The Fattie of the Firing

It's fun to look through the pots after unloading and try to choose a favorite - what I call the "fattie." If I'm lucky, choosing the fattie will be a difficult task! This as such a firing. While photographing pots yesterday I had a chance to mull it over.

This Jaunty Jar is s strong contender! It almost appears to be inhaling.
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I love the luscious quality of the glaze, edged with the silver/charcoal of trapped carbon.
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This quiet little pot still managed to grab my attention.
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I have a weakness for butterdishes - making them and using them - and this one took the soda glass so perfectly.
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There were tons of great mugs in this load! 

Can a set collectively be The Fattie?
See more at the link. 

Blue, and soda, and excessive slip trailing, and roses! This vases combines many of my favorite clay qualities.
See more at the link. 

Detail

The Fattie is ultimately a subjective choice, and factors play in that don't come through in photos, like a silky surface or perfect weight: substantial but not clunky. In the end I settled on the butterdish: that is my Fattie of the Firing. All the factors came together, plus one: the lid fits so perfectly: it neither shifts not sticks, and it fits almost the same in either direction! (They almost always fit better one way than the other.)
All of these are currently available in my online store, but I will need inventory for my December shows, so they will probably only there until the beginning of December.

Do you choose a favorite? Do you keep it or sell it? (I always sell my favorites! Sometimes I charge a little more for them, though.)

NCECA Demo, at last on YouTube!

So, hey, remember when I went to NCECA in Kansas City to demonstrate thrown and altered butter dishes? The video of that demo is finally available!
Well. Sort of. Turns out you have to purchase the Process Room videos. You can catch a bit of my demo in the teaser, though; enough to get a sense of how the tray to the butter dish is stretched. I'm tempted to buy the video - not for my demo OBVS but because it looks like the others were pretty fab, which I was too nervous to notice at the time.
Anyway, check it out. My bit starts about 11 seconds in.

  You can get a copy here, if you're interested.

Update: AAAARGH for some reason the embedded video keeps vanishing. If it's not appearing, you can see in here on Youtube. 

All Those Butterdishes!

I made at least a dozen butterdishes in preparation for my Process Room demo at NCECA; now I get all the fun of decorating them! This batch I have been asymmetrically quartering, alternating slip decoration with smooth surface. It's always difficult for me to stop decorating at leather hard, to leave something for the glaze to do, but I am stepping away now. Most likely, the slip-trailed areas will be glazed over, the smooth reas will be flashing slip & soda vapor, with a pattern of glaze dots. Probably white. Or some other color.

The upcoming firing will be The Mugs & Butterdishes firing, as I have a number of large (for me!) orders for mugs due in the next month or so. I am also in the process of organizing the Maine Pottery Tour, always a stress-fest for me. (Q: Why do I do things I know will stress me out? A: Good question.)

Still have lots of NCECA photos to share, but I left my nonDroid at my sister's house, so.

Soon! I promise.

Ovals in my Dreams

Having anxiety means I tend to over-prepare...that's when I don't freeze up and fail to prepare at all. This would be one of the former instances: I've been making stretched oval butter dishes all day, so that I'll be able to make them in my sleep come Thursday, when I will be demonstrating this form in the Process Room at NCECA. I even talked as I worked, describing what I was doing as though I had an audience, so I won't have to think of all the words while the eyes are on me.

In some ways this is silly: it's a half hour demo, of a piece that I have made about eight hundred thousand times before. I do demos, with people watching, all the time; it's part of my job. I just really want this to go well.

And, you know, I'm feeling pretty good that it will. I will finish these up tomorrow, and throw a few more, and then pack my bags.

Not leaving until Wednesday, but, you know. I want to be prepared.

Might Take a Train, Might Take a Plane

...but if I have to walk, I'm gonna go there just the same.

Just got some exciting news: I've been selected to be a demonstrator in the Process Room at the 2016 NCECA conference in Kansas City! The Process Room features artists doing 30-minute demos of building or decorating techniques - if you were in Providence you recall the room was constantly full to overflowing.

I'll be demonstrating the thrown-and-stretched butter dishes I wrote about a few years ago.

If I were in my depressed/cynical mode, I would make note that this is not a paid gig, and that it's surprising to me how many organizations are happy to ask artists to work for free, including organizations of and for artists. (*cough*Ceramics Monthly*cough* ) But hey! I applied knowing it was not paid, save for my NCECA membership, and I am damn glad to be doing it. This might be the ONE time that the exposure really is the important part.

