Hands, Brains, and Happiness: It's all connected

My pottery friends often say of their messy hobby: "It's cheaper than therapy." It's meant as a joke, of course, but like the best jokes, it contains a grain of truth. Neuroscience has some possible explanations for why your pottery hobby can help prevent or ease depression. 

The Effort-Driven Reward Circuit

Dr. Kelly Lambert, a neuroscientist at the University of Richmond, has written on the subject of behavior-induced neuroplasticity Lambert believes that human brains are innately wired to induce well-being when performing certain physical tasks. She calls this the Effort-Driven Reward Circuit, involving brain regions connected to emotion, reason, and creativity, and it could be key to a happy brain. Lamberts notes that in the 19th century doctors sometimes prescribed knitting to address anxiety. It makes sense to her:  "Repetitive movement, increasing certain neurochemicals, and then if you produce something - a hat, or a scarf - there's the reward."

Work has changed since the environment our brains evolved in! For many of us our work tasks are almost exclusively intellectual, with very little physical activity. A hands-on hobby with a creative aspect can help spark up that neglected brain circuitry & generate some of those happy-making brain chemicals. 

This must be what inspires me to say I am a dopamine queen. (I sometimes think I've never been interested in recreational drugs, because I sort for employ brain chemicals for a similar purpose. I used to be an oxytocin queen - yeah, don't do that. Lotta bad decisions came out of that.) 
Anyway: tl;dr: get into your studio & make stuff! You'll be happier for it. 

Coffee Pour Over Cone

 I've resisted making these for a long time, because I figured like lots of specific-use items, there were some specs I didn't know, & wouldn't know until I went to use it. I didn't (& don't) have time right now to do the experimenting that would be necessary to make coffee pour-over cones that work well. 
But, then I got a jump start from my colleague at Portland Pottery: fellow instructor Brian Buckland. Brian had drawn this image on the whiteboard in our shared classroom: 

Brian makes these a lot - you can purchase one of his here & here, if you've been wanting one! or visit his studio in Buxton during the Maine Pottery Tour. Anyway, Brian is incredible generous with knowledge & information, & he filled in the last 2 pieces I needed: how much clay to start with (2 pounds) , & how big is the hole in the bottom (1/4 inch.) 

Here's my first attempt: 

I took a slightly different approach to the base - I gave the tray a little upward curve, thinking it would seat itself better on a wider range of mug widths. I think I will leave the outer surface of the try unglazed, to create a little more friction so it won't slip around while in use. I also made a more conventional one, with a flat tray at the bottom, but that still needs to be trimmed. Looking forward to testing out both of them, & maybe making more if they work out well - hopefully I will have one or two in the kiln I unload during the pottery tour. 

We get by with a little help from our friends! 

The Stack, The Arch, & More

Achievement unlocked: the stack is up! As is the arch. 

Tyler built the angle iron frame & laid the brick for the arch on Monday. Sadly I was not able to be here for that! Trying to work around my teaching schedule was going to delay construction, and I really really need a kiln. I have orders piling up! Anyway, I came home Monday night to a completed arch, with a blanket of insulating kaowool. We removed the form in the morning & laid a layer of Quikcrete. I had a brief moment of wishing I hadn't discarded the boxes of broken pottery bits I used to save, thinking one day I might make a mosaic! I decided a couple decades ago that I am probably not going to make a mosaic! & even if I wanted to, there are plenty of shards in the world. But I am kind of enjoying the sleekness of the plain concrete finish. If I change my mind I could always add another thin layer of concrete & lay buttons & mug handles & porcelain doll heads in that. 

We built the stack yesterday as well. There was a little design question to resolve: what material to use for the upper portion of the stack. Technically, to fire, the stack only needed to reach the top of the arch, because this kiln will utilize forced-air burners. (More on that later, but here's the scoop from Ward Burner on the differences.) But in order for the hot gas escaping the kiln to vent above the roof of the shed, the stack has to reach that high, and do so without creating a draw that would interfere with the firing. 

Options: a piece of culvert, elevated above the last brick layer to let air in (ugly, will need to be replaced every couple of years); a double-walled stainless steel tube, also elevated, made for kilns & such (less ugly, more durable but spendy - maybe $300 for a 3 foot length) or...hey, we've got all these brick! 
The stack could not be solid, like a conventional stack, because of the draw issue, but Tyler had an idea: we could build it in a checkerboard pattern, leaving gaps between the brick to pull in air. So that's what we did & it looks so cool! Can't wait to see it firing - I am hoping to see a bit of light thru the gaps. 

