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. 

It just slipped out!

 

"Slipped" out, get it?? 

I've been making some rustic, torn-edge plates in class, aiming for a loose, spontaneous, almost found-object quality. My own work is pretty tightly thrown (not entirely on purpose!) and over-decorated, although I do enjoy letting the soda vapor have its way with the piece during the firing. There's a wide world of approaches to clay out there, and I wanted to give my students a taste of a different aesthetic. 

It sorta worked - they got the idea - but then another idea popped up in class, one I had talked about earlier: aesthetic tension. Sometimes what makes a piece intriguing is when two dueling aesthetics are mashed together! With that in mind, and because I can't help myself one the slip bottle is in my hand, I trailed some delicate flowers onto my meaty rustic plates. 

I have to credit a student for the poppies! I mentioned that I had been trying to figure out how to make a recognizable poppy with slip; I turned my back for a sec & when I turned back she had made 2 on the worktable! Victoria is a very talented sliptrailer (and formerly a cake decorator!) I learn so much from my students. 

These will probably not be soda-fired, since students don't have access to the soda kiln so it feels like cheating to use that method to finish my demos. SO, I am thinking, iron oxide on the back & edges, then shino on the front face. 

I'm excited about these & plan to make more at home! 

Cosplay Aesthetics

 

My usual style is a kind of froufy, over-decorated, more-is-more approach: slip-trailing, glaze-trailing, wax resist, soda. I want my students to learn about & appreciate all sorts of ceramics, tho, so I borrowed an aesthetic from the Upper Midwest. I have some clay roots there, anyway, and while they aren't the sorts of pots I make, I do enjoy them. 

These are made from thick slabs, torn rather than cut, and shaped over a hump mold. One thing I as reminded of, making these: that casual, spontaneous look - as if you could almost have just found them that way? That is an illusion. Unless I really work at irregularity, I get tidy, smooth, almost-perfectly-square plates by default. 

I haven't decided how to fire these. Though they seem like naturals for the soda kiln, I made them as class demos so should probably stick with the firing methods available to students. Maybe a brushed-on- wiped off shino? Just iron oxide on the back, tenmoku on the inside? Not sure. 

Matching Plates Are So Over

I've posted four new items in the online shop - plates! Check 'em out here, here, here, and here. I've been having some fun with the descriptions. It's like a lot of things: once you give yourself permission to have fun, it gets easier.

Here's a thing I sometimes wonder about: many people like to have their own personal mug. It's not unusual for a household to have no matching mugs (is it? I've never owned a set of mugs, handmade or otherwise.) But plates? Culturally we look upon matched plates as the only way a normal household can have plates.

I want to push back on that idea, and not only because I like to make plates but I hate to make sets. I think it's an opportunity to appreciate plates as object d'art. Each plate its own little vignette, a circular frame around an arrangement of texture, color, and pattern. It's a chance for creative hosts to mix styles and colors together to create an artistic table. Plates are also naturals for display storage; on plate rails or in glass-front or open shelving.

Matching plates? So five minutes ago. Set your table with plates as individual as the people using them!

PS. Don't forget: type in discount code BLOG BUDDY to get 10% off!

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.

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.

Dementors and Grindylows

Grindylow

 J.K. Rowling has said that when she wrote the dementors in the Harry Potter series, she meant for them to describe what depression feels like: the despair, the hopelessness, the replaying of bad memories. That all sounds about right, but when I visualize depression, I think of another dark inhabitant of Rowling's fictional world: Grindylows.
For those unfamiliar, Grindyows are water demons that grab the ankles of unsuspecting swimmers and drag them to the bottom. This, to me, is depression: you know you are going down, and you fight, and maybe you break free; but the longer you have to fight, the less able you are.

Here's another rendition

If you haven't guessed, I've been kicking at my own personal grindylow for some months now. It was a loooooong winter, and a cold one - those things matter - and once the spiral starts, any disappointment seems to contribute. It can be difficult to tease out what is a symptom and what a cause. It got bad, this time: I was able to rally for my classes, and to organize the pottery tour, but outside of those obligations,  I pretty much just went to bed. And then, in that cause-symptom spiral, felt even worse, because I must be a lazy piece of shit, right?

