So, Funny Story...

 

You can recognize the copper blue in 
the burner channel

It's time for our favorite game, that we play after every firing, called How Did Lori Fuck Up This Time? 

I'm kidding, sort of! But I am serious about sharing my goofs, large & small, because I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one who feels like a screwup most of the time - & I want you all to know: you can screw up, even big-time, and still do okay. I do! All the time. 

So, what happened this time? Well, it was kind of funny...or rather, it is now, now that I know it didn't cause any serious mayhem. Before the firing I took apart the sprayer & cleaned out any clumps of crystals of soda ash that might cause it not to work properly when I needed it. I was actually pretty proud of myself for doing this! Like, look at me, all preventative & stuff! I am one competent human! 

~*~LOL~*~

That crusty black material is what remains 
of the spray wand.

Apparently when I put it back together, I failed to screw on a little collar that keeps the brass wand attached to the sprayer hose. How did I discover this, you may ask? Well, my first clue was when, while spraying soda through the port, the pressure from the tank blew the rod right off the hose...and right into the port. 
There was nothing to be done about this in the moment, of course, except replace the wand (YAY EXTRA PARTS), continue spraying, and hope for the best. Brass is about 2/3s copper and 1/3 zinc - both will volatize well before ^10. I feared the fugitive copper might cause some flashing, and I really had (have, lol) no idea what fugitive zinc might do. 

I saw little evidence, actually, that the copper did much. It seemed only to affect pieces that had a specific flashing slip - Bauer Orange. The BMix pieces wearing Bauer turned blue - not the teal blue I would expect of copper, but what looked like a watery cobalt blue. Those are quite nice. There were only a couple items in brown stoneware wearing flashing slip, and good thing, too, because those were less nice; a dull mud-brown color with little shine. 

These shells had only Bauer Orange 
Flashing Slip applied.

So, weird but could have been worse! Overall a very successful firing; I will photograph some pieces on Wednesday & update the online shop on Thursday. Thanks for reading! 

A Lot to Learn: A tale of Some Ridiculously, Laughably Terrible Photos

 In olden times, before the internet, I only needed photos of my work (in slide form) to apply to art fairs and send to stores. The photos were representative of the body of work, not necessarily intended to sell that individual piece. Once or twice a year I'd take five or ten pieces to a photographer who specialized in ceramic art, and pay him a hundred bucks or so, and he'd shoot the photos I'd use for my applications. 

Then along came the interwebs, and online sales, and suddenly I needed photos to sell individual pieces. Getting a pro to shoot these was out of the question, in terms of time - I'd have to schedule a shoot after every firing! - and money. Luckily digital photography appeared on the scene at the same time, so I learned to shoot my own photos

I'm not Peter Lee, but I can shoot adequate enough photos of pottery to get me into art fairs, and that's been good enough for me. Today, tho! Today I shot some Christmas ornaments, with the intention to list them online. Damn these were hard to photograph! The first shots were so ridiculously, laughably terrible that I had to show you. 

These were shot in a south-facing room on a sunny day, with three true-white photo bulbs around them. They look like they were shot at midnight in a mine shaft! I think my mistake was choosing a white background for them - just some freezer paper I had around. The camera tried hard to balance the reflected light, and this dreadful gloom was the result. Next time I will choose a grey background.

These are just some fun little doodads - I plan to list them online, but I won't be applying anywhere with ugly sweater ornaments, I assure you, so I don't plan to reshoot; I'll just "fix it in post," as the cool kids say. 

Was it Jimmy Buffet who said, "If we couldn't laugh we would all go insane?" I think that's especially true for laughing at ourselves. Anyway, enjoy my terrible horrible no-good-very-bad photos. I've got some editing to do. 

ETA: You can see the listings, and the photos after editing, here. 

Not Another Learning Experience! The Pop Up Photo Booth Edition

 I unloaded a firing on Friday. It was supposed to be Wednesday, but my laptop was stolen Tuesday night, so Wednesday & Thursday were burnt up in all the process involved in that - police report, contacting my banks & credit card companies, all that stuff. Boy do I have a lot to say about that experience, but I'm gonna save it for later, because, new pots! It was kind of a shitty week, but at least the kiln didn't let me down.