Next, the door, the burners, the plumbing - that last bit will be the hold up, since it will happen just whenever the propane tech can get here. 

You can check out some other kilns Tyler has built at this link. 

If you'd like ot support this project or just want a great new mug, you can pre-order a mug from the first firing at this link! 

Karen Makes a Textured Vase

One of the many things I love about the clay community - our community - is the enormous generosity of my fellow potters. When we learn something, we don't hoard it; we are excited to share with others. Case in point: my student Karen Carpenter recently demonstrated for the class a technique she learned from another potter, to make an evenly textured surface on a curved vertical vase.

The roller she uses here is from MKM Tools.

Did you find this post valuable? Buy me a coffee!

^^LOL if anyone does this for *this* post I'm gonna have to buy Karen a coffee!

MAKE IT STOP

My wheel has started to make a horrible grinding noise, like so:

The annoyingness ...that's a word, right? Hmm, maybe not. How about the "irritateousity?" Wait, no, "vexatiousness!" That is a word!...OK, the vexatiousness of this sound does not quite come through in the clip; it's so loud IRL that I can't hear my podcast while I am centering. I have a vague sense that it's something to do with bearings...anybody know how to fix this?

One Thing I Love About Potters

We are endlessly resourceful! When I arrived at Hallowell Clay Works yesterday to teach my Beginning Throwers, I found that Malley had devised an ingenious solution to thoroughly mixing her terra sigilata overnight:

😃

Upside Down Plates

Potters, in my experience, are generous folks. One of the joys of teaching in a communal studio like Portland Pottery is learning from my fellow potters. It's a regular even to see something wonderful and ask the maker to share it.

Last week I learned from Brian Buckland how to make these upside-down plates, with undulating lines from a twisty cut-off wire. Brian learned it from Tyler Gulden, and so on and so on, it's turtles all the way down.

It's also a joy to be the one sharing!

Here are the steps, pictorally:

Center a three pound hump low & wide, as if you were throwing a regular plate

Throw a foot ring

With a wooden rib, make a deep undercut - about a half-inch 

Cut of plate from the bat with a twisty wire, but leave it on the bat. You can cut straight or not, depending on the pattern you want. 

Place a second bat on the foot ring. Line up the pin holes to get the plate as close to the center of the second bat as you can. 

Flip the plate between the two bats, like a clay sandwich

I couldn't get a good picture of the next bit, but you have to reach between the bats and get your fingertips (gently!) into the undercut, and peel the plate off the first bat. Be very careful , as it's easy to mess up the rim. This bit takes some patience, and some practice.

Even if you are very careful, it will look like crap when it first comes off the bat. Don't worry! It's supposed to.

See? Looks like crap. 

It should be pretty close to center, because you lined up the two bats pretty well, but make whatever adjustments necessary to get it as close as you can now that it's unstuck. Now you are going to snap the bat back on the wheel, and with a sponge, persuade the wall to come up until it is shaped like a plate or shallow bowl:

Optionally, you can trim out some of the center. This is probably a good idea so you can compress the center - I am a little worried that the ones I didn't trim out will crack.

If you are really, really good, your plate might be done! Mine all needed trimming underneath after they'd dried to leatherhard.

Check Out This Press Mold Tutorial

If you've ever thought of making press molds to make tiles and other flat items easily reproducible, Shawna Barnes has got those mad plaster skills.Check out this tutorial, and the rest of her blog.

As a bonus, Shawna is smart and fun and funny. If you aren't reading her, you should be!

I Make Pots and I Know Things

Well...I know some things. I actually had in mind the delightful multitude of fellow potters who emailed me to help me out with my burner trouble last week when I designed this t-shirt:

You can get one for your very own, or for the potter or ceramics instructor in your life at this link.

Game of Thrones fans will recognize the inspiration!

Love is a Clean Burner

Remember my funky burner thing from last week? This one:

The consensus of my equipment-clever friends and readers was that the burner for some reason did not have enough gas pressure to create its Venturi effect. The burner was turned all the way up but the pressure definitely did not seem right, just before the flames appeared where they weren't supposed to be.

The possibilities included something -  a bit of rust or debris - blocking the tiny little orifice thru which the gas flows.

Luckily I never discovered whether that was, in fact the problem. On Monday night I had a conversation with my husband - I told him about the burner troubles and the possible fixes. You may think this is the dullest possible thing one could talk to a non-potter about, but Doug is an unusual guy. The physics of things interests him, and the kiln and burners are apart of that. I told him what our friend Tyler suggested as a remedy - taking the burner apart, removing the brass orifice plug, etc. He didn't say much, made some sympathetic noises - he knows how much I hate kiln maintenance.