And so on.

Most of the time I felt no desire to make things. I feared, as those of us in the creative professions sometimes do, that I had lost it: lost the mojo that made me who I am, because that drive was as gone. Terrifying and depressing, awesome.Not to mention the economic consequences: one more anxiety, one piece of evidence that I am not a competent adult, blah-blah-blah, did I mention Grindylows are chatty? They have opinions about me: hateful opinions, all of them.

I've been managing this illness (more or less) with exercise and relaxation techniques for 15 years, but I finally - finally - decided after being unable to kick free for months that it was time to go back on meds. I've contacted my doctor's office but haven't been able to even set an appointment yet (long boring story)...so I wait. I've been waiting over a month, just to set an appointment. (No wonder people go to the emergency room for stupid things! They probably just give up waiting for their own doctors.)

In the meantime, I've started to feel its grip weakening. Remission, too, is a spiral: if you can feel a little better, you can be a little more active, which makes you feel a little better. If you can address even a small thing that seemed overwhelming, you can feel empowered to address another. And so on! Like this:

(There's a great post at Captain Awkward about breaking the low mood cycle, where I got that "chart.")

My remission is still fragile but it does seem to have some momentum: I spent a few hours at the wheel yesterday, in the summer studio, and a few more decorating.

 tl;dr: I've been feeling low for a while but starting to feel better, and look! I made some pots yesterday!

$1 Shipping Sale

Finally, I listed new pots on my website! I have been needing to repopulate that pages since December. I thouhgt I was going to be very very clever and offer a promo code to FB fans and blog friends. but that...was an unmitigated disaster.

O_o

Okay, maybe not unmitigated...but who ever heard of a mitigated disaster?

The html I found for making your own paypal promo codes, just made up its own shipping rates. And then charged handling, also seemingly randomly. I'm sure there's a way to alter it to make it work right but if I knew how to do that I wouldn't have to borrow someone else's code in the first place!

Anyway! The promo code thing is out (and why don't you get on that, Paypal?) but I can still have a $1 shipping sale! All stoneware items ship for $1 anywhere in the continental US. Here are the new items:

See them all here.

Pink & Grey, Follow Up

I made some plates back in February, using a mixture of red underglaze and porcelain slip. I promised to post the finished results, and lo, here they are:

The claybody was less grey than I expected, but that PINK! Can't complain about that bright cinnamon pink.

Pink and Grey

I think grey is a very underrated color, don't you? It has a great range: can be pastel or somber, masculine or feminine, goes with everything. Like foods, I can get cravings for certain color combinations, and lately I am just dying for some pink and grey pots. First, a little story:

Now, kids, when I was your age, we couldn't get a true red at ^10. We got some great cranberry tones and ox bloods and watermelon shades; I personally got more than my fair share of that awful battleship-mauve that comes over over-reducing a copper red glaze. But true red, fire-engine red? That was a low-fire thing, and even then they sometimes went brown, unless you popped the kiln lid as soon as the sitter fell. Quick cooling, that was the trick.

Well, grasshopper, technology is a wonderful thing! I bought me a hundred-dollar flashlight that can also tell the time and temperature and play pretty music. And, now red underglazes stay red at ^10, reduced or not.

I'm not much a fan of commercial glazes - although I've seen potters who use them to good effect - but underglazes...well, there are just some things that it's better to let the professionals handle. Underglazes are like eggrolls. You can do homemade eggrolls, for sure. You can spend all afternoon chopping vegetables very fine, rolling and pinning the wraps, you can smell up your kitchen with an immersion fryer...and when you are done you'll have egg rolls which, if you are very lucky, are almost as good as the ones you can pay somebody five bucks to bring right to your door. A lot less cleanup that way, too!

I've had good luck with Amaco's velvet series, both Bright Red and Radiant Red.

Pink, though...I started out talking about pink. Pink underglazes, in my experience, go kind of beige. Beige is a nice color, for sure! But beige is not what I am jonesing for.

