A really heavy wall piece

This is some of what I was up to on the weekend. I also scratched up some short goblets and some mugs.

Pig update

Here piggy piggy piggy

Here's a we little piggy getting ready to run all the way home.

I guess I need to bite harder

I have not been very selective with my outside voice lately. I can usually keep the lid on it and the brain to mouth filter firmly in place. Not lately though. So, if you have been in the line of fire, I'm sorry. I will just have to bite my tongue harder next time. Perhaps there is no more room in my head for the things I have not said out loud and then, like a pressure cooker that's blown a gasket, you get verbal stew all over the place.

The good news is that my condo building just got the occupancy permit from the city for the 12 upper units. Now we are just working on getting a contractor in place for the bottom 4 units. Hopefully this will not be too long. I'm pretty sure I can't do this much longer.

There’s A Lot Going On

Well, I guess fall is over. It was a lovely 19 degrees on Saturday, the sun was out, the sky was blue and it was warm. Sunday however was a completely different story. It started out by raining over night on Saturday and by the time I left for the studio at 8:30, it was quickly becoming snow. It then proceeded to snow all day.

But with the snow comes looming sale deadlines, so I managed to finish handling all the mugs I made on Friday, I sgrafittoed 4 mugs in very unique freehand designs, made a couple of glazes, loaded and fired off a bisque and topped my day off by throwing some medium sized bowls.

The 2 glazes I made are very similar; in that they are the same base and that they both contain 4% rutile. One of them however contains 4% tin. I am working with the Plainsman Clays recipe using Alberta slip and Frit 3134. It is the simplest glaze formula, and comes out really, really nice. It feels lovely, it doesn’t craze and it applies beautifully. The only crabby thing about this glaze is that you have to calcine half of the Alberta Slip to drive off excess moisture to reduce the plasticity. Not a difficult job in and of itself, but it just adds another step to the process as well as making you think ahead when deciding to mix glazes. I pop it in the kiln in bisque bowls, fire to 022 and hold for a bit. I do this overnight so I can mix it first thing the next day. It comes out looking like chocolate milk powder. So the one with just the rutile is a lovely purplish lavender colour floating over an amber background. It breaks nicely and is reminiscent of our true Orange Blue Rutile glaze from our cone 10 reduction days. The other great thing is that it plays really, really nicely with our other glazes which can always be an issue when making a glaze that will probably end up being layered with other glazes. This one will hopefully become a studio glaze for all to use.

The second glaze is the same as the first but with the addition of 4% tin. I have not really tested this one, but according to Plainsman, it is a light gloss brown. It isn’t the brown I am after so much, but when a thin wash of Titanium Dioxide is brushed over top, it changes colour to a creamy green and blue variegated glaze that breaks nicely on texture etc. This glaze will not become a studio glaze. The tin is just too expensive for the quantities we would require.

I can foresee that my future for the next couple of weeks will entail more mug carving. I have a few flood mugs I need to finish. I have 19 or so mugs to carve and I will probably do half flood mugs and half whatever comes out of my brain. I will also be glazing and firing as much as I can. There is the Fairview Christmas sale on November 23^rd, and the Moe Shelley Craft Market the following weekend on Sunday December 1^st. I won’t have much, if any, time in between to restock, so I will need to have stock ready for both.

My nose will be on the grindstone (what a weird saying – how does grinding off your nose mean that you are working hard?) for the next while as I try to get ready with my own work in amongst the student firings that always take precedent in the weeks coming up to a studio sale.

Tonight I will be sending out the reminder email about the sale, so If you are anxiously awaiting the info, it is coming. But until then, I will post the info here.

Interview

What is it like to live with family for extended periods of time? Well, the CBC asked me that question on Wednesday night last week. The interview aired Friday morning leading in to the thanks giving weekend.
Here's the link:
http://www.cbc.ca/player/Radio/Local+Shows/Alberta/Calgary+Eyeopener/ID/2411646086/

New Weight Loss Program

I stood on the scale this morning and was shocked to find that I had lost, at minimum, 10 pounds. What is this amazing, fat dissolving diet you ask? I guess it all comes down to water. It has always been said that a person should drink approximately 8 glasses of water a day, but that is not what I did. The water came in the form of a massive flood. So I guess flooding, stress and moving back in with your parents is a way (not a good way) to lose 10 pounds in 3 months.

