Always open your mail…

Well, I finally got around to doing my taxes. Nothing like the night before the deadline to get it done. Reminds me of how I used to do things in University. Always put off doing it today, ‘cause you can always do it tomorrow…plus, "I work better under pressure".


While doing my taxes, I learned a “valuable” lesson. Always open your mail as soon as you get it. I had been stockpiling all of my tax info in one pile (that's pretty good for me), and it was waiting for me when I began doing my taxes last night. There were a few envelopes in the stack that had not been opened, but I knew what they were (I thought). They were T4’s (income statements), RRSP statements etc. I opened one up, and low and behold, it was a cheque for $2200 that I had been waiting for. It was the share payout from the last place I worked at. I wasn’t at the point of worrying about it yet, as I know that things can be slow when it comes to actually paying someone money. I guess I must not have seen it in the pile, but it just goes to show you, open all your mail, even if you think it is a bill, or something else equally horrible, it might just be a nice surprise. So, I have to pay the MAN $500+ more in taxes, but in the end, I am a bit further ahead than I was yesterday. I must have stockpiled some good Karma somewhere along the way.

I am off to post my pound of flesh to the tax man after work, and then to unload the kiln at Ceramics Canada. I had a peek at it yesterday when I opened it up, and everything looks just right. It was just a little warm and I didn’t have any gloves handy to unload yesterday, so today I can take some pots home to actually price before the sale on Saturday. Hopefully my stockpile of good Karma helped with this firing. I hate it when the top shelf just teases you and the further down you go the less happy you get…

I WILL take pictures tonight. I always forget to take pics of pots before a sale, but I will tonight, I promise...

Murphy Sucks!

I mentioned in my last post that I would have some pictures of my latest firing. I need to retract that statement. In fact, what I should have said was that I am firing and if the kiln manages to fire properly, I will take pictures. I guess one of the elements shuffled off it’s mortal coil during my glaze firing on Sunday night. We thought all was well when we replaced a burned out element, a week or so ago, but lurking in the back ground was another element waiting to screw up a firing. This would not normally bother me too much, but the sale is only 9 days away, and now the student work will back up again. The kiln actually got to about cone 5, maybe 5.5, so everything looks ok from a distance, but when you actually get up close, you can see that most everything is under fired. The gloss glazes are very satin, the red bodies are too orange when they should be a dark nutty brown and the porcelain just looks dry & not quite vitrified. To remedy this situation, I am going to pack the lot up on Friday and load as much as I can into the slightly smaller kiln at Ceramics Canada and fire it off over the weekend. Then I will spend all day Sunday glazing the last few things I have not had a chance to get to, just in case I am able to load a kiln on Tuesday night (you never know). If not, then this is it, that’s all I can do. I always seem to think that I don’t have enough for a sale, when in fact, I always have too much. Kinda like when you are a kid, and you are confronted with a salad bar. You always load your plate up with more than you should, or that your stomach can hold, and you haven’t even had dinner yet. I recall once when my sister and I were little, my parents took us to Disney Land and we were in a restaurant with a very large salad bar. This salad bar was different than the ones we were used to though. It was kinda like a salad / dessert bar. My sister came back to the table with (no joke) a plate full of whipped cream instead of salad.
This sale does not require much in the way of prep, but I will need to price everything, so the night before the sale, I will be madly stickering, as usual.

The solitary potterer

This post has been percolating in my brainpan for the last week or so. I was not even sure I would post it for fear that I would offend someone (how introvertedly sensitive of me, and I am not really sure who I would actually offend now that I think about it), but then I said, who cares anyway? Just post it for crying out loud. So here it is.

Recently I have been bumping into a topic of conversation in both the media and now in the blog world. It began one day while listening to the CBC. I caught an interview with Eric Klinenberg about his new book “Going Solo – The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone”. Then, again listening to CBC on Sunday afternoon, I was half listening to a radio program that normally deals with the “spiritual”, and as nobody could ever confuse me with being that…my brain was definitely not on full attention mode, so I did not catch the name of the guest, but the topic was on introverts. My ears perked a little at that and I discovered that we introverts are a little more sensitive to their environment and what is going on around them than extroverts. Moving forward, I was watching HBO a week or so ago and happened to catch Bill Maher and it turns out that one of his guests was Eric Klinenberg. Yesterday I was reading Carter Gillies’ blog on the “loneliness of the long distance potter” and was using Susan Cain and her blog and book “Quiet” as his inspiration for his discussion on introverts. Turns out Susan Cain was the one being interviewed on that half listened to CBC show.