When I came home from class on Thursday he had taken it apart, cleaned it all out, and put it back together! It hums along just like it should now. No more FLAMES BAD.

Now, he has taken a burner apart & put it back together before - I have an old one lying around. But that was years ago. He took apart the old one first, to remind himself, and then cleaned & thereby repaired my burner! It's sooty and gross and he barked his knuckles on the kiln brick getting it off the pipe, and now I don't have to do it.

Some guys bring you flowers and candy. Some write you poems.

Mine cleans my burners. 💗

Oh, and he writes songs. Check 'em out!

Roberto Lugo: This Machine Kills Hate - NCECA 2016

Oh man. I got weepy. Fellow potters, you want to watch this. 

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.

Lisa Orr on Ceramic Arts Daily

I'm sure many of you subscribe to Ceramic Arts Daily, and if so you know how they just deluge your inbox with videos, book suggestions, and I-don't-know-what-else. It's really out of hand, so I just have them go to a separate folder; otherwise they will fill up my inbox and maybe cause me to miss important emails. As a result, I have a folder with hundreds of emails from them, that I almost never open. Hint, CAD: send a few less and people might actually see them!
It's churlish to complain, though, when much of the content is so valuable. You can't possibly watch all the videos - or anyway I can't - but I have a little time now that my classes are on their December break so I am watching a few this morning. This one is really cool:
I was doing something like this with porcelain slip on paper, to make snowflake Christmas ornaments (yeah-yeah, ornaments: so sue me); but I never thought to use them to build with, or to slip both sides. So clever! As I was typing this it occurred to me that they would make good sprigs also. I'm off to deliver pots this morning; but when I get back I need to make pots, so I can try this.

Our Friend Failure

I have a couple of student who need to see this! I told you guys:  If you're not failing, you're not trying! Keep counting down: 999, 998, 997...


From "Be Friends with Failure," by Stephen McCranie: http://goo.gl/6L5CF

Pots By the Pound, Part II: Valuable Input

I've had some feedback about the Pots By the Pound equation, and it illustrates the value of listening to people who  know what they are talking about! (Listening is a skill I had to cultivate. I used to get defensive about my ideas and push back on perceived criticism; it's hard to learn anything, that way.) Some input I will put in place, because it is a genuine omission which would ultimately have caused the approach to fail. Others were just things that I needed to think about: if they needed to be in there, and if not, why not?

To review, the pricing equation looks like this:

2 x BM(Bare minimum of household expense) + UFE (15% of BM, for unforeseen expenses) + S (20% of BM for savings) + BE (Business Expenses) divided by PC (pounds of clay I purchase annually) = wholesale price per pound for pots. 

Firstly, someone pointed out that I have not accounted for failed pots. My numbers assume that 100% of the clay that I buy will result in a finished, salable piece. That is so not true! I lose at least 10% of my ware, though most of those become seconds rather than shards, due to normal parts of the clay process, like cracking and warping, accidental chipping of greenware or bisqueware, and glaze flaws; and a few more which are specific to vapor glazing: big crusty blobs of soda in the middle of a plate, for example, or a pot that received so little soda glass that the surface is dry and unappealing. There are also some pots that fail because I try something new and it doesn't go well.  I don't know if 10% is high or low, but I know all potters have some percentage of kiln-god sacrifice. So the PC part of the equation will now be amended to PC = pounds of clay purchased annually minus 10%. This pays for the inevitable expense of making pots that then fail.

Another important point mentioned was that I should build into the equation expenses that are not unforeseen but not annual, either. Someday I will have to replace my kiln. Someday I will have to rebuild the kiln, whole or in part. That will have to be part of BE; I am thinking ten percent every year of the initial cost of those items, and any other big purchases I can think of that come around rarely but predictably.

A point that required more reflection: a friend pointed out, correctly, that this model contains no profit for Fine Mess Pottery itself. There's compensation for me, and (now) money that will be saved for future predictable expenses, but Fine Mess (in theory if not in practice) will have zero dollars on the books at the end of each year. It will generate enough to keep me happy and afloat, but no extra to expand. No future larger facilities, no apprentices, no second kiln. Apparently businesses are supposed to do this, plan money to grow.

