a bit more snow

I just checked the weather forecast and it looks like one more week of cold with a bit more snow. We will finally be busting out of this cold and moving directly into warm weather. We don’t fool around with spring for too long, gotta get green quick. I see that it will be 10 degrees by the end of next week. This winter has been very, very long, with very little in the way of Chinooks. I can not wait. We will be able to put pots outside to dry soon. No more waiting forever for things to be stiff enough to trim, or even fire. Speaking of firing, I put a load in for bisque on Sunday. In that load is a whole bunch of little bowls that were thrown off the hump very quickly. I will be using them purely to calcine Alberta Slip for our new “purple rain” glaze. The recipe comes courtesy of Plainsman Clays, but we need cool studio names, not a boring number, so as I was the one to push for it to be included in the studio glaze repertoire, I got to name it. I have had a lot of water in my life, so purple rain came to mind. The purple is a bit transient, in that if you get it too thin, it will be more of a light amber brown, but when applied properly to a buff stoneware or white porcelain, it is a floating lavender blue on a brown background. When applied to a dark body, it is a beautifully intense and compellingly juicy (too many adjectives?), floating blue. It also works really well with all of our studio glazes. If you are curious, the recipe is this: 40% Raw Alberta Slip 40% Calcined Alberta Slip (fire the raw to ^022 and hold for about an hour to drive off excess moisture) 20% Ferro Frit 3134 4% Rutile I will hopefully be mixing up a slightly larger test batch for the studio this weekend. I am using my labor as the incentive to include this glaze in the studio glaze line up. If Dave doesn’t have to do it, then he gets more agreeable. We are quite limited in colour choices. We have dark brown, celadon green, turquoise, hares fur blue, pale stone blue, periwinkle blue, white & clear. You can see the trend. The addition of a purple(ish) glaze will hopefully get the creative juices flowing. We try to keep the costs down with each glaze, as well as ensuring that they are all as non toxic as possible. We don’t use barium or lithium or anything that could leach out or cause problem. Fairview Studios is a reational studio where there are times when nobody is there to ensure that students are not eating, drinking, breathing, or bathing in the glaze buckets, so we try to keep it simple, the result being quite a neutral pallet. The cost of frit is also quite a challenge to overcome. We try to make glazes that use very little, if any, to avoid not only the cost, but the inevitable hard panning that occurs with heavily fritted glazes. This new one should be quite acceptable. The cost is a bit more with the 20% frit, but there are only 2 other ingredients, 80% of which is clay (AB Slip). Even though it settles quickly, it does not hard pan, even after sitting undisturbed for 3 or more months. I guess glazing is the next thing on the agenda, I have a sale looming on the horizon (end of May), and I just don’t have the stock. I did however do a down and dirty studio sale this past week. Essentially, cleaned out all the pots that have been sitting on my shelves, that have travelled to one too many sales and never sold, or are just not quite good enough for the galleries and sell them off to the students. I put all the pots on a rarely used hand building table with a note saying to take these pots if you want them and if you feel the need to pay, to put what you feel is fair in a jug on my shelves. It worked great. I cleared a lot of space and made a few bucks in the process. So that has been my life lately: cold, waiting for summer, working, glazing, mixing etc.

Oh ya, this one is waiting for the snow to melt too, she doesn't know it though. She has only ever known snow.

Just a little snow

Well, I guess March decided to come in like a lion. This was the view outside the studio yesterday at around 11 am. I got up early and left my house at 8:00 to go pick up some stuff I had in the wee little test kiln at Ceramics Canada and the snow was not too bad. When I got to the studio at 9 I shoveled the entrance but within a few minutes you could not tell. I packed it in shortly after taking this picture and just went home and watched movies instead.

