Frame

We had a little rain last night and this morning, so Matt and Sarah may not be here till this afternoon if then. Here is where we stand with the studio. Matt brought some nice old doors and we'll figure out where to put them.

I'm off to the old shop to pug clay and maybe get a few pots spun. It's all I can do after pugging fresh clay to take some over to the wheel and check it out. Have a good Friday.

It's Alive

Not much to say about mixing the clay this afternoon, except that it was a lot of trouble moving the clay around from old studio to new studio to Penland to this mixer and back again. Isn't it what we potters do? Moving stuff around all the time? Anyway, I guess I have to do things wrong a few times to figure out the right way. Next time instead of making the red dirt slip and then drying it on the racks, and then schlepping bags of fire clay and red dirt across God's creation, I will make the fire clay/feldspar slip, since it is 50% of the total, and blend it 1:1 with red dirt and dry the combined on the racks, then pug it, then throw it! How do you spell duh? Thanks for allowing me this post to figure this out.

The Power(Pole) and The Glory(Hole)

Sorry for the bad pun(s), but I can't help myself...The electric company installed the power pole today and the road crew replaced the culvert from our pond to the other side of the town road. So there was a little "Busytown" feel to our little corner of the world.

I visited Greg Fidler to measure the windows again and took a few pictures of him at work in the glass shop.

Greg using a wet wad of newspaper to shape against the paddle.

The "Glory Hole"

Also Greg has this in his shop, can you guess what it may be?



More on clay mixing later.


Chiao.

Finally

Matt and Sarah got to work on the framing today and here are a couple of pictures. My girls and I have had the afternoon together and enjoyed a tractor ride to the back nine. Below is the studio/kiln viewed from afar with the current color of Spring.

Tomorrow may be my clay mixing day. I have a little over 800 lbs of red dirt ready to go. That will make about 1600 lbs of clay for this session and the June firing. That should be plenty. I want to make some tiles for the show at the Clay art Center in Port Chester, NY. And I can't wait to get back to the wheel. Leave a comment if there is something you would like to discuss. Until next time...Thanks so much for reading.

Monday Romp

Not a lot of pottery was made here today, sorry to say. But, I manged to score some nice windows from my glass blowing friend, Greg Fidler. He is redoing his house and had a bunch of nice windows that happened to fit my plans. Thanks Greg! I'm waiting to hear from the building inspector before proceeding with construction. Framing will hopefully start tomorrow. I got a call from the truss manufacturer and they will be ready by next Monday. So hopefully in a week we will be putting the roof up and it will start looking like a pottery workshop.

I have been tending to my clay racks and had a couple of pictures of the stages of the process.
The first shows the clay as it looks when it's ready for bagging. Since the red dirt is pretty short it cracks open when it dries.



Although the dirt is cracking it is still pretty soft. I remove it from the racks as soon as I can handle it without it sticking too much to my hands. Since I will be mixing it in a paddle type mixer with the other materials, fireclay and feldspar, I am bagging it and taking it to the mixer up at Penland, which they so kindly let me borrow. Most of the classes at Penland use premixed clay, so the mixer sits idle most of the time. So until I buy my own mixer I will be very, very appreciative to Susan Feagin, the clay coordinator at Penland.

As I unloaded to racks I decided to mix more dirt with a slightly new technique, always tweeking the process. I tried blunging the clay a bit thicker than usual, so there would be less water that needed to be removed in the racks. The only problem I had was sieving the small rocks, mica, roots, sticks, etc. from a thicker slurry. I had noticed that if I slam the sieve a few times the finer "clay" would go through. So I went ahead and poured the thick slurry through the sieve, and surprisingly about 75% went through the screen without assistance, but the remaining took a bit of additional water and steady pushing through. But it was quite a bit less water overall which was the aim. All this was probably just an excuse to be up at the kiln/studio complex during my favorite time of the day. I snapped off this shot just as the sun was going over the hill around 8 p.m.



I will be mixing a new batch of clay on Wednesday. Cheers.

