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...