Apparently I am only allowed a certain length... maybe I should talk less. Anyway... I have decided that it is time to look into getting a wheel that was designed to be a "production" wheel. I have no intention of getting rid of current wheel. If for no other reason than because it is the best wheel I have ever used for trimming. The very things that make it "unsuitable" for production work make it excellent for trimming. But it is time to move up to a wheel that will allow me to do everything that I want to do, and allow me to do the things that I will be required to do for custom orders.
Now that the hard part of the decision, the letting go, is made I need to decide whether I am going to go for a used wheel or if I am going to drop the extra money and get a new wheel. And really cost is the biggest issue in this decision. I am going to have to set aside all of my sales anyway, but unless I get one big huge sale I will get to the used range first. Kinda sorta sounds like that decision is made already as well...
Environmentally Conscious Pottery, Sustainable Living.
Wednesday, December 26, 2012
The holidays, downsides, and moving forward
Well the Christmas holiday has past and I truly hope that those of you who celebrate it had an exceptional one. I personally decided a while ago that Christmas was simply another day, albeit one on which it is almost impossible to get any errands done on. It wasn't a completely wasted day however... I did manage to make a decent start on recycling clay.
The owner of the bookstore that I am selling a good portion of my work out of has graciously allowed me to put my wheel in the basement of his shop. This is really great of him, especially considering my normal "studio" is outside completely exposed to the weather. As winter has finally decided to rear its ugly head and grace us with sub freezing temperatures, working outside would have been challenging.
There is however a couple of downsides to this situation, the first being that the environment in the basement does not really allow the clay to give up its moisture quickly. This is great when you are talking about finished pieces that you want to dry slowly. However when you find yourself out of clay and need to recycle it does make it challenging. I am trying to speed the process by using a plaster slump mold with a fan blowing across it. This does help somewhat and I managed to get about 15 pounds wedged up already, but I am at a standstill as far as making until I have the clay recycled. So to help speed the process even more I have now added a sheet of plywood that I got out of a dumpster a while back so that I can dry more at a time.
This is not ideal as I had other plans for this plywood but....
The other problem I am currently facing is that the last tub of clay that I had processed but not wedged up got left outside at the old studio. I was reluctant to try to move it before since it is completely full and weighs close to 500 lbs. So now it is frozen completely solid, and since I dig this clay up myself I can't just run out and get more. Ah well, it should be very plastic once its wedged up in the spring.
Speaking of the spring, since my kiln is also outside, and cools very quickly under normal circumstances, it will be springtime before I am able to fire anything anyway. I don't want to take the chance of things cracking from the super fast cooling that would happen. This does mean though that by the time the weather warms up enough for me to run bisque firings it is most likely going to be about a week and a half straight of back to back firings. And I am a little nervous about the prospect of the 6+ mile trip with unfired greenware over poorly maintained city streets, I suspect that I am going to be that annoying guy creeping along at 15 miles an hour.
As I have had a couple of orders recently for large pieces, and because of the fact that I am going to be making a lot of larger slipware pieces. I have been doing a lot of thinking recently. Currently the wheel that I use was made in the 1970's.
It is called a "Spinning Tiger" wheel and as far as I can tell it was developed to persuade individuals to take up pottery as a hobby. Don't get me wrong, I love my wheel. I got it and the kiln that I converted from electric to gas for $150 for the pair, and at about 20 lbs, I can throw it in the back of the van when I go to shows and do demos without a second thought. It does however have a couple of drawbacks, one is that it doesn't have any power. I think it has about an 1/8th horsepower motor, this means that centering anything over 5 lbs of clay is to say the least challenging. And centering over 10 lbs at a time is impossible. Also it lacks any real speed control. For small pieces this is not really an issue as I rarely want it to go slower than the fastest speed it will maintain. But for larger pieces where I want a nice fast speed for centering and then want to be able to slow it down once it gets taller than about 8 inches this is an issue. Finally the only thing that the foot switch does is to turn the wheel off and on, and I have a number of times now ruined pieces by reaching over with the wrong hand to turn down the speed...