Fare Thee Well

David Stuempfle, Maya Machin, Josh Copus, Michael Hunt, Naomi Dalglish

Kyle Carpenter: Cost of gas

I'll just keep my trunk stocked with pots.

Kyle Carpenter: Cost of gas

Show and Tell

It was time for the Show and Tell" event that officially closes all of the sessions at Penland. There were these big crusty pots everywhere. Where did they come from? From the Bandananagama, of course! The class had gone to Bandana to fire Michael Hunt and Naomi Dalglish's wood kiln. Michael and Naomi normally fire the kiln with glaze ware, but for this once they redesigned the firebox and fired for 4 days.




This little dish below had some really nice lines, don't you think? I don't know who made it though...the unknown craftsman strikes again.

"One of these pots is not like the other..."

Everybody was showing off what they had made during the session and exchanging addresses etc. Show and Tell is one of my favorite things to do because the students pick out the pieces they are most proud of and all the work is displayed informally in one big room. It's a bonanza of objects of all kinds. It's really cool and very inspiring.

Clop, Clop, Clop, Clop

After spending the morning on the phone arranging work to begin again on the new studio, I managed to spend the afternoon with my hands wrapped around some clay. Pitiful as it was in the end I had a few pots that I liked.

I also tried some of the clay straight out of the field, it was blunged but not sieved. It looked a lot like Doug's clay, maybe too chunky. I did pull a couple of rocks out, see the pot in the foreground (and log cabin, built by my neighbor Ed Murphy, in the background!).

It was interesting to work with clay that was somewhat unworkable. The clay had small, sharp quartz stones and I kept thinking that I would get cut! But the stones stayed "inside" the clay wall, with the exception of a couple, that had to be dug out, and replaced with clay. There were a couple of cracks when I ribbed and stretched the clay outward. Now I know why they call it wild clay. I was dealing with untamed clay, definitely unrefined, "oh, how rude!" Can't wait to see these pots fired.

I've also been messing around with some low fired house number tiles that I designed last summer.


I'll have to run these down to Ron's next earthenware firing. I used my red dirt for the clay body. It's actually perfect for press molded tiles. The red dirt is not that plastic and doesn't shrink too much, but is a little crumbly on its own. I will continue to experiment on amending the dirt with some finer clay to get a stronger green strength. The bone dry tiles tend to break easily in handling.

And finally this jug got a handle this afternoon after sitting under the plastic most of the week.


The pot and I both breathed a sigh of relief!

Sometimes the pottery wheel seems square...clop, clop, clop or start and stop, start and stop. I will try to regroup tomorrow and get rolling smoothly. Just in time to put my tool belt on Monday and start hammering nails...

As Winnie the Pooh would say, "Oh, bother!"

Pots and Preview

It's Thursday and I'm going to check on the pots I threw yesterday and handle them. (sorry no pic's, left the camera at the shop last night) I've got more plates to make today and I'll also make what I call "mini's", 1 lb. mock ups of the big pots I will make next week. I like to work out some of the shape ideas I have ahead of time. The shapes don't always translate into the larger scale, but it's a good exercise. The mini's are fun and more spontaneous, where the larger pots are a bit more of a calculation. But the mini's warm me up to ideas I wouldn't get by carefully making the larger ones.

I just got this in the mail box this morning:

Does this guy look happy? or what...! Mark Hewitt is having his Spring kiln opening! I saw Mark at the Pottery Center Auction last Saturday. He claims he's had a great firing. See for yourself if you're in the Chapel Hill/Pittsboro area this weekend. Here is the link to his preview. I wish I could go, but Lillian is turning 4 on Sunday and there's much to prepare for on Saturday. She's having a tea party for her friends so I've got lots of little sandwiches to make, not to mention preparing the grounds. Those kids really like to run around after a couple of cups of darjeeling!

Here a sneak peek of the Mark's preview gallery (that I snatched).

juicy!



This one has a lot going on in such a small pot.



a detail of the above cup

Well, I've got a lot of plastic in the studio to chase, so I'd better sign off for now. Have a great Spring day.