Memorial plaque

My parents were in Melfort Saskatchewan this past weekend and sent me this photo of the memorial plaque I made for my Grandmother's ashes that are buried there next to the Eastman family that raised her. I am actually really quite surprised that it has done so well. It is exposed to the rain, sun, snow & freezing cold weather that Saskatchewan gets. It has been exposed to about 3 winters now and no cracking or anything. So if you are looking for a material that will withstand the rigours of being outside, Laguna cone 5 Bmix (fired to cone 6) will do the job. The glaze itself is crazed, but this glaze naturally does that, so no big deal there either.

Spring Blizzard = Good Pottery Sales

I was participating in the Fairview Studios Pottery Sale this past Saturday. When I left my house at 7:00 it was sprinkling lightly, but not very cold out, so I decided against a jacket and wore runners without socks. By the time I got to the hall where the sale was being held (7:30), it had started to snow and was beginning to accumulate. I parked my car, got out, opened the hatch and immediately stepped into an ice cold puddle of melty slush (BTW, runners with mesh tops are not water proof). There were not many customers waiting for the sale to start, maybe 10 or 12, but by 9:30 it was packed and people were shopping. For a spring sale, I did reasonably well. My gross sales were on par with a slow Christmas sale. I ended up having to re-sticker all my pots as the ones I had used were not coming off very well. As I was standing at my table madly redoing everything, there were a couple of women looking at some of my stuff. The words coming out of their mouth sounded like “this is just beautiful, I love it”, and then they put it back and walked away. Perhaps I misunderstood them? Maybe they were looking for the same thing, but in blue? Actually, I think they were looking for the same thing, but in “Cheaper”. I do tend to price myself out of sales, but my thoughts are that why should someone else get it for $20, when it cost a minimum of $30 in materials and time to make it. I would rather wait a little longer to make the sale than give it up for a quick buck now.
I have the Mad Potters sale in 3 weeks on May 26th, and it will be curious to see how this one goes. I have been involved with them only for 2 previous sales and so far my earnings from them have been about half of what I can do at the Fairview sale, but then I am spoiled. The Fairview Sale, which has been running for over 30 years, has all the kinks ironed out and it practically runs itself. The Fairview customers are extremely loyal and it always amazes me how much money they spend. I will give this sale one more shot, and if the numbers remain the same, I will have to reconsider if I participate in it next year or not. You never know, this could be the year that everyone wants cone 6 electric instead of cone 10 reduction. At least I am not competing with salt/soda or wood fired work


I should note that the snow did not stick around. It stopped snowing around noon, continued to sprinkle on and off for the rest of the day, and then on Sunday the temperature was ~12 degrees celcius, and today, it is forecasted to be a beautiful 19 degree day, and tomorrow is supposed to be even nicer at 23 degrees. In saying this, I am looking at the weather forecast right now, and I see snow and rain on Thursday…oh well, that is what you get for living nestled up against the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in Southern Alberta. No two days are ever quite the same and you can always count on a snowstorm in May.

Neither snow, nor rain....

The United States Postal Service Creed (no Canada Post equivalent) should apply to potters too. Saturday saw an official snowfall of 9 cm on Saturday night / Sunday morning. I crawled out of bed at 8am, shoveled off the car and set off to go open up the studio and throw a few pots. I knew that I would be the only soul there for a while, as it was still snowing quite a lot when I got there and it continued to do so until noon or so. This meant I could spread myself out, turn up the tunes (today it was all Imogene Heap), and get into it without any distractions. I don’t mind the distractions, as it comes with the teaching territory, but the weekends are my own time, and although the students usually respect this and try not to ask too many questions, there are always a few interruptions throughout the day. I got the pots I threw on Friday night trimmed, assembled a teapot, added my high temp wire decorations to a tall lidded form, threw another large lidded thing, and threw eight 600g mugs. Not a whole lot accomplished but that’s OK. I suggested a method to trim mugs to Sallie so that it would go faster, and wouldn’t distort the rims, she was very pleased. I talked to Sonia about how to glaze her pots and talked to 3 or 4 different people about how a particular glaze result was achieved on someone else’s mugs that recently came out of the last glaze load. Oh ya, I also finished constructing my pendant hanger. I was inspired by a student to come up with a simple way to fire pendants that did not have to be fired flat, and therefore only glazed on one side. I had originally suggested bead bars but, she would have to purchase a set of the posts and bars and they take up a lot of horizontal space in the kiln, and end up costing a fair bit to fire. So, I thought, what if I threw a thick walled cylinder and inserted kanthal wire hooks into the cylinder at intervals to allow for multiple pendants to be hung on it . I have created a few pendants to give it a shot, and have incorporated little loops of thinner high temp wire  right into the pendants so they can hang from the kanthal wire, we will see how this works.  I left the studio at 3pm and went to my friend Christy’s house to deliver a set of 6 tall mugs, 2 medium bowls, and a teapot. So all in all it was a relatively productive day. I made some pots, and I made some money, can’t complain about that.