For those interested, here is an update. My condo is still uninhabitable. In fact, nobody is living in the 16 unit building. The work for the mechanical and electrical has only just begun and my understanding is that they are still waiting on parts for the electrical to arrive. There were delays caused by asbestos removal that was required as well as some issues with the heating system in the first floor units. We were given a very tentative move in date for the upper floors of approximately mid October, just in time for Turkey day (maybe). As for when my first floor neighbors and I can move back, not a clue. Construction can not begin on our units until the heat, water, power, etc are all installed and inspected, and it is almost October, so I am guessing we probably won’t be in until February? Who knows, it could be sooner, but it could be later.
By the time this is all over and I am back in my little home, I may need to re-buy the wardrobe I just had to replace. But instead of losing it all to a flood, I will have lost too much weight. I will say that my Mum eats extremely healthy, so that might also have something to do with it. When I was living solo, I would grocery shop like someone with a split personality. I would try to shop healthy, but would get distracted in the ice cream section, or get sucked into a bag of chips, so that was a problem. If I want a snack at my parent’s house, it usually looks like a bunch of sugar peas, or trail mix.

A few mugs from Medalta

I have not had a lot of time to take any pictures of the latest pots to come out of the salt and soda kilns in Medicine Hat. Half of them have been loaded right into Centennial Gallery and the rest are going to a sale this weekend. I have saved a few for myself, but I also have a few mugs put aside for a potential customer looking for a mug. These are the mugs I am holding until I hear which one she wants. They are all thrown from Babu Porcelain and are very translucent.

Now I need to get ready for the fall sales in November. It is still hard to believe how fast this summer has gone. I guess major disasters will eat up the time. It just feels like yesterday that I was watching my condo go under water in the news.

How to lose 5lbs in 1 day

I went to Medicine Hat last Wednesday to fire the Salt and Soda Kilns at the Shaw Centre at Medalta.

I left right after work on Wednesday afternoon and arrived at our motel at 7:30. Kathy and I got up early and went to glaze and load the kilns on Thursday and turned the kilns on low and slow overnight to preheat. There were various issues with this round of firing. The cone packs in the soda kiln blew up during the preheat, so we were flying a bit blind. Aaron found us an optical thermographer called the Cyclops. He was not sure how to use it, so had one of the train kiln operators from the old IXL brick factory to come over and trouble shoot it with us. As this was our only guide for temperature, we used it as well as colour in the kiln. By the time a witness cone bent in the salt kiln we had finished adding the soda, so that was pretty much a shot in the dark. We took a reading when cone 7 bent, and it looked like the “cyclops” was out by a hundred degrees or so. I think we were slightly underfired in the soda, but got some decent results. The salt was much better, although it could have used a bit more salt. In total, we added about 6 pounds of soda ash, and 14 pounds of salt. I did not take many pictures during the firing as it is too hard to do that when there are only 2 of us. If I could find a way to grow a 3^rd arm, that would help. I would look weird though.

As to the weight loss, it was all sweat. The temp in Medicine Hat on the day of the firing was about 31 degrees Celsius (87.8 F). Without the kilns it was pretty darned hot out. The kilns themselves were at about 2385 F or so at top temp. We were a little limp with the heat by the end of the day. While we were waiting for the salt kiln to reach salting temp (it took until 9 pm or so), we ordered a pizza, around the time the pizza was to arrive, a torrential downpour sprang up. So we had heat, lightning, thunder, rain and pizza.

All in all I think the firings were OK. The soda was a bit dry in spots, but the salt was relatively juicy. There were some really nice glazes in this firing. I had some excellent carbon trapping in a Malcolm Davis shino, some good colour development in the yellow salt glaze, and some really lovely pink halos and blushing on the insides of some of my rice bowls where I used the Andrew Wong Lustre glaze. That glaze can come out quite boring and white if not reduced enough (?), but this time, I think we had good reduction. Not too much, just enough. 