My issues with these underglazes are two. One, under a clear ^10 glaze, they can act as refractory ingredients in the glaze, and create a drier surface, and two, in the soda kiln, they don't attract much soda so by themselves are rather dry. Porcelain slip, though...that stays a bright white and gets very shiny, with added glaze or just with soda glass.

See where I am going with this?

I mixed Amaco's Radiant Red with my porcelain slip, two great tastes that...well, don't taste great, not that I know of, but I am hoping they will look great.Clear glaze over an iron-bearing claybody in reduction will give me my grey; hopefully the slip/underglaze mixture will give me a bright candy pink, like ya see in the pictures. No, really: these pictures! I am hoping the fired result will be close to its wet color:

I am thinking the rims will just be flashing slip, so, earth-orange. Pink and orange don't immediately sound like the best combo but in my head it's amazing. I'll post the photos after the firing....though who knows when that is going to be? I mean, technically I could fire any time. I could load a bisque today! But realistically that is just not gonna happen. It's seven degrees outside! Nobody is waiting for these pots, except me. I'll just keep throwing and decorating, throwing and decorating, until we get something resembling a thaw. 

Slip Slop Oops

The poets say into every life some rain must fall. In mine you can add to that a whole shirtload of snow, and now a bucket of porcelain slip. Everything happens to me.

What I was trying to do, before I was so rudely interrupted by the great slip tsunami of 2015, was make a platter with a slip spiral. I'd just made some porcelain slip so I had plenty (no not more!!) and I can get seduced by the lusciousness of slip, and want to do something more than delicate ladylike dots and curliques.

I start by pouring a puddle of slip into a leather hard plate.

Then I rotate and turn the plate (still on its bat) to spread the slip round. There will be extra; to prevent a layer so thick that it cracks, I then pour the excess back into the pitcher. I have to shake the pretty hard to get all the excess; that is the point where I bumped the full pitcher and tipped it all over my table and tools.

I just left the puddle there while I made the spiral, though; it seems to work best if you work fast. Using the short end of a kidney rib and starting in the center of the plate, I spin the plate (on a banding wheel, in this case, but a potter's wheel would work as well) and bounce or tap the end of the rib into the slip. It removes a bit of slip wherever it touches. If you move the tool out from the center with each bounce, you get a spiral pattern.You can cover the surface or be selective where the marks land.

So! that was fun. Now where's my sponge? I've got a mess to clean up.

Here's another one. 

PLATE is Live!

PLATE: A Celebration is live online at MudFire! So excited to be a part of this show. If you scroll to the bottom of the page you see the works that have already sold. None of mine yet, but I'm just pleased as punch that wares are selling from this show. And it only opened yesterday!

So, what else is new? My ongoing flirtation with burnout continues, and it's still working, sort of. I am teaching a raku workshop today, and glazing with the hope of firing the soda kiln on Wednesday. I need to send wares to Belfast, Rockland, Portland, and Rochester, NY.

Plans for this year's Holiday Pottery Shop are chugging along: we have a location! We will be at 184 Water Street in Hallowell. The shop will open early this year; the plan is to have the doors open by November 14th.

Also looking forward to Portland Pottery's First Friday event, which will feature works by faculty and staff. That's November 7th from 5-8.

And in between clay work, I'm still making soap. Because the bars need to cure for a few weeks before they are ready to use, I need to be making now so they will be ready for December. Here's a peek at the curing rack: the green soaps in the center - Mango Sage - and the white & blue ones to the right - Cool Coconut - will be ready by Cyber Monday.

 Keep on keepin' on.

The Final Five

Yesterday after much internal debate I finally selected and shipped out the plates for Mudfire's October show, simply entitled "Plate." SO excited to be a part of this! Show opens October 25.

Other quick hits:

• I posted a few new items on the website, including two new soaps:Warm Vanilla Sugar and Tahitian Beach.