The owner of the bookstore that I am selling a good portion of my work out of has graciously allowed me to put my wheel in the basement of his shop. This is really great of him, especially considering my normal "studio" is outside completely exposed to the weather. As winter has finally decided to rear its ugly head and grace us with sub freezing temperatures, working outside would have been challenging.
There is however a couple of downsides to this situation, the first being that the environment in the basement does not really allow the clay to give up its moisture quickly. This is great when you are talking about finished pieces that you want to dry slowly. However when you find yourself out of clay and need to recycle it does make it challenging. I am trying to speed the process by using a plaster slump mold with a fan blowing across it. This does help somewhat and I managed to get about 15 pounds wedged up already, but I am at a standstill as far as making until I have the clay recycled. So to help speed the process even more I have now added a sheet of plywood that I got out of a dumpster a while back so that I can dry more at a time.
This is not ideal as I had other plans for this plywood but....
The other problem I am currently facing is that the last tub of clay that I had processed but not wedged up got left outside at the old studio. I was reluctant to try to move it before since it is completely full and weighs close to 500 lbs. So now it is frozen completely solid, and since I dig this clay up myself I can't just run out and get more. Ah well, it should be very plastic once its wedged up in the spring.
Speaking of the spring, since my kiln is also outside, and cools very quickly under normal circumstances, it will be springtime before I am able to fire anything anyway. I don't want to take the chance of things cracking from the super fast cooling that would happen. This does mean though that by the time the weather warms up enough for me to run bisque firings it is most likely going to be about a week and a half straight of back to back firings. And I am a little nervous about the prospect of the 6+ mile trip with unfired greenware over poorly maintained city streets, I suspect that I am going to be that annoying guy creeping along at 15 miles an hour.
As I have had a couple of orders recently for large pieces, and because of the fact that I am going to be making a lot of larger slipware pieces. I have been doing a lot of thinking recently. Currently the wheel that I use was made in the 1970's.
Sunday, December 23, 2012
Gonna try this again...
Well I am going to try this whole blogging thing one more time. I'm not sure why I don't seem to be able to keep up with the whole concept. I enjoy reading other potter's blogs and I do want to let the wider world know what I am up to, but somewhere along the line I simply stop keeping up with the whole thing.
Anyway... it is winter here in Kansas City. Definitely not my favorite time of year to be in the city, but then if I was going to be perfectly honest about it the only time I really enjoy being in the city is when I am leaving it. But it is what it is, and in this day and age it is difficult to find someone in the countryside who is willing to give you a small piece of property to build a small house and pottery on. So here I am a country potter stuck (temporarily) in the big city.
I am in a new place as far as my pottery goes, well a new old place really. I have always been interested in country slipware pottery, from both sides of the Atlantic. Here in the US we call it red-ware and it was(is?) fairly popular in the eastern part of the states. In the UK they call it slipware and it never really fell out of fashion. On either side of the pond it is basically defined as sturdy earthenware pottery, with a comfortable feel since it is designed to be used, decorated in a simple(?) manner using colored slips and either clear or honey(amber) glazes. Often these pieces are fired in a wood/coal/charcoal kiln to earthenware temps, what these days we call lowfire. I should point out that historically the glaze contained lead in it as at the time this was the only method known that would create a proper and durable glaze in the 900-1100c temperature range. Yes lead is bad for you, but they didn't know that at the time. These days we have other methods for reproducing the effects of the old glazes using new materials that won't make you crazy(fun) and then kill you.
Anyway... I have always been interested in the old/traditional forms and styles that this type of pottery took, and when I decided that I was going to become a full-time potter my plan was that I was going to make slipware pottery. However I have kept getting side tracked away from that, mostly because I keep running into people who tell me, "you should make this", " you should use these colors", "that's not flashy enough", "no one wants NEW old stuff", and on and on and on. Consequently I have found myself fighting with forms and techniques that I truthfully don't enjoy making. And as a result I feel like for a while, no matter how much practice I put into making new pottery I was simply not growing as a potter. And I still wasn't getting good at the forms. Somewhere in the past 2 months I made the decision within myself that I was going to make the pottery that I liked. I mean seriously, I wasn't born liking this particular style so I had to see it somewhere. I didn't grow up in a house full of antique pottery, so obviously I have seen it fairly often as I was older so someone must still be making it. So I set out on a quest as it were to find out 1. if it was still being made, 2. where it was being made, 3. and if it was still in demand. Well I found out quite a lot really, the first thing is that if they had had the internet in King Arthur's time we would know where the Holy Grail was, it makes questing so much easier. Other than that I found that yes indeed potters were still making slipware, not just in the UK, but in the US, and Australia, and Europe and, well you get the point. It was still being made and it was getting made because people are interested in traditional pottery, and the skills that make it. Also because Like me there are potters out there who have made it their mission to ensure that the traditional skills remain intact in our culture.
