catching up on all things pottery and other stuff

It sure has been a while since I last posted anything on this blog. But I have been very busy. I believe the last time I posted, I had just finished up the last of the 150 bottle vases for my sister’s wedding.  Well, that has passed us by, and we are all relatively unscathed by the event. Nobody got too lubricated, well, maybe a few, but nothing out of control. My sister didn’t want people to come to the microphone and make speeches unless they were a bit wobbly anyway. Something about “every good wedding needs a scandal”.

I have a couple of Christmas sales coming up this holiday season, the first of which is this coming Saturday. I believe I have mentioned this before, but it is the busiest, and most financially rewarding sale I have ever been a part of. This would be the Fairview Studios Pottery Sale. It always amazes me how many loyal customers we have. The sale has been going on for probably 25 or more years, and there are probably people coming that have been doing so since the very beginning.

My next sale is the very next weekend (Nov 26^th and 27^th), and is the Calgary Clay Arts Association’s 2^nd annual Christmas Pottery sale. Although last year was not as well attended as I would have hoped, I am giving it a 2^nd chance. I only participated in the Sunday last year, so I thought I would go all in and give both days a shot. I will be at Mount Royal Station on Saturday and Sunday from 10-4pm. So if you are reading this, and live in Calgary, you should come on down and check us out. Sunday is the Grey Cup, so all the non football fans will need an escape, and there is no better way than going to a pottery sale where you can meet the artist that made the work, and hopefully picking something very special up.

Anyway, enough about that…

I have been working, working, working, hence the lack of blogging and will be working even more for the next 4 months. I am picking up a Thursday night class at the studio, as the instructor that does it now is flying south for the winter for 4 months (Phoenix I think).

Funny thing happened to me on the weekend. I was franticly trying to get a bisque fired on Friday. It was Remembrance day here in Canada, so I had the day off from working for the man, and was working for me instead. The kilns at the studio are going full bore right now getting all the student work done for the upcoming sale, so I thought I would take advantage of the kiln at Ceramics Canada. I left home early (9am), went to Tim’s for an extra large double double and got to the studio by about 9:30 or so. I packed up my green work, carefully wrapping it in paper, loaded the car and drove off to Ceramics Canada. At the first intersection I think to myself, hey, where’s my coffee?  As I thought that, I also wondered why there was liquid rolling off my roof onto my windshield (wasn’t raining or snowing out). Ok, so I put my coffee on the roof of the car before I got in, it sprayed all over the rear side windows and all down the sides of my car…needless to say, I lost my coffee to gravity and centripetal forces beyond my control. I did get the bisque loaded and out by Saturday Morning, glazed all day Saturday (10-6), and then went back and loaded up a glaze on Sunday at around noon. The results were pretty nice. I am playing with some high temp wire, using it as accents pushed into the sides of the leather hard ware and loops for lid handles etc and it came out all nice and oxidized, not too shiny, just right. It works really well with the glazes I am using. One fluted jar is a nice sea foamy green (faux ^6 celadon), and another jar has our studios ^6 take on a tea dust glaze, but as it isn’t really a tea dust, we call it coffee dust (ha ha). This really dark brown glossy glaze is on the bottom ¾’s of the jar, and then the top 1/3^rd was dipped into 2 commercial glazes, that when overlapped, produce a very nice gun metal metallic, lustrous surface, and then when they run over the “coffee dust”, they produce creams, mauves, blues etc. very interesting.

So, busy me for a bit, but I will try to  blog a bit more as time permits, and if I have anything of interest to share.

Oh Ya, one last note, there was a death in our family. Ginger, our family dog of 13+ years left us just before my Sister’s wedding by a week or so. Very sad, and she will be missed.