New pots!

 I unloaded a firing last Sunday! Between packing & delivering the pots to their awaiting outlets, & photographing, then processing the images, I am only just getting around to posting about it. Nice problem to have: a week out, & almost all the pots are sold. I held out a few for the online store. 

Lately I have been producing two bodies of work: Dotopia & Sweet Life. (I find it helps, especially for taking wholesale orders, if I name the lines. Yes, the names are a bit corny! That's marketing for ya.) I'm only posting a few Sweet Life pots, because the Dotopia pots are in stores now. Damn, I really need to fire more often, because I need more inventory. 

Anyway, the pots are here. I'll be posting these in my online shop today! 

I'll be posting the links here as soon as I get these listed. Stay tuned! 

Torn Slab Platter

 Well, that was fast! Between my wholesale accounts & social media, basically all of that last firing is sold now. (I now have to squeeze out a firing before the pottery tour, but that is a good problem to have.) I do have one piece left, maybe because I haven't even tried to sell it yet: the first of the torn-slab platters has come out of the kiln.

I have to make a lot of stuff, pretty fast, and there's demand for both Dotopia & Sweet Life (I've been wanting to use that name!) so now would be a really bad time for me to go haring off after yet another aesthetic whim. [Insert some quote about discipline here, I'm too tired to dig one up.] But this platter - more of a plate, really, after the shrinkage - well, it did turn out very well! Once things calm down a bit around here I will definitely be making more. 

If you are interested in Dotopia, you get get those pots at Gifts at 136 or at Maine Local Market; if you like Sweet life, you can get those at Monkitree. 

Dear 2018

Speaking of reflections, check out this Sun Dog! It's a reflection of sunlight on ice crystals in the air. 

Longtime readers know that the week between Christmas and New Years' is my favorite of the year. (Well. Except possibly the Wigwam Weekend! and all the other days that the air outside doesn't hurt my face.) I love that all the holiday hulabaloo is done, but it doesn't yet feel like we've returned to routine. I use these days to reflect on the past year and think about the next. I am a big fan of New Year's resolutions, on the grounds that even a partially kept resolution typically has a more salubrious effect than none at all, but I don't make them lightly. This week gives me time to think about what I could do better or more or differently, to being my life - and, increasingly, my world - closer to ideal.

This year's Week of Reflection opened with a Sun Dog: bright spots of light flanking the sun as the light bounces off ice crystals in the atmosphere. (No, I didn't take the photo; that's a sun dog that appeared over Chicago a few years ago.) It seemed fitting.

I learned a lot in 2017, actually, but the big takeaway is to focus my energy. Boiling it down, in the personal realm:

• I  can only do what I can do, and I can't do more than that. I also learned that what I can do - what all of us can do - is more than we think!  
• I hate this one but...I learned to walk away from some people - even if I feel that at heart they are good people. I hate it because it feels like giving up, but people have to make their own choices. It's arrogant of me to think I can change a mind that's determined not to change. 
• As a direct result, I grew closer to the people who nourish my joy, and I hope that I do the same for them. I want to use my emotional energy lifting people up. 

Professionally, I had the same big takeaway: FOCUS. I make pots. I make & sell soap. I teach classes. I do workshops. I sell wholesale, at shows, and consignment. This is a lot of spreading my energy around! It's time to pare down a bit.

I 💓 teaching my classes. Some days I honestly can't believe my luck that someone would pay me to hang out with fun people and do fun creative projects and talk about my favorite subject. It also lends some stability to our household income; with Doug & I both being self employed, it can get a little chaotic because payday is just "whenever the checks arrive." So teaching stays.

Obviously I'll be making pots! and also selling pots. I am finding that shows fit my work style very well: I work better (or at least more!) when I am aiming for a specific event. I'll keep my existing wholesale accounts, and maybe pick a couple more, but I think I will be ending my consignment relationships. They are a lot of work for a small trickle of money, and more than the work, they keep a bunch of inventory tied up collecting dust while waiting to sell. Better to have the pots on hand to fill an art fair display or provide work when a wholesale account needs it.

Soap. Ah, soap. For sure I will keep making soap, and for sure I will sell what I make, but I've decided that soap will remain a hobby. I have a daydream of a line - Sweet Life Bath & Body - and maybe even a store in downtown Augusta. But there are only so many hours in a day and a week and a year, and I can't do both this and be a potter. Upside: this frees me to make whatever I feel like, whenever I feel like it, and not try to design a line or produce consistently, or market the line, or mess around with the perfect packaging. Just lye and fat, doin' their thing.

I'll be cutting back on workshops, offering only the two I am already committed to in 2018. Because I dread the very thought of failing or being unprepared in front of an audience, I spend so much time on preparation for workshops that the otherwise-reasonable amount I am paid for the ends up not covering my time.

Happy New Year, dear readers! Here's hoping in 2018 you spend time with the people you love and doing things that bring you joy.

Icy Water

No throwing today; no bathing, either, or dish-washing. We ran out of oil yesterday - Saturday afternoon, and not just any Saturday: the one just before Easter. I guess I should count my blessings that it wasn't Christmas Eve, and anyway it's no one's fault but my own: I was trying to squeak through March without an oil delivery. Well, I succeeded; but not the way I had hoped.