Muddy Waters has more to say on the subject:

New Butterdish in the Pottery Shop

I listed a new butter dish in the online Pottery Shop today. It was the only item from my last firing, aside from a couple of mugs, which did not immediately have a destination right out of the kiln. This is really cool, of course, but also a little weird for me.

It's got to be good, though, that it makes me doubly motivated to get in the studio and make stuff. No matter how much I love making, full shelves always discourage me.

Next firing is, hopefully, September 24th. I know I always end up pushing it back, but I need to have a date to shoot for. 

Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

Yesterday was butterdishes! I had thrown and stretched these on Sunday but it was Friday before I got a chance to assemble them. They are some of my favorite things to make: enough elements to keeping things interesting, and a broad surface to decorate. It's hard for me to remember to leave something for the glaze to do! I expect these to be part of the August 15th firing.

I haven't forgotten that I am supposed to be doing a video of butterdishes. Maybe during the glaze firing. It's hard for me to make anything while the kiln is firing, for some reason.

Yesterday was also website work. I built my own, noticed that it was not that hard to do, and a few weeks ago, I started putting the word out that I was available to build websites. I had in artists in mind; lots of artists are not especially tech-y, but nevertheless need a website. People are always asking if you have one, for one thing! And if you want to show someone what you do at distance it really is still the best way. I've gotten a few responses already, and started building the first last night.I'll post links to the finished sites here, once I get the go-ahead from the artists involved.

And today? Raku Workshop!! I run a series of them in conjunction with Portland Pottery every summer; this is the second this year. The sky is looking a bit ominous...here's hoping it holds off. Maybe, like weddings, rain is good luck for the firing?

Tomorrow I am back in the studio, finishing some salt & pepper shakers and plates, and throwing for a new account: Craft Company No. 6! More on this later.

The Flip Side

I got a few pieces out of this last firing that exhibit a marked directionality, one of my favorite soda effects. They have distinct "windward" and "lee" sides, indicating which side faced the burner channel.

The flame, carrying soda vapor, passes over the piece from one direction to the other; specifically, from the walls toward the center. It also passes from the center top toward the bottom, and from back to front and then front to back, but those effects are less marked; buy the time all that happens much of the soda glass has been deposited on the pieces it struck first. Here's another:

This one also got a nice kiln kiss, smooth and glassy with no crusty spots, on the lee side.

In each case you can see the design work I did, and in each case that is somewhat obscured just by glaze fluidity on the lee sides. But on the windward sides, woooo! It's a molten blur.

This is why I do what I do: to have the flame come along and undo it. Is that weird?

Everything Happens for a Reason But Sometimes it's a Stupid Reason

In ceramics, everything happens for a reason.

Like, the interior of this otherwise-very-nice sugar bowl is dry and rough, and the reason for this is, some dumbass (ahem) forgot to glaze the inside.

And sometimes, in clay, you never figure out the reason, and that's okay, because you can solve things without knowing it. For example: I have a yellow glaze, Old Yellow, that's always been a little funny about what bisqueware it likes. If the bisque was a little too cool, it wouldn't adhere well, so I would get crawling, and sometimes sheets of glaze falling off. Uncool! But a simple fix: bisque higher. I used to bisque to ^010; I upped it to ^08. Problem solved, for years. Now this firing, I am starting to see evidence of that old crawling problem again.

But why? Same glaze, same clay bodies, a good solid 08 bisque...all the variables the same ones that have been working for years. There has to be a reason; everything happens for a reason. I just don't know the reason.

I see two possible solutions here: water the glaze down a bit, or fire the bisque a little higher. I'll probably try option 1 first, cheapskate that I am.

Lucky for me the crawling was slight, not really enough to create flaws. 

Otherwise a very good firing! These pots are bound for Monkitree, and also for my yard. Maine Pottery Tour is coming up.

PS: Also in the category of "Everything happens for a stupid reason" I submit my latest soap batch!

Goat's Milk, Oatmeal and Honey...looks like a loaf of poo, smells like ammonia. Ugh! It was worse when I first unmolded it, covered in a thick layer of oily brown yuck.Apparently honey is very prone to make soap overheat and separate. It can be rebatched but won't have the nice gold-brown color one hopes for with goat' milk soap (the round cakes are okay, though.). I plan to try again, but sadly the new batch probably will not be ready in time for the Pottery Tour.

Way Too Much is Just Right, Chapter a Million

I started slip-trailing and I couldn't stop.

This is my last wetwork week for a little while, and I am making the most of it. Next week I need to begin preparing to fire, a process that includes an additional task in the deep dark winter: I need to shovel out the kiln. This most recent snow - maybe 10 inches in Augusta - was very wet and heavy, and has now frozen into a solid mass. Maybe I should get my burnz-O-matic involved, to cut the snow into movable chunks. 