Anyway, it is just strange how all of a sudden, I am hearing about why it is OK to live the way I live, and that it is OK to be the way I am. Not to say that I was looking for validation, I mean, I am not that weird (am I?).

To the point about being introverted, I want to clarify. I am not shy (contrary to my parent’s belief, but then they still think I am 12). I was always labeled as shy, and perhaps I was as a kid (more than likely just introverted), but I am now an adult, and seem to function pretty well in society. I graduated from Uni, I have a job, I teach pottery, I own my home, I lease my car, and I have friends with whom I enjoy hanging out with. I am just not good at small talk, and that can come across as either shy, or perhaps rude, but it’s not, I am just not good at filling up the void with mindless babble (this blog doesn’t count, ‘cause I am fairly sure that nobody is actually reading it). If I have something important or meaningful to say, I will say it, you can sure bet your bippy on that one (what is a bippy?). But I will make sure it is said in a way so as not to insult or hurt anyone’s feelings.

Having a contemplative nature and being comfortable with being alone (not lonely) are perfect attributes for working in a studio. I am in a bit of a different situation from many other potters in that the studio I work out of is not my own, it is where I teach. So, there are usually a few people there at any given time of the day. I have a key and can come and go 24 hours of the day, so if it was really a problem, I could throw pots at 2 in the morning if I wanted to (ya right, I also like to sleep, I even have an app for that). I have found that I no longer sleep in on the weekends though. I will get up at 7:30 some Sundays just so that I can get to the studio well before anyone else would ever be there (except for Ellen, she seems to always beat me). I enjoy putting the radio on, or my ipod in the dock and just focusing on the throwing, glazing, or whatever. I will usually get a call from my mum while I am up to my armpits in clay, and she will ask “where are you?” and although it makes perfect sense to me, I always feel a bit weird when I tell her that I am at the studio, because it is the only answer I usually have to that question. Non potters don’t get it, and non potter extroverts really don’t get it.

Now that I got that off my chest so to speak...
Time is ticking by rather quickly. There are only 12 days left until the spring sale on May 5th (YIKES) and I may very well be unloading hot pots the night before (nothing new there). I just finished glazing and loading yesterday, but I have at least 1 or two more firings to get through before everything that has been kicking around gets fired. I am still working with the shellac to create bas relief texture on a lot of my pots.I am worried about sacrificing them to the glazing process, but they are in the kiln cooling right now, so there ain't no going back now. There are very few glazes that I trust to yield acceptable results. Unfortunately, most of those are commercial glazes. I would really love to find that perfect glaze recipe that breaks really nicely, allows the texture to be seen and yet be interesting all on it’s own as well. We have a clear glaze at the studio that is nice, but tends towards yellow (I have nick named it cat pee clear). We also have a very nice celadon, but on certain bodies, it will craze like crazy (no pun intended), so I don’t want to risk that on these highly textured pots as the crazing will obscure the delicate patterns. I think for now I will stick to the “Amber Topaz” and “Rootbeer” glazes from Mayco. They seem to be the most translucent glazes of the bunch that I have access to. I will probably do a clear interior on the porcelain pots so as not to neutralize any translucency in the body.

Perhaps I should explain why I say “unfortunately” in the same sentence as “commercial”. I am mostly referring to the fact that unless I shell out for the powdered form, I will have to paint on 2-3 coats of glaze, and I hate that. I have a whole pile of glazes in pint form, but only because they were given to me, not because I bought them. The other, and really more important reason why I am not too fond of commercial glazes is that I don’t really know what is in the glaze (although I could make a pretty good educated guess). If they ever discontinue the colour, I would have to run through a ton of testing to find a version I could make myself. The same could be said for raw glaze materials disappearing too I guess. We have recently run into a situation where an ingredient (spodumene) was no longer available from the regular producer as they had stopped manufacturing/mining it. Another supplier was located, but it is coming from much further away (Australia vs. Manitoba). Obviously the transportation costs will greatly affect the price of this ingredient, so we are now forced to look for a new glaze that uses more local ingredients. The second most recent ingredient change was with Cornish or Cornwall stone. We have not had REAL Cornish stone for a very long time. It was substituted with a variant that worked pretty well as far as I can tell. However, recently the substitute was substituted with another replacement that not only looks very different in it’s raw state, but has totally changed the characteristics of the glaze that we use it in the most. The change in glaze characteristics actually was not a disaster, it looks and feels very nice (I actually like it more now), it just does not have the same properties when overlapped with other glazes that it used to.

As Scott Cooper over at http://stearthpottery.com/this-week-at-st-earth says, if you make the clackity clack sound on the keyboard long enough....