So having said all that, and cheers to you if you are still with me after that, I finally made the decision that I too was going to help insure that the traditional skills survived, and at the same time I was going to make pottery that I enjoyed making. And I can honestly say that in the last month since I made that decision, that my skills have grown, and because of it I am a much happier person.
So to start off this journey I will leave you with these. This is where the journey of my pottery starts. This is the riverbank that I get my clay from. Missouri is blessed (farmers would say cursed) with having more heavy clay in the ground than they know what to do with.
Anyway... it is winter here in Kansas City. Definitely not my favorite time of year to be in the city, but then if I was going to be perfectly honest about it the only time I really enjoy being in the city is when I am leaving it. But it is what it is, and in this day and age it is difficult to find someone in the countryside who is willing to give you a small piece of property to build a small house and pottery on. So here I am a country potter stuck (temporarily) in the big city.
I am in a new place as far as my pottery goes, well a new old place really. I have always been interested in country slipware pottery, from both sides of the Atlantic. Here in the US we call it red-ware and it was(is?) fairly popular in the eastern part of the states. In the UK they call it slipware and it never really fell out of fashion. On either side of the pond it is basically defined as sturdy earthenware pottery, with a comfortable feel since it is designed to be used, decorated in a simple(?) manner using colored slips and either clear or honey(amber) glazes. Often these pieces are fired in a wood/coal/charcoal kiln to earthenware temps, what these days we call lowfire. I should point out that historically the glaze contained lead in it as at the time this was the only method known that would create a proper and durable glaze in the 900-1100c temperature range. Yes lead is bad for you, but they didn't know that at the time. These days we have other methods for reproducing the effects of the old glazes using new materials that won't make you crazy(fun) and then kill you.
Anyway... I have always been interested in the old/traditional forms and styles that this type of pottery took, and when I decided that I was going to become a full-time potter my plan was that I was going to make slipware pottery. However I have kept getting side tracked away from that, mostly because I keep running into people who tell me, "you should make this", " you should use these colors", "that's not flashy enough", "no one wants NEW old stuff", and on and on and on. Consequently I have found myself fighting with forms and techniques that I truthfully don't enjoy making. And as a result I feel like for a while, no matter how much practice I put into making new pottery I was simply not growing as a potter. And I still wasn't getting good at the forms. Somewhere in the past 2 months I made the decision within myself that I was going to make the pottery that I liked. I mean seriously, I wasn't born liking this particular style so I had to see it somewhere. I didn't grow up in a house full of antique pottery, so obviously I have seen it fairly often as I was older so someone must still be making it. So I set out on a quest as it were to find out 1. if it was still being made, 2. where it was being made, 3. and if it was still in demand. Well I found out quite a lot really, the first thing is that if they had had the internet in King Arthur's time we would know where the Holy Grail was, it makes questing so much easier. Other than that I found that yes indeed potters were still making slipware, not just in the UK, but in the US, and Australia, and Europe and, well you get the point. It was still being made and it was getting made because people are interested in traditional pottery, and the skills that make it. Also because Like me there are potters out there who have made it their mission to ensure that the traditional skills remain intact in our culture.
So having said all that, and cheers to you if you are still with me after that, I finally made the decision that I too was going to help insure that the traditional skills survived, and at the same time I was going to make pottery that I enjoyed making. And I can honestly say that in the last month since I made that decision, that my skills have grown, and because of it I am a much happier person.
So to start off this journey I will leave you with these. This is where the journey of my pottery starts. This is the riverbank that I get my clay from. Missouri is blessed (farmers would say cursed) with having more heavy clay in the ground than they know what to do with.
Here is a link to the full length video on You Tube
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