The Pottery Stairs are Out!

 

The Pottery Stairs, wearing their spiffy new coat of lipstick-red paint, are out for the first time since the Maine Pottery Tour! Local peeps, come & get your love! (Or, you know, mugs.)

Here's how it works: Choose your pottery. Grab an envelope - it's already got my address & a stamp.  You can mail me the price of the ware, or you can put the payment directly into my mailbox, on the porch. Or you can send money via CashApp: $FineMessPottery ; or paypal.me at :@LoriKeenanWatts

Sorry, but I can't hold or ship pieces from the pottery stairs. 

Yes, I'm Still Making Stuff!

You might have the impression from my last few posts that all I've done for the last couple months is studio housekeeping: roof repair, new shelving, painting the stairs. Au croissant! (or whatever.) I have been making like a mad bastard! I tend to share those photos on instagram - the social media platform I find truly enjoyable. I use a couple of the others but insta is the one that is actually fun, as opposed to a tool for staying informed, either of the news of the day or of my friends lives. Though I am very interested in politics, I keep my instagram feed free of it - anyone making political posts or god forbid memes, I mute them, at least for a while, because I think there need to be places, irl & online, where we can go & not focus on what divides us. It's the only way back to civility, if there even is a way back.  (Side note: I f*ckin hate most memes, they are basically bumper sticker thinking for the internet. Most just play into confirmation bias, & make people think they are informed without giving them any information.)

That was a long introduction, that wandered off into the weeds! Here are some pics of what's happening in the studio: 

Bisque on Wednesday...so today is my last day to throw. Better make the most of it! 

The Pottery Stairs Are Getting A Glow Up

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The pottery stairs have needed spiffying for some time now, but it’s never the most important thing on my list. It’s not the most important thing on my list today, either, but I bumped it to the top while the waste I threw yesterday is drying . As you can see, the pottery stairs used to be red! And they will be again. 

Also on today’s list: Trim & decorate coffee cones; mow the lawn; grind kiln shelves; & listen to the 1/6 hearings.

But if the sun comes out, all bets are off; the kayak will start calling me.

All My Ducks In A Row

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For “ducks” read “kiln furniture.” 

It takes so little to make me happy. Today it’s a new wire shelving rack to keep my posts orderly, freeing up tons of space in the summer studio. 
It's good to feel like one thing is under control! 

I've had a very busy June so far! I am still trying to catch up from not having a kiln for half of last year, in addition to the things I neglected while organizing the Pottery Tour: my taxes, for example. Did those yesterday, & got a start on reclaiming the lawn from no-mow May. I hope the pollinators appreciated it because it's way more work than if I had just been mowing all along. 

And then there are our new kayaks. 

I've been trying to purchase these for 2 years, but every time I had the money all in one place something would happen from one of our 3 big unexpected-expense categories: house, cars, pets. Never the less I finally made it happen so of course we had to take them out. We went to Savade Pond, a little puddle of a place too small to attract tourists, a paddled around for a few hours looking at lilies and turtles and white fluffy clouds. 

Other than that, I've mostly been in the studio. I have a slip trailing post queued up in my brain, all about my new best friend, Darvan 7. Type at ya later! 

Up on the Roof

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A predicted 4 day dry stretch seems like a good time to address the state of my studio roof. 

This is sort of a new experience for me, as my typical approach would be to wait until a thing is a Problem, with a capitol P, before solving it. I could have just plopped a tarp over it, or replaced the torn shingles, to keep the water out, but carpenter ants have gotten into the wood, & while I could have postponed the fix it was not gonna get better by itself. So, dry weather predicted? Time to tackle the roof. 