Oh ya, I also saw the Medalta International Cup Show. The labels had not been put up yet, but I was able to recognize quite a few potters. There were several of Jim Gottuso's yunomis and beer glasses, a couple of cups from Zygote, a wall piece from Mindy Andrews and a ton of others that I just can't recall the makers of off the top of my head. There was stoneware, porcelain, low fire, high fire, salt, soda, functional and not so functional, etc etc...Very good show. Great job Carol for picking all of these amazing cups.

My Camera is in Newfoundland, but I am not...

I loaned my camera to my sister and her husband for their belated honeymoon trip to Newfoundland so they would have 2 cameras instead of just 1. Therefore, no pics for a bit until they get back. I am currently house/fish/plant sitting for them and am apparently also in charge of feeding and bathing all of the neighborhood sparrows. I put out water and seed for them the first day , I was not sure how much to put in the feeder, so I filled it up. I came home in the afternoon and it was gone, all of it. They are little flying pigs, and are now on a one scoop diet.
This is the Heritage Day long weekend, so I will naturally be spending it at the studio. Dave is working at the Canmore Folk Festival as Instrument Security, so I am going to be opening and closing for open studio time,  as well as teaching on Monday night.  I also need to bisque the last of my pots for the salt/soda firing and pack them up. I am also teaching a couple of hand building classes on large(ish) soft slab vases next week, so I need to get all the slabs rolled out so they are suitably stiff for construction, as well as a few examples of finished pieces just in case. Nothing like trying to build a large vase when you slab is all floppy. It is kind of weird about this hand building class. I don't normally hand build. I am not sure why I said I would demo this. I have no patience for hand building. Too much waiting for things to dry in my opinion. But, throwing is a skill learned over a long time and if you are a new student it can be frustrating when all you can seem to make are lumpy dog bowls. Hopefully this will get them thinking tall and make them feel like they are accomplishing something. I may include some basic "printing" techniques with underglazes and how to incorporate texture with found objects and bisque stamps etc. This is definitely stretching my envelope.

It's My Birthday...

I can only hope that this 42nd year is better than the last. Not that the past year was all that bad, just the last month of it.

I am not doing anything special for it, just going to go make some pots tonight and possibly glaze some with the new spray booth. I need to finish making pots for the salt firing in August, so that is top of the list. But I also need to glaze some pots to put into the gallery. I also have some low temp porcelain that I need to use up and fire. I may do that with the bisque. They fire to 04 so I might just fire the next bisque load a little hotter. It burns out the organics a bit more, esp with the ^5Bmix that occasionally bloats. I think it also leads to a nicer glaze surface. I might even try to bug out of work a bit early today to get to the studio a bit earlier. We'll see how the afternoon goes.

Flood Relief...

This post is for everyone that has offered to help me out with donations of stuff. By “stuff”, I mean everything that a person would need to rebuild their life from scratch. I really do appreciate all of the offers. However, at this point, my life is going to be a bit in limbo for the next 4 to 6 months while my condo undergoes renovations, quite literally, from the ground up. I am currently staying with my parents in their house in Douglasdale, so life is not so bad right now.

I guess what I am trying to say is that at this point, I don't know what I will need until the flood relief money comes from the government and I can put a list together of what I can afford to buy new, plus I just don't have a lot of room to store things until I move back in.

When I know more I will let you all know via this blog.

Thank you again,

Ashley

Craft market

 

This is what I will be up to this coming weekend. This is the first time for me with this group, but it should be cool. The sale runs from 2-5pm at the Bamboo (next door to the Drum and Monkey)  1201 1 Street SW

So if you are in the area (Victoria Park etc), come over and check us out. I am not sure what I will have to sell, but I will have something for sure. I just fired a kiln with some FLOOD MUGS, and other assorted little pots. I will also have whatever wasn't in my condo during the flood. So, it might be a bit eclectic, but there will be lots of pots. 

