All carved up

Now that I have committed myself financially to the festival of crafts in the fall, I need to commit mentally and physically. I began my weekend on Friday afternoon by throwing a few mugs, trimming what needed trimming and carving a few mugs. I worked one of the last few Saturdays left before the summer at Ceramics Canada so I was only able to finish off the last few mugs that were to be carved that afternoon. Sunday however was the day to throw and carve en mass. I made mugs and casseroles, and carved a ton of ramekins. OK, only 7 ramekins, but they take about 20 minutes each to carve, not counting the time to slip them up with black terra sig. It is amazing how much does NOT get done in the studio though, even when I have a list of TO DO's. I usually arrive at 9am on Sundays and am generally there until at least 2pm, although this Sunday I was there until 4:30 ish. I only managed to throw 7 mugs and 2 casseroles, I think I will need to step up the production rate if I am going to have enough to fill my shelves. This will mean less talking I think. The sale may be over 5 months away, but I will need to get the majority of my stock made and glazed this summer so I don't run into any snags getting things fired in the fall. The student sale takes priority at the studio, so my firings will need to be worked in and around the student work.
This image is just a sampling of what I have been working on. I have changed my mug shape a wee bit, and the handles are way more substantial. The designs are different, yet similar to the ones in the past. I have to find a good pattern or 2 that is simple to lay out and carve, yet still engaging to the eye. The time it takes to carve some of them is way too long, especially if I actually want to make a profit or even break even on this. I should note that these are all free hand, no actual pattern is used, it all comes out of my brain. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it does not. The top right hand mug for instance is not really working for me in terms of the pattern, I do like the bottom 2 though. 

I will finally be able to spend more time in the studio as of July 4th. Ceramics Canada does not open on the weekends during the summer, so I should be able to put some long hours in over those 9 hot, sweaty weeks.

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.

Translucent cone 6 porcelain

I have been mucking about with a new porcelain body. Plainsman Clays in Medicine Hat has been working on a cone 6 translucent body that would be comparable to Laguna Frost. They tested and came up with a body that appeared to throw well, but when they scaled it up to a full batch, the throwing properties were lost in translation. So they are back to the drawing board to tweak it to make it more throwable. That being said, I got my hands on half a box and did throw it. Whipped cream or pudding comes to mind when trying to describe it's consistancy. It did not stand up well, nor did it trim easily. I did however manage to get a few pieces made, mostly mugs. Here are a couple of examples of what came out of the kiln. I love the way it feels. Silky, smooth, fat etc etc etc. I like the finished result enough that I would try to fight another box of this into submission, and will definitely give their next revised batch a shot too.

This pic is of the inside of the little cup. I carved the bottom to see how that would show, and it does, quite well.
 

The little cup with the sgrafitto deco is not very thin, in fact the carving was not easy as the body is quite hard once it becomes bone dry. I really just wanted to know how it would take the OM4 terra sig and it feels really good, no fit issues that I can see.

Mugs, mugs and more mugs

These mugs and an assortment of bowls, plates and vases that were done in the same black and white sgraffito decoration were bisque fired on Sunday. I will be glazing them tonight. There are a couple in there that were done with a deep red terra sig slip and I have no idea how it will come out, so I will have my fingers crossed for those. I tried layering the red and black on one mug as well. I am really liking some of my designs, some not so much. One in particular is sort of an accidental homage to Dr. Seuss. It ended up looking like the houses the Who's live in. You can see the "Who" mug in the last picture front and centre.

All the little plates

These are all the little square plates I have been making and experimenting with the shellac resist and terra sig. There were a few fuggly ones in there, but a few really nice ones too.

Here are 6 that I really like:

Has a Tim Burton vibe I think

Love it

Love it

The octopus plate was sold pretty much the second it came out of the kiln, so this is probably the only pic I will have of it. I will have to do more mollusks....

Here are a few other things that I have had on the go for a while and are now ready for the bisque:

I was going a bit dotty by the end of this one

same with this one...

I was working on this bowl while listening to a CBC show that was talking about Glen Gould. While I was shellacking the pattern, they were playing one of his quicker pieces and I think I was flying along with Gould at the same time. The person doing the show said he thought that Gould had "left the stratosphere".

Fancy Legs

The women in my immediate family (my mum, sister and myself) suffer from what my mum has always termed “antsy legs”. The pharmaceutical industry has now termed it “restless leg syndrome”. I guess to be able to charge money for a new drug. Anyway, for a while now, we have been calling this irritating problem “fancy legs”. My sister was talking about her antsy leg to a friend, who had no idea what she was talking about and misunderstood and thought she was saying that she had “fancy legs”. So there ya go.

