Fairview Studios Fall Pottery Sale!! - WE ARE MOVING LOCATIONS!!

The next Fairview Studios pottery sale will be on Sunday, November 26th from 10 - 2pm this year. Also note that we have had to change locations again (sorry about that). We made this decision after our costs for hall rentals almost doubled and in order to keep our pots affordable, we will now be located at the Kingsland Community Hall.

Fairview Pottery Sale - Fall 2015 - NEW LOCATION, NEW DAY, NEW TIME!!!

In case you were wondering, the sale info is below. Note that the location has changed, as has the day and time.

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.

Back to work on Saturday

After having had 2 whole months off from working Saturdays, I will be going back to Ceramics Canada this weekend. My biceps have had 2 months off from shifting boxes of clay and I know they are not going to like this drastic change in activity level. It will however be nice to reconnect with the community of clay people. I have not seen the CC people at all over the summer and it will be nice to catch up with what has been going on there. To be quite honest, I am ready for this summer to be over anyway. Not that I had a bad summer, I just need a change of scenery and a few different faces (plus I get to go on a mini holiday in just over 6 weeks!). Having spent most Saturdays at the studio this summer, with not many people around has been a bit solitary and now it is time to pick the socialness up a little. I got a lot done this summer, not as much as I would have liked in terms of glaze testing, but I did fool around with some hand building, which just reaffirmed why it is best left to those that really know what they are doing. I don't have the patience for it. I tend to assemble too quickly, or not quickly enough and scale has always been an issue as well. My pieces always seem a bit unwieldy and wonky as I don't know when to stop (kinda like when I was a kid at a salad bar). For example, I made a flower brick/vase. Some of it was thrown, some slab, some pinched. By the time it was done, it had more of a “Noah's Ark” massiveness to it. The only good thing I can say about it is that it did not crack during the making process and it managed to survive the bisque.

On the crock front, I have completed the 12 8"x8"crocks for my friend's wedding. Here are 3 of them with the name stamped in cobalt blue slip. I have removed the smaller text, as it just read as blobs. I have a half a bag of the clay I used for them left over, so I will probably just make a few smaller crocks as well.