I spent today photographing pots, some new out of this kiln, some that I've been planning to shoot for a while. I tried a different photo set up: one of those nylon pop up tents. A friend - Libbey Seigars of Whitefield Pottery - gave me one of those pop-up photo tents last year. She wasn't happy with the results she was getting, so didn't want it anymore. It takes me a while to get around to things, but today I finally gave the it a shot. The advantage, I hoped, was that I could just pop the tent up & start shooting, as opposed to my indoor setup which requires me to re-arrange my living room, pin up a backdrop, and set up three lights. I usually don't want to do all that for just a few pots, so I wait until I have a bunch, and then shooting & processing the images - never mind listing the items for sale - becomes an all-day deal.

That was a learning experience, and what I learned was, those pop up photo tents suck! I eventually gave up & just set up my backdrop & lights as usual. The point of the pop up booth was supposed to be that it was easier - just pop it up on a sunny day & start shooting. Well, the pop up part is easy, that much is true. Getting the wrinkles out of the backdrop - even though it was stored carefully - was not. What eventually worked (kind of) was putting it in the dryer on high heat for about 10 minutes. 

Once the only-a-little-wrinkly (me: I'll fix it in post!) backdrop was in place, I had to find a block or something to place the pots on, because the opening for the camera was a lot higher than the floor of the ten, so the camera was looking sharply down on everything. (I put bricks under the backdrop, but the angle was still not great. All of that would have been tolerable if the photos had been good but - guess what? - they weren't! 

Here are two photos of the same pot, one taken in the pop up tent, one taken with my usual photo set up: 

Taken in the pop up photo tent

Take with backdrop & lights

To my eye the second is just infinitely better. I did my best with editing but the pop up photos all had a bluish quality, and correcting it made the color of the pots wrong.

Anyway, I gave up on it. I like to learn new things but I just had too many pots to shoot to mess around much with it, and anyway I already have a system that works. 

Anybody want a free pop up photo tent? 

ACC: Let's Call The Whole Thing Off

For weeks now I have been both excited and stressed about the upcoming ACC Baltimore Wholesale Show. So much to do: Define the wholesale line! Take photos, create forms, plan a production schedule. Build a booth! (What space will I use to build it? To store it afterwards?) Will it fit in the Grey Lady? No? Okay, check out trailers. Where will I stay? 

I'd already paid the $400 upfront they ask you for, to hold your space. When the contract arrived, I put off reading it in detail, the way you do when you are stressed about something. (On the plus side, I tend to do lots of other things in the process of procrastinating. I got a lot done!) The first thing I noticed were the FEES. Some I expected: of course I'd have to pay for pipe* and drape or carpeting, if I was going to need it. (I wouldn't, because it's $256 to rent a 10x10 square of carpet. I didn't even bother to find out how much the pipe & drape was) But mother of dog: WIFI? It's $135 to access WIFI?? Before I had even finished reading the contract, the expenses were looking like this:

• $1200 booth fee (I knew about that, obvs)
• $65 "facility fee" Wut? Just make it part of the booth fee, you knew there was going to be a facility involved, the show doesn't take place between dimensions. 
• $40 Membership fee. Um, okay, I can see that, I guess.
• $135 for the freakin' wifi, WTF
• $301.80 Mandatory labor to unload the truck/trailer. FUCK THAT NOISE 
• Electricity: $95 for 500 watts...that's FOUR bulbs. $120 for 1000W. That's not more than I expected but...it's an indoor show. Everyone is going to need lights! Just be honest and roll it into the booth fee. 
• Exhibitors are not permitted to use power tools to erect their booths: must hire labor from the hall to do that, so who even knows how much that would end up costing.  