Fortunately it's not very cold, and I have an electric space heater for the studio, so, onward! (Funnily enough, the electricity went out for about an hour, as well: Frontier Days here on Cony Street! I try to keep a sunny outlook but I admit I started to get a little exasperated. I read by a window until the power returned.)

I did trim some more teabowls for the first test firing of my new line, which, as regular readers know, (O hai regular readers! Mwah!) will be ^6 reduction soda: same palette, same forms (or many of the same), same utility; just less propane. My hands aren't in water too much while trimming, anyway. But trimming is done now, and it seems like a good chance to try something I've had in mind for a while: sketching out some shapes and glaze schemes, with watercolor pencil.

By nature I am a mud potter: throwing, shaping, stamping, slip decorating, all the things that happen while the clay is wet are easily appealing to me. Like a lot of ceramic artists, for years I thought of glazing and firing as just something I had to do to finish the things l loved to make. I tried to choose (or create) glazes that would enhance my shapes and textures, but could be applied with simple dipping or pouring. That has been changing in the last few years, and I feel like my work has taken great strides forward - come to a new level, if I may say so - since I have been treating glazing as just as active and creative a process as wetwork. I want to see if planning out some glaze designs in advance will further develop that aspect of the work.

Watercolor pencils seem like a natural because of the analogy to soda: carefully applying the color, and then along comes this fluid force to melt and soften the marks.  It's fun! And it's a better use of icy water than throwing.



BTW, the watercolor sketches - these, and some others - are available as part of the $100 reward level for my Kickstarter campaign. Even the $10 will get you a card based on one of the sketches! I am leaning towards using the teapot for the thank-you card, but we'll see what else comes out of the brush.
EDIT: Now available for a $29 pledge: the full glaze notebook in PDF form! Also, for Canadian potters who would like a hard copy, you can get one for a $41 pledge, to cover the additional shipping.

A Glaze for Sweet Life

Remember I said I have yet to choose a glaze for my currently-gestating line, Sweet Life? I have a candidate in mind, although it will need some tweaking: I have here Ingrid Bathe's Clear recipe. I don't think I am revealing secrets by publishing this recipe, since Ingrid hands it out at workshops. Here's the glaze in its original form:

custer feldspar 51%
whiting 9%
zinc ox 8%
strontium 21%
om4 10%
neodymuim 5%

This glaze is rather matte, and blue in the pools, as you can see in the image of Ingrid's plates. I am looking for something icy and with a bluish cast, but maybe not as blue as this. That is fortunate, as the ingredient which is contributing most of the hue is neodymium, which goes for around $60 a pound. So, scratch the neodymium.

Second, I will need to make some adjustments for the soda, per some sound advice I was given recently. So, let's increase the whiting to 15%; at least in one test. In the other I will add 6% dolomite instead. My expectation is that the additional-whiting test will be shinier, and the dolomite-variation test will retain the more matte surface.

And, because I need some source of boron, let's replace the missing neodymium with 5% gerstley borate in both tests. This will have the effect of making the glaze more fluid at the same time it helps protect against the soda vapor. (Which, by the way, quit hating on gerstley, all you gerstley-haters out there. I have had none of the problems of material irregularity that people are talking about...maybe it's a low-fire thing, and I wouldn't understand.)
These changes make our recipe:

custer feldspar 51%
whiting 15%
zinc ox 8%
strontium 21%
om4 10%
gerstly borate 5%

Or, alternatively:

custer feldspar 51%
whiting 9%
dolomite 6%
zinc ox 8%
strontium 21%
om4 10%
gerstley borate 5%

I know those batches don't add up to 100%; I will worry about re-balancing the percentages when I know which one I will be using.

Watch for result 2/26!

Sweet, Sweet Life

One of my winter projects has been to design lines of work. I originally conceived it as a marketing tool, but it has turned into a delightful creative challenge: to create well-designed functional shapes which communicate a consistent sensibility. My plan was to design two, Cottage and Lodge, but that has morphed to three (and a fourth percolating...this is getting out of hand!) The third is Sweet Life, and is related to some sundae dishes and banana split boats I was making last summer.

With Sweet Life, I am focusing on special-occasion, celebratory pieces: a punch bowl, a cake stand, wine goblets, latte cups. Also some bowls and plates, of course. I am looking for a festive and somewhat formal feel: think summer-wedding-reception. I haven't selected the glaze recipe yet, but it will be an icy clear, with greenish tints where it interacts with the soda.




My plan is to launch it with a gallery show of the bigger pieces and sets - I have a place in mind but haven't asked yet, as I feel like I need to go in with at least a few finished piece before making the approach.

The Lodge line is coming to me fairly easily, facets and tenmoku and flashing slip. The Cottage line I am having a bit more trouble with: I can see the glazes - iron yellow, oribe, and soda-cobalt - but though I've tried some shapes for bowls and mugs, nothing gives me that jumping-up-and-down feeling when you know you've got it just right.
If it seems like I have a different project every week, well, I guess I do. ADD is a blessing and a curse! I definitely haven't abandoned vessel sinks, for example; there's just not much more to say about them until they are at least out of the bisque.