My only problem is, I don't really know what I am doing. I do find myself in this situation semi-regularly: a job that needs doing, but no money to hire it out, & no skills to do it myself. My usual approach has been to just do it anyway, & figure it out as I go along. How hard can it be? has been my catchphrase for decades, though some things can, in fact, be pretty damn hard! For example I have no idea if I am going about this job correctly. I climbed up on the roof with the circular saw & cut out the punky section; next it's back up the ladder with a tape measure, then off to Lowes to buy some...idk, plywood, I guess?... to fill the gap. 

And maybe there's some kind of product, like caulk, to seal up the joint between the boards? I mean, there's definitely caulk, i know there's caulk, but is there a special kind of...roof caulk? You know, like how there's moisturizer for you face & there's moisturizer for your elbow but they are different? Maybe caulk is like that. 

Or maybe I am overthinking it. 

3 Days in the Studio

 Yesterday, Today, & Tomorrow:

Yesterday was mostly teaching classes - not a lot of studio work. I did some minor clean up from the pottery tour,

& sent off some photos & a blurb to promote a workshop I am teaching at Hallowell Clay Works. Oh! That reminds me. Want to take a slip workshop? It's Sunday, May 22nd, from 2 - 5. 

Today has some teaching also! I don't normally teach on Wednesdays but I am subbing a class this morning. This afternoon I'll be sorting, pricing, & packing pots to go to Mainely Gallery, in Belfast. That'll take most of the afternoon, but I might get to end my workday at a reasonable time & read my new book, The Investigator. 

Tomorrow I am delivering said pots! It is looking like a gorgeous day for a drive; maybe Doug will come with me & poke around the cute little town of Belfast, Maine. Not too long, though; I have to be in Portland to teach by 6 pm. 

Friday & Saturday I have to do a serious house cleaning. I mostly neglected cleaning in the 3 weeks prior to the pottery tour, and it shows! Then my mom & the fam are coming on Sunday for Mother's Day. Busy week! 

Time to say Goodbye

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And, unlike the old song says, goodbye does mean forever. Goodbye does mean we'll never be together again! It's time to let go of my old art fair set up. I built it in 1994, and while it served me well for many years it has gotten increasingly rickety (not unlike myself) and I have had to resort to more and more desperate measures to make sure it is stable enough to hold the ware for the duration of an event. Last weekend I nailed parts of it together. There was a moment when I was contemplating duct tape. It's time to let it go.

Here's how it looked, in better days...

 The question is, do I build another one? If so, for what specific uses? If it is to be solely a studio evnt display, that has a different set of parameters than an art fair display, that needs to be fairly lightweight, portable, and quick to set up. 

I used to spend a lot of time thinking about booth displays. Lately I am thinking about whether I want to do art fairs at all, given my own increasingly rickety self. Art fairs are a lot of work! And, honestly, I got spoiled in St. Paul; there were maybe 20 top-shelf art fairs within a day's drive; here there's one. Craft Boston used to be, but for the last at-least 5 years it has been sucking mud; the PMA show is headed that way also. 
Most of the good shows that I used to do, when I lived in St Paul are still running, but driving 2 or 3 days, staying in motels (I'm too old to sleep in a tent on the ground, at least when I am working), eating out - fast food is both nastier & more expensive than home-food - the calculation is different. The absolute most I could hope to make from a good show is probably around $5000 - & that would be a rarity. Subtract the booth fee & the studio time, & the classes I'd have to miss & the travelling expenses...not looking like such a great dice to roll now. 

OTOH, I used to love the art fair lifestyle. Seeing new cities, a group of friends I only saw during that season, trying new restaurants...I didn't even mind the driving. I'd try to find a Spanish-language radio station & listen hard to see if I could understand any of it. 

Anyway. The Maine Pottery Tour is over for another year. My event was successful, about 70 visitors & the same sales as last year - which is good, because last year landed in kind of a unique moment, when for about 5 minutes we thought the pandemic which had been keeping us away from public activities for a year was over. (It's still not, of course, but the pottery tour is mostly an outside event, & even a big turnout isn't densely packed, so I felt ok about doing the tour.) Anyway, maybe we've just finally hit a critical mass of people who know about hte tour, return every year, & help spread the word.