I know some of these are requirements of the hall, but that doesn't actually matter to me: what matters is a show that I could barely afford to do before got pushed into the prohibitive range by a bunch of hidden costs. If these expense were stated upfront, as the booth fee was, I would never have applied.  Nor are these expenses stated anywhere all in one place - I really had to go looking for them. I admit I side-eye the organization a bit, about this: making it hard to know what the real costs are until after the deposit is paid, surely results in more forfeited deposits. Hey-hey-hey, money for nothing, right, ACC?

And - icing on the cake - I asked for my booth not to be on the perimeter. Guess where they put me? If you guessed on the perimeter, you win! That wouldn't have been enough to cancel,but it was enough for make me feel a little dubious, even before the additional expenses.

Man I am bummed about this. I've lost my $400 deposit - of course - but also what I had hoped was a way to really grow my business. And it seems I never finish learning how much I have to learn. 🙁

I know there is a bright side here - hey, now I can relax and enjoy the remainder of my break, and just make pots - and I will focus on it shortly. I just need a minute to process my disappointment.

Oh hey, Happy Festivus! Perfect: it's the airing of grievances!



*When I first typed this, I typo'd it to "pope and drape." Like, no wonder it's spendy! His time is valuable. 😀

Pop Quiz!

This is for the clay students reading this blog. I know you are out there!

My upside down plates have come out of the bisque, and guess what? One of them cracked pretty spectacularly. I sort of thought it might. Anyone care to hazard a guess as to why the one cracked and the other didn't?

Turn your computer upside down for the answer!

Actually, there's a bit more after the break.

RIP Ghost Pony; We Hardly Knew Ye

Last month I gave my car a name: Ghost Pony. After three years, causing me...well not nary a headache, but relatively few, I was just fond of it. So I named it.

And then it died. It joined Honored Dead in Sto-vo-kor, and became a part of the silent majority.

Or, I dunno, maybe it didn't! Perhaps it's only pining for the fjords. Here's the story:

Technically, I suppose, if it's dead, I killed it. The timing belt broke, flung itself around the engine and (probably, I guess?) bashed things up in there. I replaced a timing on this car long before it had a name, almost three years ago, and I drive about 20,000 miles a year. I knew it had to be done soon. It was on my list, but I kept putting it off. Well, that'll teach me! (It probably won't.)

To be a little more precise, I don't know for sure that the timing belt did any damage when it broke. The only way to find out, say the dudes at VIP Auto, is to put a new timing belt on and see if it still has enough compression to run. (That sounds...I dunno, not quite right? Like, can't you see the damage? But they are the experts, and "Lori doesn't understand it" is not the same thing as "It's not true.") But it costs a bunch of money to put the belt on, with nothing remotely like a guarantee that it will be drivable again.

So I find myself as I so often have, carless and needing to get this sorted sooner rather than later. A few months ago I had a hope to buy a (relatively) late model compact truck, but now the Magic 8 Ball says recession coming soon (I shook it three times, y'all, just to be sure!), so I don't want to be stuck with a car note. I have my eye on a couple of little pick-ups at a local shade-tree dealer. He's just this retired guy who buys old cars, fixes them up to pass inspection, and sells them. He's a bit of an oddball - doesn't really need your business, and doesn't care if you know it. But he seems honest enough. Anyway, he's got two trucks that fall into my price/size/ mileage range, and I am going to check them out today.

Meanwhile the Ghost Pony sits in my driveway like Schrodinger's Cat, neither dead nor alive. I could put $500 into it and maybe have a good-as-new car, or I could set $500 on fire; or I could sell it for short money on Craigslist and be done with it. Or I could just not decide.

I'm going with option D. Obviously.

Soon I hope to introduce my new vehicle, but though it has long been my custom, I am starting to feel a little superstitious about naming it. Some people knock wood; maybe I could stave off bad luck by keeping up with the maintenance.

Flames Good, Flames Bad

A dramatization

Ugh, there is SO much to learn, in clay, so many new things to go wrong! The best that we can hope for is for things to go wrong when they don't do any harm, and by that measure I am a winner today.

I finally had a chance to fire the kiln I loaded last week. Candled just fine, no surprises...one of the valves was locked in ice, but I chipped/ melted it out, all good. Reached body reduction, all good...but when I went out to check if  ^05 was falling yet, I noticed one of my burners was behaving weirdly.

