Monday, December 5, 2011

Neither snow, nor rain....

The United States Postal Service Creed (no Canada Post equivalent) should apply to potters too. Saturday saw an official snowfall of 9 cm on Saturday night / Sunday morning. I crawled out of bed at 8am, shoveled off the car and set off to go open up the studio and throw a few pots. I knew that I would be the only soul there for a while, as it was still snowing quite a lot when I got there and it continued to do so until noon or so. This meant I could spread myself out, turn up the tunes (today it was all Imogene Heap), and get into it without any distractions. I don’t mind the distractions, as it comes with the teaching territory, but the weekends are my own time, and although the students usually respect this and try not to ask too many questions, there are always a few interruptions throughout the day. I got the pots I threw on Friday night trimmed, assembled a teapot, added my high temp wire decorations to a tall lidded form, threw another large lidded thing, and threw eight 600g mugs. Not a whole lot accomplished but that’s OK. I suggested a method to trim mugs to Sallie so that it would go faster, and wouldn’t distort the rims, she was very pleased. I talked to Sonia about how to glaze her pots and talked to 3 or 4 different people about how a particular glaze result was achieved on someone else’s mugs that recently came out of the last glaze load. Oh ya, I also finished constructing my pendant hanger. I was inspired by a student to come up with a simple way to fire pendants that did not have to be fired flat, and therefore only glazed on one side. I had originally suggested bead bars but, she would have to purchase a set of the posts and bars and they take up a lot of horizontal space in the kiln, and end up costing a fair bit to fire. So, I thought, what if I threw a thick walled cylinder and inserted kanthal wire hooks into the cylinder at intervals to allow for multiple pendants to be hung on it . I have created a few pendants to give it a shot, and have incorporated little loops of thinner high temp wire  right into the pendants so they can hang from the kanthal wire, we will see how this works.  I left the studio at 3pm and went to my friend Christy’s house to deliver a set of 6 tall mugs, 2 medium bowls, and a teapot. So all in all it was a relatively productive day. I made some pots, and I made some money, can’t complain about that.