• We've scheduled one final raku firing for the year for November 1st, a Saturday, from 1-4. I've asked the studio staff at Portland Pottery to mix us up Lemon Luster (recipe coming soon!), a gorgeous metallic yellow that can also do peach and turquoise and copper; and I've mixed two terra sigs, a white and a red art, for anyone who'd like to try horsehair raku. 
• I have this dopey idea that I want to make Days-of-the-Week mugs, like the underpants you loved so much when you were nine. Or the ones I loved so much, anyway. I'll give them some scalloped designs and lacey edging...I dunno, the very dumbness of the idea is what appeals to me.

I have half a dozen partially written blog posts in queue - just can't see to finish a post of substance. But I'm still here, still plugging away, and I hope you are too. TTFN.

So Many Plates

Many years ago, someone asked me why so many potters hate to make plates. I couldn't answer for all potters; it wasn't even easy to answer for myself, though at the time I did, in fact, hate to make plates. It wasn't the skill involved - it's hardly more difficult to make a plate than a bowl. They do have a pretty high breakage & loss rate, but it wasn't that either. Plates occupy a funny place in the world of functional ware. They are ubiquitous on western tables, but almost always in sets. Even the most casual of households tends to put matching plates on the table at mealtime. People think of mugs as individual. A mug with a cute saying or a picture of somewhere you've been, or indeed, a handmade mug can help define your identity to the world somewhat like your clothes or your car or even your sofa do. Nobody seems to have their special plate that speaks to who they are. Nobody buys one plate.

It never was plates that I hated; I hate making sets of plates. People's eyes are so accustomed to the exact match of machine-made plates that the tiniest differences read as flaws. Once I accepted that I prefer making plates that are cousins rather than twins - a lesson driven home by the Great Plate Debacle of 2012 - I discovered that I actually love making plates.

I don't think I blogged about the Great Plate Debacle at the time, I was so discouraged and annoyed. A couple from Colorado bought four plates of mine in a local store. They later called the proprietor to ask if they could order more. Despite my policy to never, never, never, never take custom orders, I took this one because the store owner is a good friend of mine, and, like all of them, it ended poorly. (Even the ones that end well end poorly, as I always put far more time into a custom order than I could ever hope to be paid for.) I made the plates, but the customer said the oribe was a little brighter on some than others, and there was an eighth-inch difference between the biggest and the smallest...ugh. Not clear on the "handmade variation" concept! Worst of all, now they didn't want ANY of the plates...even the ones they had purchased, in the store, six months previously, before they even placed the order. There's more to this stupid story, but even typing it is giving me a stabby feeling, so I'd better stop and go watch some cute-kitten videos.

Whew! I'm back. Anyway, here in the present, I love making plates. They are a wide canvas of space that cries out to be stamped, slip-trailed, and glaze-embedded. Even better, I need five plates for a group show in the fall, and they have to be fabulous. I'll probably make between 30 and 60 plates to get the Fabulous Five.

Above are some in progress towards this goal. I had hoped to trim and decorate today but the humidity is not cooperating! Maybe today is housecleaning and lawn-mowing, and tomorrow, back to the plates. 

A Few of My Favorite Things

This was maybe my favorite piece from the firing. Ask me again tomorrow - that may change. It was loosely - very loosely, as you can see - based on this textile pattern I found somewhere online. Expect to see more of this flippy daisy:

Sadly, it has a flaw. Or maybe not all that sadly, because the flaw means I will keep it.Yes, technically I could keep it flaw or not, but most of the time I'd rather have the $32 (or whatever.) Basically I can't afford my own work. But I do get first choice of the seconds, and this one is my choice.It's a minor flaw - some crawling in the bottom - but enough that I wouldn't sell it to a store.

This next was tough to photograph, with the dark/light contrast and the high gloss surface. The detail shows the, well, details, better.

Another plate, close cousin of the first:

My yellow glaze has a brownish quality I haven't seen before; possibly just because this was a new batch of glaze. I always tell my students that glazes are not at their best on the first day. Maybe they are not quite at their best the second day, either! Still, overall pleased with the plates.I'm making lots of them lately, in the hopes of having five spectacular plates for a show in 2015.

And, of course, Jaunty Jars! This was pretty much the Jaunty Jar firing - there were about eight or nine in there. Considering changing my business name to Lori's House of Plates and Jaunty Jars.