I need to load a kiln....a sale is looming

I am really hoping to get a bisque loaded tonight and a glaze fired on Sunday. I will be participating in a craft cooperative sale next Sunday from 12-5 pm. It is being held in conjunction with the Victoria Park Community street festival and will be located inside the Bamboo Tiki Lounge (right beside and conjoined via a breezeway of sorts to the Drum and Monkey Pub). This would have to be the strangest venue I have sold out of, but hey, it is close to beer and that has to count for something. I will probably have some flood mugs, and other assorted stuff that has been sitting on my shelves at the studio for a while. A lot of the stuff is ear marked for the firing at Medalta, but some is cone 6 and destined for the craft sale. I also have to get more flood mugs done for the little presents I want to give to all the helpers and my 1st floor neighbors, but those can wait a bit. I am buying a round or 2 of beer for everyone who came out to get muddy this Sunday, the mugs will come later. Hopefully before 2014.

I will survive...

I might be a bit crazy when this is all over though.

I met with the buildings insurance adjustor yesterday. The good news is that they will restore everything to original conditions (how it was when the condo was first converted). The bad news is that this could take up to 6 months before I will be back in my little home. I am torturing myself right now by searching paint colours, furniture and appliances on line. With an entire rainbow to choose from, how do I narrow it down?!
This is the view of my "kitchen" right now. Everything looks so much smaller with no walls to define the space. I keep saying to myself  " how did I ever fit a Queen sized bed here?"

What I did this past weekend

Over the past week or so, I have been slowly attempting to replace all of the pottery that I lost in the flood. Things like plates, bowls, teapot, casserole, etc. I also threw a ton of porcelain pieces for the salt and soda firing at the end of August. Time is ticking and waits for no man and all that. I finished scratching all the flood mugs that I could and threw some more. Finally, I finished this large vessel. The first 4 shots show the 4 sides (if something round can have a side that is).

 

Apparently I still have some water issues and have included 4 fish at the bottom of the pot in between the 4 panels.

Flood mugs

Once the flood was over and as soon as I was able to get back into the studio, I decided to scratch a few mugs. Of course the only thing on my brain was water. There are 4 units in my building in Mission that were totally destroyed by the mighty Elbow river. It is normally quite calm and shallow, but on June 20 - 24th it was mighty indeed. Anyway, as a means to commemorate this life altering event, I created this mug, and am working on 3 more as gifts for my 1st floor neighbors. If you are in the Calgary area and would like a Flood mug  for yourself, I may make more of them if there is the demand. Rough guestimate on price is ~$40 per mug. The final colours will be black and creamy white. If you want to contact me regarding a mug, shoot me an e-mail at ashleymorrow@shaw.ca

 

There are 2 Kinds of People

Thankfully, this city (Calgary) is mostly comprised of the best kind, the helpers & givers.

The other kind of people are thankfully few and far between (in my experience anyway). They are the “tiskers”, complainers and are just generally mean spirited. During the time I was down cleaning up my apartment, the other units in my building as well as other buildings on other streets, occupied by people I did not know, I was surrounded by the best kind of people. The atmosphere was almost like a party, except we were all covered in river mud, and were throwing people's entire lives into the back of garbage trucks. The gawkers were out though, and although I tried to ignore it, it was probably the rudest thing ever. I understand the need to see the devastation with your own eyes, but these people were almost gleeful. Taking pictures of other people's despair is NOT COOL. If you are the press, that is one thing, but the busybodies that are so obviously not there to help were like salt in a gaping wound.

While I was in mid disaster clean up, I was keeping my eyes on the news, the blogs and the comments and there are some really really nasty people out there that do not feel our government should be giving out the disaster relief.. I wont name names, because both you and I know who you are, and naming names is not my style. However, you need to know how hurtful your comments are. Apparently, according to some, the prepaid debit cards being handed out by the Alberta government should not be handed out to people in my neighbourhood, and I am assuming other lowerv income ones, because the recipients will just go down to the bar and drink it all away. WOW, your sympathy knows no bounds. I am one of those recipients, and so far have managed to not drink it all away. In Fact, I have some amazing friends that have offered me their cards. They were displaced, but did not sustain damage except for rotten food and missed time at work. These are the very same people that are supposedly just going to drink it all away. So, in closing, SHAME ON YOU if all you did was prance around my neighborhood with your camera and designer clothes, but did not lift a finger to help, only to wag in a disdainful manner and made disparaging comments about the crap on peoples lawns. You can sure bet that KARMA is a B@#$%. Good luck to you when you need help.