My fingers are itching to unload that kiln, so pictures tomorrow(ish)....

House finch

What the heck have I been up to lately? Well, let me tell you (since you are already here, and this is a very one sided conversation). On April 5th (the day before Good Friday and all the Bunny related festivities), I went and bought myself a brand spanking new camera. My old one was purchased in 2005 or 2006, I can’t remember exactly. In the world of electronic gadgetry, that is pretty ancient. At the time, it was $469, and was a very good point and shoot that offered a little bit more control of the aperture and shutter speeds, but was not a DSLR. At the time, I think the cheapest DSLR was at least $1500. I picked up a Nikon D3100 with a 2 lens kit (18-55mm & 55-200mm) for $769.99. This of course did not include the memory card, so I had to lay down another $50 for 16 GB of memory. I have not taken it out for any prolonged photography sessions, but I have used it in the studio to film a few videos and take a few pot shots. I also took the picture above of the little house finch singing away in the trees on the golf course behind my parent’s house. On the studio/clay front, I have been a little lax in getting things glazed and now there are only 25 days left before the spring sale. Why do I do this to myself? I should know better. This wouldn’t normally be an issue, but because I work in a communal/recreational setting, where student work is always fired on a first priority basis, I do find that I only have weekends to glaze my work and fire it. I can usually do it, and it only requires that I pull a longer than usual shift at the studio on Friday night to get all the pots glazed and loaded in order for the kiln to be cool enough to unload by Sunday. However, there is a glitch this time. There was a load of student work being fired on Thursday night, and when I came in on Friday morning the kiln started beeping and flashing E-1. This error indicates that the temperature is rising too slow in 1 or more zones. In all his wisdom, Dave thought he might give it another go and fired it off again on Friday night, well, surprise surprise, it happened again. So, he changed the thermocouple, as he had one laying around. He was not sure if that was the problem, but when he took it out, the ceramic casing was cracked, and it looked like the probe itself had started to degrade/melt. 3rd times the charm right? Nope, it still did not fire properly. Next step is to change the elements, but if that does not work, then it is probably a relay. Regardless of what the issue is, it has put the firing of student work back by at least 2 weeks, which has put my ability to fire anything back by at least 2 weeks plus however long it takes to clear the backlog up. I do have a last ditch solution, but it will require a bit of effort. Ceramics Canada has a kiln, which I never use, ‘cause it requires that I pack my work up and drive it over there. There are a lot of speed bumps and stupid drivers between the studio and CC. I may try and take a load over there this weekend though if I can manage it. I have also had some results from my shellac and hydro abrasion “tests”. I originally subjected 6 or so mugs, 3 bowls and a vase to the process and so far have had some OK results. I have yet to bisque the vase, but the rest of the first batch have been fired to completion. Two of the bowls were glazed in a translucent amber, and they are pretty good. I mucked the 3rd bowl up by using a glaze that did not allow the detail to come through very much, but I knew it was an experiment, and the bowl was not a stunner anyway. The mugs all had a blue slip on them, that I wanted to come through, so I applied some terra sig based slips to the green mugs, hoping it would reveal the texture a little more and then glazed them all in a clear glaze. I was relatively happy with the results, but the clear glaze did nothing for the texture. I should have used a coloured glaze that would have highlighted the texture more. The rutile slip was very subtle, but I liked it the most. It was not too stark against the white clay. The black one was good, but it showed any irregularities in application too much. I should also note that all of these pots were Laguna B-mix. Part 2 of my shellacking and time wasting involved a different body. Dove porcelain was my next step, looking for a whiter white with more translucency. I threw several medium sized bowls, a couple of mugs and some yunomis. I was still struggling with the application of the shellac in terms of getting the right amount of shellac on the pot to resist the scrubbing, as well as maintaining the clean, sharp edges. It was bleeding a little, thereby making the pattern a little less than perfect, so in response to that, I attempted a looser approach through spattering, loose brush strokes and just splashing it on. I kept on using the black slip and the rutile slips and hopefully my designs took it better, as I think I may have figured that part out. I still need to bisque these pots, and will not risk taking them to CC, as in the green stage, these pots are very fragile. I lost one of the bowls during the washing stage, so I am sure that I would loose more to the speed bumps. The next phase of learning will be using P300, a midrange Plainsman Clay porcelain body. I guess I am just looking for that perfect porcelain that is strong, but washes away easily without having to scrub too much so that the shellac gets washed away too. So far I am liking the process. It makes me think about the shapes a bit more in terms of what will showcase the texture best. I think I will stick to bowls and cups for now, as the porcelains are not cooperating with me to get nice tall vases.