Long story short, I was unable to get to sleep for a while last night due to this problem. I also love to self diagnose myself via the internet. I have had localized muscle pain in my left buttock, and I think it is Piniformis Syndrom. The piniformis muscle is rubbing against the sciatic nerve due to pelvic torsion caused by a car accident 10 years ago. I think this is also exacerbating the fancy leg problem. I went to the massage therapist a couple of weeks ago and she worked a miracle (albeit only temporary). However, that night, the fancy leg was quite extreme, so me thinks they are linked.   On the clay front, the kilns are now working again. The electrician was in to diagnose/fix them on Monday. They both had some relay issues. So tonight, I guess I will be loading what did not fire properly last week. I have some more plates to terra sig, and 2 very large bottles that I have already terra sig'd and now need shellacking. The new batch of sig is very good. I am getting a very high gloss on it after burnishing. The last batch seemed to haze up and never really got very shiny. It almost makes me want to pit fire them...

A Potters Nightmare / Girl Interrupted

Sunday/Monday

As I mentioned in one of my last posts, I am in a bit of a time crunch to get some mugs finished that I have been commissioned to create. I backfilled all the handles on Friday and left them loosely covered over night until I could get back to them on Saturday after work. I left them uncovered in the sun on Saturday afternoon for about an hour and then put them uncovered on the plaster to hopefully wick out more moisture. On Sunday, I got to the studio bright and early (9am) & put the mugs outside to dry again for several hours. If a non potter were watching me, they probably wondered what the heck I was doing. Every half hour or so I would wander outside, pick a mug up and press the base of the mug against my cheek, shake my head and put it back down. This is the only method I know of to tell if there is any moisture left in the clay. If it is cold, it is probably still wet & my cheek is the body part I rely on to gague the level of dampness. I nervously began loading the bisque kiln at bout 2:00 and set it for a 2 hour delay and a 2 hour preheat, so it wouldn’t start until 4:00. I went home and that night I sweated bullets in my sleep worrying about the mugs. Could they have been a little too damp? Will the handles and bottoms get blown out by the moisture being boiled out too vigorously? All the worrying was for naught. I checked them on Monday, and all was well, now I am a couple days ahead of schedule. I was originally going to wait until Tuesday to fire the bisque, but now I can glaze instead and take my time to get that part right instead of rushing through it and then I can load on Friday night and unload Sunday. Even thought these are very simple mugs, I am really happy with how they have turned out so far. The handles are perfect (in my opinion). They are not too big, and not too small, they are juuust right. I also had a few shellacked pots in there that have the layer of coloured terra sig slip. I am eager to see how these come out in the glaze, especially since the process is rather time consuming. I want to know that going cross eyed from all the dots and squiggles was worth it. I am not 100% sure how they will end up glazed, but probably in the translucent Amber as I love the way it reacts with the rutile in the sig).

Tuesday
I taught my Tuesday class last night and the kiln was on from a firing that one of the other instructors had loaded and fired. It should have been done a long time before that. About a half hour into the class, the computer on the kiln started beeping indicating that it was not heating fast enough, and it shut off at 2140 F when it was trying to reach 2175 F. I have a sneaking suspicion that this load only reached cone 4. So that means that my load of mugs etc will not be fired in that kiln this weekend as I had planned. Now I will be madly glazing on Friday night in order to pack it all up and take it to Ceramics Canada on Saturday to load in their kiln. I got the feet waxed on the mugs and a few other pieces, so I’m a little bit ahead.

Sanity seriously in question now

This is the last one for now...

And another one before bed...

I must be crazy...

One before bed

I applied a black slip tonight and then spent the evening after I got home shellacking the pattern and dotting the dots then wiped back the slip to reveal the white clay underneath. Now to bed to dream of dots and swirls.

Sunday's pots on Monday

So I'm a wee bit late posting these, but this is a little bit of what I was up to on Sunday. Well, Ok, so I did not make all of this on Sunday, but I touched them all. I refined the feet on the squared off plates, wiped off the shellacked mugs and the tea bowls, threw 10 tall mugs and 4 porcelain bowls (trimmed them too after a few minutes in the sun to dry a bit), and and refined the lid to the casserole. 

I will handle the mugs tomorrow, uncover the rest of the wet work to air dry and terra sig and shellac the 3 square plates. not a bad day. I probably could have done more, but I have been suffering a bit from "potter's elbow" and arthritic thumbs and fingers, so I took it a bit easy on the grunt work. 

I am starting to use more of the terra sig slips on the bas relief pots. I have added in a bit of Mason Stain 6600 black and ceramic rutile powder in one and just the rutile in another, and then apply them to the pot when bone dry. As soon as the sig is dry, I shellac the pattern on. This gives me colour on the very first layer and a white ground colour which I then go over again, wipe off again (but not too much). This process is still evolving in my mind and am thinking along the lines of octopi and other life forms that have a curly cue nature like tentacles, and tendrils etc...