Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Plenty to smile about






This one is REALLY beautiful, best appreciated in person.




Just one of my Neti Pots. Two, unfortunately, did not make it to temperature so those will have to be refired. I tried a couple of different glaze combinations on these. They still need some tweaking.





Overall I'd say I had about 85% success, which for me is monumental. Normally, and this is no exaggeration, I get about 15% success. Spraying my glaze makes all the difference. Like I said, I had the couple of Netis that didn't make it to temperature which is a big bummer as that means I have a cold spot in my kiln and I just spent $800 of my principals money replacing the coils. I also had two pots that the kiln wash actually curled up and touched so those are no good. But overall I'm THRILLED. We'll see how things go at the Raspberry Festival.

And here's Sebastian. The buyer didn't give me any guidelines to follow so I hope they like what I came up with.

Tuesday, July 29, 2008

The night before Christmas...

That's always what the night before unloading the kiln feels like. Buzzing with the anticipation... will it be the Easy Bake Oven I always wanted or will it be socks... or worse, socks like my sister's hole-y (as in full of holes) Christmas socks. There's a good story there (with even better pictures!) But I digress.
I had the kiln programmed to fire off this morning. I stopped by the school at 3 to make sure it shut off ok and that there weren't any unforeseen power outages or some other catastrophe that would have tanked my efforts. Everything looked good and it was down to 1200 degrees. Good news, I should be able to open it up hopefully early afternoon (as I can't hardly wait any longer.) This firing will be the first ever glaze fire that has been completely my own work. In fact I had to load the kiln twice as when I got to the top the first time I ran out of space, requiring me to unload all the way back down to the bottom to re-organize. To say I'm nervous and excited is an understatement. I have untold hours of production, 18 hours of glazing and all the hope I can summon into this endeavor. I'm looking now for the payoff.

I know my family is invested in this nearly as much as I am as the first thing I hear when I talk to them is "Well??" To which I reply, "Not yet." Thanks guys. I appreciate your support. Once I get the results you can bet I'll be posting photos. After that I still have to bone up for sitting in front of my wares, watching people pick them up and then set them down only to walk away. A position I have never been up for putting myself in. Every artist is their own worst critic but I'd say it gets worse when you interpret other's perhaps not as positive as you would like reactions. Fortunately I'll have the big A there for life support. I haven't even tried computing what I'd look at bringing in if I were to sell everything. Something about not counting your eggs. I'll know more tomorrow.

Friday, July 25, 2008

Glazing has begun

Last Monday I carefully packed all my goodies up in plastic and got them in to my classroom, which I was not so happy to see in a state of total disaster. A few things got chipped up in transport as you have only to sneeze at them, really, to cause something to chip or crack. But I fixed what I could and loaded everything up to bisque. Thursday I unloaded and started the long and laborious process of glazing. Because I do the detailed carving my glaze process is really labor intensive. Everything had to first be stained, then I wax off all the carvings to preserve the clay body underneath from receiving any glaze. I spent 6 hours and got everything stained and a good chunk of the waxing done. I'll have a couple more hours of waxing tomorrow then I'll begin glazing. My glaze palette will be limited to just a few solid combos that I know pretty well and have more faith in them to turn out. I need absolutely everything to turn out as you can see I don't have much. It seems like I should have so much more for spending a month and a half of summer on the wheel. But I'm more of the slow and steady type so I guess this was the best I could do. I'll post the afters once I unload the glaze mid-next week. Keep the positive thoughts!


Here is my army of minis. You can see my six neti pots in the back ground.

A few wheat pots, three of which have a new spin on the wheat theme with just the band of the wheat design. I think I like them! I especially liked that they didn't take as much time to carve. Always a bonus.

And the most time consuming of all my pots. The tree idea is something I came up with years ago and have duplicated a hundred times, though no two pots are ever exactly the same.

And my latest order for a dog urn. This is for Sebastian.

