Challenges, sigh

Being a newish Year, it seems a good time to take aim at some new pottery challenges!

Definition of a challenge: problem you haven't yet given up on.

The first one is that #$%$##@# rectangular butter dish. Super Helper really thinks we should make these as she gets regular requests for them (she owns a shop), and I have to admit, I have had requests too. We made a stab at them last year, but didn't get very far. So we're trying it again. I made a mold for the upper part (a comedy of errors involving a too-large master shape, a sharp saw and much sanding) and she made a template for the clay. You can see one of the dishes she made this week on the table in the picture below. Now if we all cross our fingers, maybe they will shrink to the right size.

The other challenge is Bonsai pots. I have a friend who keeps asking me for pots for his bonsai. Trouble is, hand-building is not my long suit and I can't see any other way to make straight-sided rectangular pots. So it's learning time around here! High time I learned to make a square pot, right? Anyway, here are the first efforts:

(Note the butter dish hiding behind the bonsai pot in the foreground.)

(Note also the efficient, scientifically precise and highly detailed engineering drawing ....)




So far they seem to be working, but they aren't quite dry yet so there is still the possibility of cracking, especially at the corners, and of the feet falling off, which is what I seem to recall is what feet  mostly want to do.

Once they are bisqued, I then get the nice challenge of glazing them..... here I really need to do some serious testing of colour/glaze combinations. Not to mention figuring out how to handle oddball shapes with holes in the bottom, and, later, really large shapes. The ones above are only about a foot square, but a lot of bonsai pots are much larger. How the heck will I glaze a pot 24" by 18"??

Last minute gifties and Happy New Year

An entirely new year, and like the heroine of Anne of Green Gables said about a new day, 'with no mistakes in it yet'.Maybe, being a whole year, we should say, 'with no disasters in it yet'..... although that may be tempting fate. Anyway, I wish the very Best of Everything to all of you in 2011, and no disasters, please!

I had a nice quiet Christmas season, with all orders picked up well before the 24th (unlike other years) and not even one 'it's an emergency, I must have a purple pie plate to give to my mother for Christmas and I know it's only a week, but surely you can do it.....' customer. It was so calm and civilized around here it almost made me nervous, but then I decided to make a few pieces to give to my daughter's step-daughters. The oldest is studying to be a pastry chef and the other, who is busy sorting out her personality as all teens must, asked for a 'zebra plate'.



Making the zebra plate was harder than I expected. Turned out I had no real idea what zebra strips look like! A quick Google helped out though and here is the result. Not bad, but boy did it take a lot of black.

 The other gift I wanted to make was a series of square plates for serving goodies. Since J. also likes all things oriental, I immediately pictured plates with bamboo designs. Here they are:

Both girls were delighted!

'Tis the Season

It's snowing.....

The garden's asleep.....

All my Christmas Sales and Shows are done.....

All my Christmas orders have been picked up or will be very soon.....

I'm planning my annual Christmas Party....

Sending gift certs to the offspring.....

Debating whether Husband can stand another new shirt.....

Dreaming about new glaze colours, new forms..... maybe I'll finally perfect that butter dish for a full pound of butter.....

Maybe 2011 will be the year I actually build up a healthy stock of pots to sell instead of always being about 6 weeks behind....

As Harvey here says:



'Tis the Season!

Hope Yours is a Merry One!

Rutile Colours

Well, turns out there's more to getting a nice soft yellow than just chucking some Rutile into a white glaze!

I thought it would be easy. I've got a bucket of yellow glaze kicking around and all I can really remember about it is that I made it by adding some Rutile to my basic white glaze. Easy, right? But it was a lot darker than what the customer wants, so I thought I'd easily get the right shade by just adding less Rutile. I got a real shock when I opened the kiln, though! The tests were pink! A melon or peach-ish pink, but definitely pink.

Only one thing to do: ask Clayart for help.

Happily, they came through. Several people posted a reply to the effect that Rutile can indeed, in the presence of enough calcium, produce pinks. Others reminded me that Rutile can contain Tin, and that Tin plus Chrome can produce pinks. And yes, the kiln load must have had some chrome vapour in it during the firing, as I had used a dark red Mason stain to paint some maple leaves on a few plates. One person suggested doing a short line blend with Red Iron Oxide.

Here are the results.

Hopefully, if the colour balance is accurate, you can see the pink. The tiles with RIO are, as I expected, shades of brown, with a greenish cast. A little too much like Baby Product #2 for my liking! The tiles with RIO and Rutile are a nice toasty colour, I rather like the darkest one.The last row of tiles, using a small amount of Rutile and varying the RIO are about the closest to what I want. The middle one will probably be what the customer wants.