This week is always funny for me, because I've spent the last 4 months thinking about & working on the tour in basically all my "free" (lol) time, and now there's a space where that used to be. I have orders to fill & pots to list online & stores to approach, not to mention classes to teach!  - believe me I have plenty to do - but I am going to take a moment to appreciate the not-urgency of those tasks. 

The Pottery Tour is in the KJ!

 Featured are my friend Diane Harwood, at her studio in Winthrop, and Nick Skelton, whose studio, The Art Walk, is also located in Winthrop. If you scroll down the article a bit, I am quoted! 

Here's the link.

Here we go!

It's probably not a great sign, that I am still tired from yesterday! & this year Doug can't be here to help me set up the EZ-up (not all that E-Z, honestly, but doable, even with just one person.) 

Still, every year I for get something, & it's fine. 

Still to do:

• Put up the tent & shelves. This is the biggie.
• Price pots. I was going to do that last night but it was so cold & after dinner I was so tired! 
• Place the pottery tour signs
• Bring out all the sales materials: bags, wrapping paper, receipt book, Square device. 

Those are the crucial things. Once those are done I can do the less critical stuff. 

Right after I finish my coffee. 

If you're in Maine, I hope you'll come visit one or more of the stops on the tour this weekend. Lots of great stuff to see! 

Getting Ready!

 

A peek into the spyhole! Unloading Saturday at 11

This might be my busiest day of the year: the day before the Maine Pottery Tour! (& yet here I am blogging, lol.) No matter how prepared I think I am, there is always too much to do on this day. Get change, print flyers, price pots, double check the Square app, set up the road signs. I would normally set up the shelves on Friday but we are meant to get high winds today, so that seems like a Bad Plan. Guess I'll just have to get up way early tomorrow!

Anyway. I was pretty excited to see how nice things look thru the spy, can't wait to unload with visitors tomorrow!! 

Off the Bench at Last

Put me in, coach! 

Because I can fit more pots in the bisque firings than the glaze firings, there are always a few leftover pieces of bisque ware. I keep them against the day that I need to do a firing but don’t quite have enough stuff to fill it. That day has come! After my mishap last weekend - dropping a board of pots on another board of pots, after the last day I could throw & have stuff dry enough to bisque- it was looking like this firing would be short. Normally I would just wait, & for when I had made more stuff, but this time I have a hard deadline: I’ve promised visitors that we will unload a firing Day One of the Maine Pottery Tour. 

Time to call in the benchwarmers! As you can see, some have been waiting a very long time for their moment to arrive.

Squish Happens

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I spent all day yesterday in the studio, attaching handles, decorating, throwing for a couple of hours; I even thought I'd get ahead of the game & pull the handles I'd need to attach later. I did all that with a little tickle of worry in my mind: I promised I'd unload a kiln for the pottery tour, which means I have to load Wednesday & bisque Thursday at the latest, in order to fire a glaze next Wednesday to unload Saturday the 30th. Would I have enough stuff? 

But I felt pretty good about my progress, until this morning when I went in to attach the handles I'd pulled. When I grabbed the board of mugs, somehow it became unbalanced & slipped from my hands, landing on the board of big bowls below it. FUUUUUCK!!

I was pretty irate, for a minute, but whaddaya gonna do? This stuff sometimes happens, and melting down over does not make it unhappen, no matter how hard I try. So, I'll still fire, but it'll be a light load. 

I handled the 2 surviving mugs, trimmed & decorated the surviving bowls, and I'll throw some little vases that can dry in time to load Wednesday. 

I'm reflecting back to a time when I would have spent the day angry & bemoaning the lost pieces. An important lesson it took me way to long to learn: not all ware is going to  make it to the kiln, & not all ware that comes out of the kiln is going to be successful. Letting go means you don't lose the day & your good mood, also.