Seems obvious, so why did I leave it out? I realized: I don't want to grow. I'll need to expand my market to reach the numbers this equation generates (will eventually generate, when I stop talking about it and put some actual numbers instead of letters into it) and presumably my expenses will go up a little each year, and I may discover some needs I didn't know I had, but I don't want or need my business to grow beyond how many pots I can comfortably make, with enough time to make them well. In a sense, if you think of my compensation as a salary, an expense which Fine Mess Pottery incurs (if we can for a moment separate the potter from the Pottery), Fine Mess is sort of...non-profit. Not in the legal sense, of course, but I have no interest in building an empire, however small.I have no shareholders to satisfy.  I just want to make good pots and have a life free of oil-bill and car repair panic attacks. 

Pots By the Pound

One of the things I spend a lot of time thinking about is business practices for artists. To my mind these are necessarily different from other sorts of businesses; every seminar and lecture on the topic I've attended - admittedly not that many - has started with the Make What People Want to Buy approach. That ain't gonna work for me, but I still look to conventional models for other aspects of my business. Pricing, for example, and the related and very important Getting Paid part of working.

I've mentioned before in this space my friend, Mr Business Guy. With regard to pricing and salary, Mr. Business Guy recommends a backing-in approach: decide how much money you want to make, figure out how much pottery you can make, and price accordingly. While I was trying to think of a way to translate that into a practical approach, another friend mentioned wanting to work out by-the-pound pricing, to solve the pricing problem once and for all. Two great thoughts that taste great together! (Metaphor fail. WHATEVER, don't judge.)

So an equation to figure out part A - how much money do I want? might look like this:

Total of all household expenses per year: utilities, mortgage, groceries, insurance, taxes, all those. Let's call that BM, for Bare Minimum.

We are going to add 15% of BM, for unforeseen expenses (UFE). This is largely arbitrary, because unforeseen expenses are, well...unforeseen. But I had to put something in for them, and if I think back on past UFE, I think 15% is reasonable.

Now for savings(S). This is hard for me, because I have a history of lowballing this number; my current savings, for example, are in the high single digits. Most of the reading I have done says between 10 and 20%, but of course there are multiple factors influencing the number, such as how old one is, and the absolute number we are taking a percent of. I'm going on the high end, because I'll be 50 this year, and because I suspect my income will always be on the low end, even if it's plenty for me.

So now we have:

BM
+
UFE = BM x 0.15
+
S = BM x 0.20

BM, coincidentally, can also stand for Bowel Movement; and life at the bare minimum can be pretty shitty. I need, and you probably need, to add something on top of this to have a little fun, buy a new shirt, contribute to causes you care about, maybe get the name-brand ketchup once in a while. Here's the sticky part: how much disposable income do you want? In some ways that's an easy question: as much as you can get, right? But remember every upward tick of the final number makes the people who will both want and be able to buy your work harder to find, so there's a trade-off. My BM number is relatively low, by design: no kids, a relatively small mortgage, no car note, no cable package or cell phone plan. I'm going to do my initial calculation by doubling BM, to account for disposable income. I feel nervous just saying that, but what the hell, it's an exercise. Let's find out what it would take to get there.  So now we've got:

2BM + UFE + S

That's how much my salary would be. That, of course, doesn't account for how much it costs me to make the pots; fortunately I have this number readily available, as my schedule-C deductions. Let's call Business Expense "BE."

(2BM + UFE + S) + BE = the total amount of gross income I would need to bring in from all sources to make this equation work.

Now that I have a number, I need a way to connect what I actually make to that number. That's where pots by the pound comes in. I know how much clay I buy each year. Well, actually, I don't. But Karen at Portland Pottery can probably look into my account history there and tell me. If I divide the number of dollars I need to make by the number of pounds of clay, I then can take that number, and arrive at a price point for any given piece: if it takes six pounds to make a bowl, and the per-pound number is $10 (just pulling that one out of my butt - haven't done the math yet), then the bowl is $60. That's would have to be the wholesale price.

But now it's time to pack up and head for Portland to teach my class. No time for math! Will follow this up later, gator.

UPDATE: I've added some features to the equation, after talking with people who know more about these things than I do. 

June Perry Says:

This was such a helpful comment from June Perry of Shambala Pottery, that I wanted to share it with all of you:

"Any glaze with around 15% whiting, dolomite, barium or a combination of any of those or with some boron or talc, will repel the soda and should work fine. The color may not be the same as in a non soda or salt atmosphere.
High clay shinos work pretty well, as does temmoku, amber celadons, many ash glazes, Shaner oribe, salt yellow, white salt (most of these are in John Britt's cone 10 glaze book). There's also a large file of soda/salt glazes and slips that I and a couple of other members put on my yahoo soda salt group. You have to be a member to access them (no charge - just a way to keep spammers out). It's not an active site; but it's more of a repository for the recipes, photos of some soda/salt kiln and members work."