Though I haven't been out to the kiln in a while, I see someone else has....

"The fog comes on little cat feet..." writes Carl Sandberg. You know what else does? Little cats!

New Pots!

I want to thank everyone for being so kind after my last post, about depression. I won't say I'm over it - though I wish I could - but some days are better than others. Today didn't suck. Most of it, anyway.

Yesterday I took a U-Haul (did I mention my car died a couple of weeks ago?) to collect up my pots and shelves from the pop-up Holiday Pottery Shop in Gardiner, which closed on December 24th. The shop did okay but the weather was against us; we lost a couple of weekend days, and the last three shopping days before Christmas due to storms and poor conditions. And it was a shorter retail season to begin with. A thing I noticed: people were buying smaller things: ornaments, magnets, pendants, like that. Next yer I will keep it in mind. Also, non-pottery items seemed to do well. Next year I will have soap.

As an aside, I think the soap is finally at a level that I would feel okay selling it. When the newest batch - Cocoa Loco - is ready, I'll post some bars for sale.

Anyway. I still have lots of pots left, and pretty good ones if I do say so myself, so I photographed a few to refresh the website. Today was one of those winter days when it never quite gets light, so the pics were pretty dark - I had to lift them using Picasa. They are still accurate, color-wise, but not the best photos I ever took:

Orange Butter Dish Blue Dots

Cream Butter Dish with Teal Dots

Bowl with patterned exterior

Oribe Butter Dish with Stripes

Blue Butter Dish with Gray/Orange Dots

Pots from the Last Firing

I was pretty excited while I was unloading this last firing: the colors were brilliant, the soda glass was generous but not gloppy, and if there were more kiln kissed than usual, well, what are ya gonna do? It's all part of the process. I was excited, that is, until I started doing the final finishing before sending them off to stores: sanding the bottoms, testing handbuilt pieces for leaks, checking for warping and cracking. Speaking of cracking...

Two of the three large tureens exhibited tiny cracks at the rim. The cracks are not structural - the pieces still ring if I tap them with a pencil - and they wwon't compromise the function. But a crack is a crack, and the tureens are instantly rendered unsuitable for sale in stores. Seconds. Most likely these were caused by handling too early (or too late?): when the piece was not yet rigid, but was too dry to accommodate any deformation of the rim. Those cracks were probably there, in microscopic form, before the pieces even went into to bisque. My language was more colorful than usual when I discovered the cracks("Aww, fuck me with a phone pole!") but that lasted moments only; I am always more sanguine once I figure out why something happened. And then I discovered that 4 of the 6 plates for an order had warped; the air turned blue.

There was other warping in the kiln, as well; probably about a third of the firing were seconds. But hey, the glass is 2/3s full, right? Here are some of the successful pieces:

The butterdish and mugs will be headed for Portland Pottery; the salt and pepper shakers - there were four or five sets - will be available on the website; or purchase right here, if you'd like!

Slab Building from Templates

Slab Built Butter Dish in progress

As I've said, I find I can't throw enough to fill a kiln in the time frame of my firing cycle without injuring my wrist due to overuse. Ain't no big! I love handbuilding anyway, and even more so now that I am teaching the Monday morning handbuilding class at Portland Pottery. (New session starts October 15th, if you're interested!) The only issue is that handbuilding can be more labor intensive than throwing, meaning I either raise prices or - and I like this better - find more efficinet ways to work.

One way to speed up the making process for forms that I build from slabs is to create templates. Templates in no way render the resultant pieces identical, any more than wheel throwing with calipers does. I've figured out dimensions for 2 templates so far:

• Butter dish lid: 18" x 3"
• Mug: 12' x 4.5"

On my to-do list this weekend: head to AC Moore and get some construction paper, and reify them. 

Shot From A Cannon

 

Normally an ant, I've had a bit of a grasshopper summer. It was unusually hot in Maine (and everywhere else, I guess?) and way too many times the river called to me in the sweltering afternoons; either that or a nap in the shady bean house, a kind of living gazebo my husband builds every year. Even the laziest week for me still includes at least 30 hours of work, but less work equals less money sure as autumn follows summer. Property taxes and a recent oil delivery have taxed my meager income to the point that at this posting, I am unable to come up with $5 to get a haircut at the beauty school. 