Sunday, July 20, 2008

Back to School

No, not just to teaching. Back to college! I finally got the letter from Lesley University regarding the start date for my Masters program. Holy crap I'm going back to school. We have an orientation meeting on August 20th and my first loooooong weekend of school will be September 12-14th. Now that it's actually starting I'm overwhelmed with anxiety and a strong voice saying "Do you know what the hell you're getting in to?" And the answer to that would be a resounding "No. But I sure hope it doesn't make me hate life..."
I told Adrian he has to take me back-to-school shopping. I need pencils and pens and loose-leaf paper! Folders with my favorite boy bands on them and pencil boxes! A backpack!! And some new Keds!!!

On the pottery front, I'm on my last day to finish all my unfinished work. I was hoping to get in to school and fire everything off tomorrow. However, I still have a dog urn to carve, a plate to finish, 2 neti pots to spout (isn't likely to happen and thus they will be left behind) and another tree pot to carve. With my nephew's birthday party this afternoon I've got a slim few hours to attack so I'd better get to it. I'll post photos of everything I accomplished this summer as soon as I get them done. It may be affirming or it may be shaming. We'll see. Stay tuned.

Saturday, July 12, 2008

IT IS FINISHED!



And no, we will not make one for you... not even if you paid us large amounts of money.

Well ok, maybe for obscene amounts of money... we can negotiate.

Monday, July 7, 2008

Raspberry Festival

I haven't mentioned my pottery in a while. It isn't that I haven't been working, I just haven't had time to work enough! I spent all of last week with our nephew Isaiah so I got very little done. And the weekends have been sucked up by the patio and family gatherings. I checked in with my calendar this morning and realized that I have a frightening 2 and a half weeks to produce and about a week and a half to fire, glaze and glaze fire. If you know my track record with glaze fires you can understand the metric-ton of anxiety I have about having things turn out well enough for me to sell at the Raspberry Festival on the 3rd of August. Essentially I have to have twice as much stuff to allow for the half that will likely turn out ruined for any number of glaze mistakes. As usual I'm beginning to think I was crazy to sign on for this. Ultimately, if there were to be some glazing catastrophe I'm only out $30, but the potential for making a good deal of money on this experience is big. Money that I would like to put toward buying my own wheel. It's probably my largest artistic commitment to date. I'd post pictures but I haven't got enough to show... yah, how scary is that?!

Sunday, July 6, 2008

woo!

Just a taste... we'll be finishing the rest this week!

Wednesday, July 2, 2008

Update

For those of you who were wondering, we are continuing to slave over the patio project. We spent yet another long hot weekend working our tails off on it last weekend. The largest part of which was dealing with the gravel. We had finished digging the depth last week and bought the first yard of gravel. According to the magic book our finished gravel depth needed to be 4 inches. I don't know what I expected, but by the end of the weekend it took 5 and a half yards of gravel (which is 11 trips... wait, is that right?? holy cow) to the local (thank goodness) D & B store which is about a minute and a half from our house. Lemme tell you guys, at this point we have SO blown the budget, which was our stimulus check. We blew that in just the stone alone. I ordered the stones from Home Depot and was enormously grateful to see that they could deliver them directly to us. A blessing of the largest sort as we needed 4 pallets and each pallet weighs 2800 pounds... that alone would have made for at least 16 trips to Home Depot and that's a 20 minute drive one way! Yicks. So, the stone showed up last Friday night. We have yet to actually lay any of it but it'll be beautiful!
On Sunday we rented a plate compactor from Tates and compacted the gravel. Nacho had to exert his authority over the compactor and chased it around gnawing on it's edges and barking, much the way he does every time we vacuum. He's very tough. So at this point we have our set-up mostly complete, the problems hopefully problem-solved and have only to screed an inch thick layer of sand and lay our stones. Voila! Just like that it'll be done... psh, just like that.
The Supervisors, very helpful.
The aftermath...
840 Rustic Tumbled Cobblestone $1300
5+ yards of gravel $187
55 feet of edging and stakes $100
26 Retaining wall bricks $39
? Yards of sand for screeding $?

50 + Hours of hard, sweaty labor and having a patio we can entertain on... Priceless