To Change, or Not to Change,.....

Some potters seem to keep making the same work. I know several who are still making and selling pretty much the same designs they started with over 20 years ago. I don't know if this is admirable consistency or a lack of imagination. Maybe a little of both.

Either way, I can't do it! I seem to need to change designs, or add new ones, fairly regularly. Maybe I just get bored easily. I made a design of blue hearts on a white background for years, then it wasn't selling so well, and I took a look at it. I really couldn't decide if people had lost interest in this 'look' or if I was bored and expressing it in the work. In any case, a change was called for, and I started doing more flower designs. Now this spring again I feel restless. The pansies, daisies, tulips and so on seem tired and the thought of painting them makes me feel tired. Plus, I want to use the fun new colours I am seeing in the decorating magazines, such as that acid green, and turquoise, and honeysuckle which is supposed to be this year's big colour.

I also keep seeing little bird designs. The twitter bird is everywhere!

So I stuck some on my pots!

Birds on plates!

Birds on bowls!

And birds on mugs!

 Most conveniently, I'm in a small local Studio Tour this coming weekend: the Maple Run Tour around Pakenham..

The birdlets will get their first exposure to the Public, yikes.

I hope people will love them as much as I do!

Glaze Containers

One problem I ran into with the bonsai pots was how to dip them in a limited amount of glaze. I didn't want to make gallons and gallons of a glaze I might never use for anything else, but I needed enough to submerge the pots. None of the pails I had in the Studio were wide enough, and the wider things I had, like old darkroom trays, weren't deep enough. I was poking around in a local Canadian Tire store looking at various plastic boxes and bins and came across some of those plastic 'trugs' made for gardeners.

I got two. One is about 16" across at the bottom and the other about 20". They aren't stiff enough to rest the pail on when you pour the glaze in, but this makes them bendy enough that when you go to lift them by the two handles the handles come together in one hand and make a great pouring spout between! It was surprisingly easy to lift the half-full larger one and pour the glaze back into the bucket. Then cleaning them was easy too, no ridges or such to catch glaze and need scrubbing.

They don't cost much, and I can always use them in the garden if I don't need them in the Studio any more.

Kinda 'red', though!