Happy Canada Day

Well, I have been in line for the flood relief money for an hour and apparently the wait is 3 hours from here. This picture is of the line on 12th Ave and I am on 11th street.

Aftermath

These pictures were taken yesterday. I spent the last 2 days doing disaster/flood cleanup in my neighborhood. We finished undoing all of the units on the main floor of my building on Tuesday and then crossed the street to help out other home owners. I left at 4:00 as I was teaching at the studio and it was going to take me a long time to get home. I think in the end it took 2 hous when normally it would only take 20 minutes. I got to the condo at 8 am yesterday and by nine the garbage trucks were in place to begin loading. Once we finished there, it was all hands on deck to help out the building across the ally from me.

Surreal, but not like Dali

Well, I went back to my condo this afternoon. Not much that I can really say about it though. Pictures say a 1000 words. So on that note, I will let the picture tell you this story. 

My neighborhood is like a war zone though. Dirt in the streets, heavy equipment, empty "bombed out" buildings etc. Anyway, here it is:

What I find really funny is that the salt fired cup on the dark ikea furniture to the left in the picture withstood the rapids and is still where it was before the flood. I should mention that that unit used to be to the to the right of the window that this picture was being taken from. It traveled diagonally across the room. Crazy...

under water

It's official. I am HOMELESS. This is an aerial shot from a highrise apartment just north of where I live. St. Mary's Cathedral is about 6 blocks north of my condo, and you can see it in the middle of the pic. So I am 6 block back from that. This is gonna suck.

I'm a refugee

I was told to evacuate my neighborhood this afternoon. This pic is what the Elbow river looked like at 3pm at the end of my street. The reservoir is expected to go over the dam some time between 3am and 5am tomorrow morning and I should prepare to be away for at least 72 hours and could be as long as a week.

Quack

The next phase in the transformation is webbed feet. The rain is ridiculous outside. I know June is the wettest month for Calgary, but come on, this is stupid. The news on the radio this morning was reporting that you can't take the Trans Canada Hwy to the west, as the RCMP have closed it east of Canmore due to flooding and began evacuating residents in the Canmore area in the middle of the night. My neighborhood is, thankfully, still above water. My little street dead ends on the Elbow river downstream from the Glenmore reservoir. The City tries to control the water levels with the dam, but it is a power generating dam and not meant for flood control so if the water levels rise too much, there is not much they can do about it. I think the mosquitoes are going to be fierce this summer.

This is for the Birds

One of my Tuesday night students asked me if I could make her a chicken tea pot for her chicken collection. I made 2 kinds for her to choose from. The one she chose, and therefore I don't have a picture, is covered in feathers, has an actual wattle under the spout and a comb for the knob on the lid and is all done in black and white. This is the other chicken teapot I made. My freehand chicken skills are a little less than stellar, but it's ok.

Everything is the same, but different

This was the view from the front of Ceramics Canada on Saturday after the storm passed. One minute all was sunny and warm, the next it was a downpour. The aftermath was quite beautiful though. After work I went over to the studio to glaze a load of pots. They are all sort of the same, but each one is very different.

Pass the Salt Please!

Well, we had our open house this past Saturday and considering that we only relied on word of mouth, social media and a free listing in Swerve, we were pretty successful. I can't say for certain how many people showed up, but we had left over tea bowls and I only fired 23 of them. We did manage to get several people to consider signing up for classes, and since that was the whole point of this exercise, I would have to say it was a success. There were a few of us throwing, trimming and glazing pots. I threw a large vase in 3 sections as well as a tea pot. I was also firing the raku kiln, so that kept me pretty busy.