It's a measure of how dedicated I am to you, my darling readers, that I almost went for the camera before shutting it down, but then I thought: no, when propane and fire are doing unexpected things, the time to put an end to it is right freaking now. So I turned it off, then waited a bit and relit it - and it did it again.

The flame, which ought to come out the end of the burner and (mostly) into the kiln, was igniting way down at the primary air. I have never had that happen before, and I don't know what has caused it to happen, but in addition to just not being a safe state of affairs, it meant that a bunch of the heat was not going into the kiln. The firing was not going to proceed properly no matter what.

Luckily I have no urgency about this firing - it's always good to have pots but nobody pounding down my door in the middle of February. I have time to ask people way smarter than I am (Hi, Tyler Gulden!) what the problem might be and how to fix it.

So, now I have a sunny Sunday afternoon off, with just a tiny nagging worry that I might have to invest in a new burner. It's pushing 50°, and in February in Maine, it's criminal to let such a day go to waste.

Hilariously Awful

It seems the Fire Monkey* had one more shine for me this year: my firing was truly BAD. Much of the kiln did not reach temperature - the cones fell but they were apparently in isolated hot spots.
There were a few pots in the isolated hot spots as well, including this vase. It's an ill wind indeed that doesn't blow some good, and the pots that came out well were mostly the more labor intensive ones, and the ones that came out poorly can mostly be refired.

It does mean that I won't have pots for the Portland Pottery show, although I will still be bartending, dressed to the nines, as is my tradition. I don't have many opportunities to break out the boa, and I refuse to miss one.

I'm bummed, of course, but also philosophical: bad firings happen. (Not usually this bad but hey. Some firing has to be the worst firing. Although come to think of it this was nothing close to the worst firing I've ever had.) You'd think this would be an opportunity for one of my famous, epic, pity parties, but no; I find myself laughing: what else can go wrong? As long as it's not illness or injury, I'm grateful.

In other news, I resolved my camera dilemma by kicking the can down the road. When I went to purchase a new one (I was looking at one of these) I discovered that it does not have an infared remote. I thought that would be standard on mid-range & up cameras but I was wrong-wrong-wrong. What I ended up doing was just buying a camera exactly like the 12 year old one I had that died - an Olympus c-750 ultrazoom - which I know is adequate for website work although not for application photos. Upside: it was only $20 on Ebay, being an elderly version at this point. I was looking forward to the wifi feature - upload without cables, etc. - but that's for next time.

Anyhoo: since I don't have to set up a display table, maybe I have time to get my hair highlighted. The way my luck is running it'll probably turn green, but if so I'll put a red bow on it and call it holiday cheer!

Bless you all, readers. 💙



*I speak metaphorically, of course: I am well aware that this is my own fault! Bad Lori! Bad! This is why we do not put things off until the last minute.

WELL THAT SUCKED

Pasty, lutefisk-looking pots

The Demon Crudebake has been at work.

Ugh, it's been so long since I had a bad firing I forgot how much it sucks. I was prepared for this one to be less than stellar; I knew the kiln wasn't firing right: climbing very slowly, and unevenly. When I shut it off I knew I'd have some refires in there...Wasn't quite expecting three-quarters of the kiln to be refires, but there it is.

Pots from the top shelf

So, here's the weird thing: it looks like a draw issue. The top shelf was good - juicy, even. Everything below it was as pasty as the denizens of Lake Wobegone. Even those top-shelf pots, you can see their bottoms quarters got less soda.

 Insufficient draw would make sense, because when I rebuilt the stack I rebuilt it two courses shorter, because it drew a little too hard before. Except, I've fired it since then, and it went perfectly. My firing in December was great! It's a mystery.

For now I'll be grateful that I got just enough pots to pay or the propane, and that I know (or hope I know!!) the cause and cure. I don't have anyone urgently waiting for pots now, so it is not a bad time to do kiln repair. I needed to rebuild the bag walls anyway, so looks like a trip to INFAB is on my list this week.