Monday, November 24, 2014

Weekend

The Fairview pottery sale went reasonably well on Saturday. We had a smaller number of participants (10) this year, so the fact that we seem to be attracting fewer customers every year did not hurt us too bad on an individual basis. I can't really put a finger on any one factor that is causing this "depression" of sorts, but I can think of a few things that may be dragging our numbers down. It could be anything from the location and an over saturation of that community with pottery, or it could be that people don't have an appreciation of hand made pottery, or even that there are just too many craft shows all happening at once. It never seems to fail that we tend to have our sale the same weekend as the Telus Art Market, or the Spruce Meadows Show, or the Bragg Creek market, etc etc. We DO have a dedicated core list of followers, but many are moving away, or just don't need/want any more pots. That just seems strange to me, you can't have too many pots in my humble opinion. After the sale I fell into the typical post sale coma. but woke up refreshed on Sunday and was back at it in the studio. I only took this one picture of my efforts, but there is another one of these bowls with a much different design in the works too, it just isn't finished yet. These large bowls (8lb wet) take a while to carve as they get really fragile when all that wet Terra Sig is applied. Rims can just "pop" and then they crumble. So these are carved for the most part on the banding wheel. I only pick them up once they return to a slightly less fragile bone dry state. These photos show a 360 view of the bowl I completed, although I am contemplating changing up the stripes on the top and bottom. Perhaps widening the white lines, or not, we'll see how I feel about that tomorrow. As for what those shapes are supposed to be, I'm not sure about that either. I have a degree in biology, so to me, they look a bit like unicellular organisms, but they could also be seed pods or something like that, or just plain abstract. You choose.