Nay, nay, don't weep for me! My hair may look like the hind end of a blond yak - if said yak had highlights grown out two inches - but I can't say I regret it: life is short. And now I am back in the studio, renewed and refreshed and working like the Energizer Bunny on some special occasion pots: soup tureens (and matching soup cups - thanks, Rob!), gravy boats, platters, and butterdishes.

My husband, observing my energy, described it as "shot from a cannon." To me it speaks to the necessity of leaving time for relaxation, for fun - even if your job is fun. I love my work - that was the whole point of choosing self-employment - but 60 hour work weeks without letup can burn out even the most enthusiastic self-starter.

Already things are looking up. I unloaded a kiln on Sunday, and I've sold most of it already. As soon as those checks clear, I do believe I'll get a haircut.

How to Not Hate Etsy

Remember when I broke up with Etsy? Seems like it was only yesterday, but it's been more than 18 months! So much has happened. Etsy has changed. I've changed.

It's not what it sounds like! I'm not going back to the way it was before, the endless forum-haunting, photo-tweaking, and re-listing. I just think there may be a place for Etsy in my life; my expectations are different this time. For one thing, we won't be exclusive. Etsy was never committed to helping my business. I know that now. Et$y is only after one thing. But I know what I want out of the relationship. All I really want is the Facebook tab.

Yes, that's right. I am doing it for the Facebook tab. Which isn't even a tab anymore but a tiny little link on the lefthand side.

This all came about as a result of all that math I was doing a few days ago. I left out a possible way to increase to kiln yield strictly in terms of dollars, and that is to sell more retail. Right now I have several big consignment and wholesale accounts, but only a few friends to whom I sell retail. (I used to sell to my friends at half-price, which I called the Friends & Family discount, but then it stretched to included acquaintances and co-workers and friends of friends. How do you tell someone, "I'm sorry, but while Suzy is a close enough friend to qualify for the F&F discount, you are not. It was a near thing, but I have to draw then line somewhere." Basically everyone I ever met was getting the half-price deal, which was unfair to my wholesale accounts, so I stopped doing it. Now it's immediate family only, and they are usually getting seconds anyway. But I digress.)

So. I needed a way to offer items for retail sale. I do sell through the sister blog to this one, but Etsy provides a way to showcase multiple items at once, and to have those items available on Facebook whenever anybody happens to want one. And it's only 20 cents every four months, per item.

So it's time to bury the hatchet with Etsy. With that in mind, I've compiled this list of all the things that drove a wedge between Etsy and me in past attempts. Here are my Top Ways to Not Hate Etsy:

• The very best way to use Etsy and not hate it is to be a shopper. It's a lot of fun from that vantage point.
  

• Stay out of the forums! This deserves subsections:

They are hatcheries for drama. I really don't give a shirt about resellers on Etsy, or someone copying someone's design, or what everyone thinks of the new relevancy search.

I can't resist clicking on those "Here's how I made a bajillion sales yesterday, and you can, too!" threads. Every single one of them was a list of things I was already doing ("Promote! Change your photos! Re-write your listings! Relist frequently! And if you are doing those things and the aren't working, do them more!" It's really frustrating and aggravating, so it's best if I just don't read them.

There's a creepy dynamic there between true believers, who worship at the church of Etsy, and people who apparently think Etsy is genuinely evil and yet they still keep selling there. Don't get sucked in.

• Don't fall for that re-listing scheme. The more sellers relist, the more sellers need to relist to stay high in the search, until the ideal time between relistings is infinitely brief, and everyone is relisting everything, always. Counting on shoppers finding you through searching your category is a losing battle. Sure, it can happen, but when it does, it's like found money. I found $60 on a bar floor one time, but I wouldn't write it into a business plan. In fact:
• Don't count on Etsy for anything. Money in the pot is the pot's money. A listing is 20 cents every four months, for which you get a link through which someone could buy something. It's up to you to do everything else to get the link in front of people, or nothing at all; it's only 20 cents.
  
• Don't pelt your Twitter followers with links to your listings, unless you want them all to hate you.
• This one might be specific to me, but I am choosing the "Made to order" option this time. Not custom -- perish the thought! -- but I will make pieces as people order them. That way I don't have to have a bunch of inventory here, languishing, when it could be sitting on a shelf somewhere, selling or helping something else sell.
  

I guess that's about it.

Just don't say "I told you so."

Quick Trick

Just another drive-by post:
Here's a really useful trick for fitting the tops of butter dishes. Since they need to be shaped and fitted while still quite wet, the lid can sometimes stick to the plate, or cause marring. I lay toilet paper between the two pieces to prevent this. It also useful for storing lidded pots before they are fully dry.

The Same Only Different

Can you spot the eleventeen differences between these two pictures?