Just when you thought it was over...

This is the view out the window at Ceramics Canada. If I took this picture yesterday, you would have not seen all this white stuff...
We have had a horrible winter here in Calgary, and we finally thought it was over, but Mother Nature had one last ugly surprise up her sleeve. This time next week it is supposed to be +12 celcius, so hopefully this is the last of the white stuff for the year (yeah right). They forecasted that the snow we are getting today will be the equivalent to the total average snowfall for April. 15-20 cm.
Oh well, I may get to leave a bit early today and then I can go to the studio and fool around there.

YUCK!!!

I guess winter is here...This is what it looks like from the window at work.
I took this with my phone, so I can only assume that is why it is a little purple. It is actually quite white out there....and cold. It is apparently -13 degrees celcius, but with the wind chill it feels like -20 or so I think.

I made it out alive...

Dave is finally back! He arrived in town last night and came by the studio to make sure it hadn’t burned to the ground while he was visiting family and friends in Kansas. I guess it was snowing most of the way through (He woke up to the evil white stuff in Billings). As soon as he got to the Canadian border, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.

He did mention one funny thing that happened to him. I guess he stayed the night in a hotel in a small town somewhere between Kansas and Montana and when he asked for a room, he was told that the pool was not available as the community used it that night. Turns out, they were baptising local residents. Dave was looking at the goings on in the pool through the observation area and someone told him he was welcome to join them. He told him he had already been baptised but the guy said that everyone could use a “retread”. Too weird.

I am glad he is back. 2 weeks of late nights have taken their toll on me.

Oh, one more funny thing...the other day I was driving down a street in my neighbourhood, and a black squirrel darted out onto the road and I could see it was going to get squished by the car ahead of me. I wish I had been able to capture this on video as it was quite amazing. The squirrel did a hand stand. He stopped but the momentum of his body kept moving his back end up and over his head, and then he twisted to the side to avoid landing under the wheels of the car. I believe he made it to the other side. I didn’t feel a bump as I passed by the spot where he was and I didn’t see a smear on the road behind me.

No Pottery for me tonight. I am going to the movies. Tomorrow is Remembrance Day, so I can take a wee rest.

Altered Pots (and other stuff_

It Snowed like crazy today, 8-10 inches in just a few hours fell this morning, and it was the heavy, wet and stickey kind. Then it got sunny, melted a lot of the snow, and then it snowed again. Right now it is clear, and mild, tomorrow it should be 10 degrees (celcius), and by Sunday it should be 21 degrees. This town sure has some crazy weather.

I will be taking some pictures tomorrow. My boxes were all in the kiln for a bisque firing over this last weekend, so I was unable to take any.
Taught a class this Monday, and my demo was tall cylinders. I have not thrown anything without altering it in some way in a while, so it was good to do it again, but I can see why I need the variety inherant in messing around with the freshly thrown pot, even if it is just squaring it off.
The Calgary Clay Arts Association is getting off to a pretty good start. We are planning a sale in September, and the e-mails are just flying.
The Airdrie Food Bank is having an empty bowls event in June, and in order to help supply some bowls, Galleria is hosting a "Clay-lympics" event. Various potters, the public, and hopefully some celebs will be on site to create some one of a kind bowls.