I have also scheduled another trip down to Medicine Hat to fire the salt and soda kilns. A fellow potter/instructor from the studio and I are going to head down near the end of August. I have a feeling that firing atmospheric kilns is somewhat akin to child birth (from what I have heard as I do not have first hand experience in that particular area) in that you quickly forget the pain of the event and are more than willing to take on the challenge again. I do remember the “pain” of the marathon glazing session, and the tears of joy/anguish when unloading, but am more than willing to give it as many goes as possible. This time we are going to head down the afternoon before after I get off work and get up bright an early to get all the deco done in a more civilized manner, which would allow us to finish loading well before 11pm (i hope). When I was down there in April, Susan and I almost killed ourselves trying to get it all done, but we did take in a bit of the farmers market that the Medalta Museum puts on every Thursday. We bought a couple of curry meat pies for dinner. I am not sure if it was the hunger and exhaustion, of if they really did taste that good. Either way, they were yummy. So was the mini saskatoon pie that I scarfed down. I am looking forward to partaking of the pies again.

OPEN HOUSE UPDATE!!

As you may be aware, the instructors and students at Fairview Studios are having an OPEN HOUSE on Saturday, June 8^th. I was speaking with our fearless leader (Dave) and he would like to offer a bit of a deal to any new students that sign up for classes on Saturday.

Classes at Fairview Studios run on a 4 week cycle and they normally cost $100 plus the cost of clay. This one day offer will drop the price of the classes to $90. What will your $90 get you? Well, it will get you 3 hours of instruction a week for 4 weeks. PLUS a ton of extra studio time that is FREE. To make great pots, you need to practice and the extra studio time will allow you to get really muddy, get your creative juices flowing and get the right side of your brain working.

So there it is, if you are looking for a new thing to try, or are just interested in learning a bit about how pottery is made, come out and see us on Saturday, June 8^th from 11am to 3pm. We would love to see you!

Spring has sprung....a leak

I am going to develop webbed feet if this rain keeps up. I think we have had ~100mm over the last week or so, and if that keeps up, along with the spring runoff from the mountains, we are all going to be learning how to quack pretty soon.

In non soggy news, the studio has been scrubbed down. Well, not precisely scrubbed, but wiped, swept, stacked and tidied in preparations for the OPEN HOUSE this weekend.

We will have 2 out of 3 instructors there as well as an assortment of students. We will all be ready and willing to talk pots, throwing, classes, etc. Ellen's famous carrot cake will be on the menu, as well as coffee. I will be firing up the raku kiln at 12:30 into which I will attempt to fit as many tea bowls as possible (if you come, you might just get to take one home with you as a THANK YOU for coming. I anticipate the firing to be over around 2:30, and the pots should be ready to take home around 3 ish.

So, if you are in the area and are looking for a fun and informative afternoon out, swing by the studio. You might just find the hobby/passion/obsession you have been looking for. The weather is supposed to be nice  (little to no rain) so the big door will be open wide. Come on in and check it out.

70km/hr bath

On my way home from dinner with the parents last night, I saw this:

It has been raining all day and this person still thought it would be a good day for a ride on the bike. BRRR.
Calgary has had a slow start to spring, so I guess if the roads are not icy, it is considered good weather for riding. 

Studio Time

The first long weekend of the summer is now over (sigh). I did manage to get 3.5 full & uninterrupted days in the studio, so that is a bonus. I did a lot of black and white sgrafitto, I threw some mugs, and I may have lost my mind a bit, as I threw 1 20 lb canister, 1 10 lb canister, 1 5 lb canister and then topped it off with a 10 lb pitcher. I know full well that I will probably not sell these. Nobody in this town buys jars, let alone massive ones with no actual purpose other than to look pretty.

 This is the 20 lb canister

 Pretty jars all in a row(I know, the handles/lugs suck)


 I was asked to come up with a "chicken" teapot for a student that collects chickens, so this is what I came up with first:

and then just in case it wasn't that obvious, I made this one:

I filled in the time spent waiting for things to dry with these:

OPEN HOUSE - Fairview Studios

If you have ever wondered how pottery was made and that you might like to give it a whirl, come to the Fairview Studios Open House. You can check out the studio, meet the instructors, watch throwing demonstrations and partake in a raku firing and you might even get to take a little treasure home with you. If you missed the Spring Sale, there will also be a selection of work for sale made by the instructors and various students.