June also writes a very entertaining blog.

I love the internet.

Clay is Rusted Feldspar

Guest blogger Douglas Watts writes:Lori asked me to explain in a fairly simple way what clay is, where it comes from, and how it got here. So here's an attempt at a non-technical explanation.

Clay is feldspar rusting. This is an analogy, but not that far from the actual process. We all know what happens if you buy a nice, shiny piece of cast iron from the hardware store and leave it outside in the sun and rain. It quickly rusts. If you leave it out long enough, it turns to almost all rust. So what is rust?

Rust is primarily the minerals limonite and goethite, created when iron combines with oxygen from the atmosphere and oxygen in water. We all know that iron things tend to rust faster when wet than when dry. Moisture hastens rusting.

Feldspar is not iron. Iron is one element, iron. Feldspar is a large family of minerals made from oxygen, silicon, aluminum, sodium, potassium and calcium. Feldspar does not form on the Earth's surface. It only forms miles beneath the Earth's surface, where solid rock is naturally in a semi-liquid, molasses-like state.

Feldspar is only released from its 'natural' home and to the Earth's surface either when it is forcibly ejected from a volcano as lava or when, after hundreds of millions of years, the 2-3 miles of solid rock above the feldspar is eroded away, leaving the feldspar nakedly exposed on the Earth's surface. This is usually in the form of granite, which is a rock made of feldspar and quartz and some mica.

To add another analogy, just like a piece of fine pottery on the edge of a shelf 'wants' to fall on the floor and smash, feldspar 'wants' to turn to clay when it is exposed to the Earth's surface. The agent for the pot on the shelf wanting to fall down and smash is gravity (in outer space, pottery does not break, it orbits). The agent for feldspar wanting to turn to clay is a bit more complex, but similar in design to iron rusting. In both, the agents are primarily air and water.

In the presence of air and water at the Earth's surface, the most natural and restive state for feldspar is to re-align its molecules into clay molecules. Clay is a mineral, just like quartz or feldspar. It has a very regular and ordered crystalline structure, like a diamond or a cube of salt. The three predominant clay minerals are kaolinite, illite and montmorillonite. With a scanning electron microscope you can get pictures of very nice, well formed, plate-like clay crystals growing right next to a crystal of feldspar.

Feldspar becomes clay by slowly bringing water into its crystal structure, like a sponge left in a puddle of water. This water becomes part of the very fabric of the feldspar; like how iron becomes part of your blood cells. The feldspar wants the water. It likes it. Which brings us back to rust.

What we call rust is the natural state of iron on the Earth's surface. Iron readily combines with oxygen to make rust. It wants to become rust. In fact, we have to do all kinds of crazy things to prevent iron from becoming rust. We coat it with oils, with paint (like Rust-Oleum) or galvanize it with zinc, all to keep the iron from contacting oxygen in the air and oxygen in water, sort of like teacher chaperones at a high school dance. Left to its own device, feldspar becomes clay because it wants to; that is its most stable and natural state on the Earth's surface. Like a thrown ball 'wants' to come back down, feldspar wants to become clay. Clay is rusted feldspar; and the actual chemical reactions are not that different.

In Maine, where I live, from 1880-1930 there was a flourishing industry where large feldspar deposits were quarried and mined for use as ceramic pottery glaze. This was feldspar that had not yet had time to weather into clay. It is still solid enough to make a house foundation. But if you crush into a fine enough powder, it works beautifully as a glaze ingredient. Most of the feldspar mined in Maine was shipped to pottery works in New Jersey as a basic glaze ingredient for everything from fine plateware to toilet bowls. It was an 'industrial mineral,' as the saying goes.

The only reason Maine does not have deposits of natural, 'primary' clay is because for the past million years Maine has been scoured by successive, mile high glaciers every 100,000 years or so, which like a steel plow on a snow-filled driveway, scraped away all the clay and softened rock right down to hard bedrock and dumped the residue in the Atlantic Ocean. In the U.S., you have to go south of the line of glaciers, ie. Kentucky or Tennessee, to find clay deposits still intact and near where they were first formed. What we in Maine call 'marine clay' is actually the finely ground-up residue from the glaciers' scraping and grinding that has partly altered into true clay minerals and is on its way to doing so, give another 10 million years. That said, it is still perfectly usable as a slip or a low-fire earthenware body. Be patient, Maine !!!