Who says that whining doesn't accomplish anything

Whoever said that whining doesn't accomplish anything is either a) not doing it right, or b) hasn't tried it. I say this because yesterday after my somewhat crabby blog post I found when I got to the studio that I had a good amount of energy. I have had an order for both mugs and tankard that I have been sitting on mostly because it makes more sense to sit down and do them all at once. That way I can pull the handles all at once and get that out of the way. I really dislike pulling handles, but more on that later. Anyway I managed to sit down yesterday and throw them all. That is 16 mugs with a couple of extras, and 8 tankards. I also managed to add into that 4 extra mugs that I could get creative with.

I came in this morning and got all of the handles pulled, unfortunately I had wrapped the mugs up in plastic to well in case I couldn't get to them right away and they were way to wet to get handles on. So in the meantime I decided to sit down and throw some plates. I haven't done them in a while and I actually don't have any in stock at the moment. I also wanted to try to refine the form and the process a bit. I will be honest, I don't like throwing plates. The process is fairly straight forward. You make a large flat surface, open it a little and pull up a rim. At that point you decide if you want a nearly vertical rim or if you want a flatter rim. The main reason I don't care for the whole thing is because I usually end up with a large percentage of them being seconds. They have a tendency to either warp or crack. Neither of these likes to do it before you fire them either. If they warp they are seconds or thirds depending on how bad the warp is, if they crack they really aren't good for anything other than test tiles or breaking up and using in mosaics.

The goal was 10 plates and I managed to get halfway there before my wrists decided that I was done with plates. The sixth one chose not to cooperate with the plan and ended up flopping over so it is a completely different style from the rest. Besides by that time I was almost out of studio time and I wanted to get started on the handles. I got the 4 "creative" mugs handled and then had to stop so that I could go cover the shop and re-wrapped the order mugs and tankards and the rest of the handles to within an inch of their lives. I can get to them tomorrow no problem.

I managed to get a couple of pics of the 2 days worth of work. The first is 3 of the plates, trust me the rest are under the plastic behind them, I didn't remember to get pics before I already had the plastic on them. They will stay on the bats until they come loose on their own and then I will trim them up.

These are what happens when a potter starts to feel pretentious. The curly spiral doesn't serve a purpose other than that I pulled the handles to long. The odd one out will get coils and sprigs added and then stamped before being slipped. The other 3 are going to be used to try out my very blue slip. I added nearly 10% cobalt to it.

I decided today that the new studio rule is that anytime I throw a bat pad and throw on a bat I am going to also throw 2 plates. That way I am not stuck having to throw a bunch of plates at one time. They really do kill my wrists.

I am honestly feeling a bit bi-polar about the pottery at the moment. Now I have tons of motivation and ideas rattling around in my head. I am actually considering sketching a few of them out (not something I do often) so that I can keep track of them. I have also decided that I am going to start keeping pulled handles ready in those big zipper storage bags. I will try to get a short video tomorrow of me pulling handles, I have a way to "cheat" at it so that it is less annoying.

Well that's it for now. Check back later as it feels like I might do a couple more blog posts this week.