Whew.

And, Thank You, Clayart!

The Glaze Game

Somebody once told me to make all my lids for certain things the same size, and to keep any that didn't fit because then I'd have lids for any pieces whose made-for-them lids didn't fit. This same person also threw over 60 casseroles and didn't think about lids until the next day and when she made 60 lids we had hardly any that fit anything but that's another story. Anyway, I have quite a few lids of various sizes kicking around and sometimes if I have a piece with a lid that doesn't quite fit I go through the stockpile to see if there is one that will work. I call this the Lid Game and it's great fun on the rare occasions that I actually score.

This week Poor Helper has had the unenviable task of sorting out the many buckets of odd glazes that have been clogging up the space under the work tables. I have a bad habit of just adding some stain or oxide to a bucket full of one of my regular glazes and doing some project and then having half a bucket of whatever colour left over. Then I just slap a lid on (if I can find one, of course) and shove it under the table. Sometimes I remember to dip a tile so I have a visual reminder but not always. It was getting hard to walk around with all these buckets sticking out all over the place.

Turned out there were 28 buckets of Guess-the-colour glaze.

Poor Helper added water to the ones that had dried up and left them to soak overnight, and then started sieving each one and dipping test tiles of both the white and the buff clays. She numbered the buckets and the tiles, using duct tape to write on for the buckets, which is brilliant because I had been scrawling a number or name on the bucket, which meant that after I had screened the glaze into another bucket I no longer had a clue as to what it was but now we can, at least in theory, move the duct tape to the new bucket. If you think that's bad, I once started 50 or so herbs from seed in little plastic bakery containers and wrote the names on the lids. It wasn't long before they came up so I removed the lids to give them air and room..... yup, 50 sets of seedlings with no names. You can see that administration is not my long suit.

The test tiles showed some duplicates or near duplicates - we even had three of a certain teal colour - so we were able to put those together and reduce the number of buckets somewhat. Now there are only 19.

Warning! This is what can happen if you don't watch those dibs and dabs of oddball glazes!

I'm thinking planters, vases and maybe some mugs with only their outsides dipped into these cool colours. An excuse to play!

Butter Pots

What a dummy I am!  I've often had customers ask me for 'French Butter Dishes'. They have always, ALWAYS, explained that these are great for keeping your butter cool on the table. I have also always said I don't make them, but I never admitted it was because I just couldn't see how they could possibly keep the butter cool and I didn't want to sell them something and get it back because it didn't work. Besides, they're fiddly to make.

Now the current (Sept/Oct) issue of Pottery Making Illustrated has an excellent article by Keith Phillips on what he calls the 'Cloche de Beurre' or 'Beurriere'. And he explains that they keep the butter FRESH! Quite a different thing from keeping it cool! Fresh I can understand, yes. The seal created by the water in the base of the dish means that the butter doesn't oxidize, or pick up unpleasant odours, or otherwise go nasty.

Awright! Beurriers coming up! Thank you, Mr. Phillips!

BTW, update on the canister set customer: I went down to see her and came away with a paint sample which she wants to match. It's a pale creamy yellow so shouldn't be too hard to do. I promised to make some tests and come back and show them to her so she can approve the colour before I make the set. She struck me as one of these ladies who don't have enough worries. Sounds silly, but the result is that they try to control everything in their lives to the -nth degree because now they can. She explained several times that in her old kitchen everything was co-ordinated, even the towels, so I guess she's doing it again. She won't be easy to please but I'll give it a shot. She did surprise me at the end of my visit, though, by getting out quite a comprehensive tool kit in order to put a dab of paint on a stick for me. The serious tool kit didn't 'tell' with the pure white carpet, the white nylon sheers, the precisely aligned china ornaments.... hmmm.

A Growly Day

What a growly day today!

Opened the bigger kiln today and.... yikes. It had gone off after an unusually long 12 hours but I couldn't remember how long it had been on low so I wasn't that worried. Mistake! Totally underfired. Bleah. Yuck. Of course I need the stuff for Saturday....

So I unloaded and sure enough, another element was broken. Luckily it was the last of the old ones (I wanted to replace all elements last time Jim the kiln guru was here, but he talked me into only doing the ones he felt were the older ones) and even more luckily, he had made me one extra element. This sounds odd, but this is an old kiln, made almost 20 years ago by a cheerful carefree sort of a guy. Eric made excellent kilns for a few years and then decided he liked motorcycles better. So, in his carefree way, he stopped making and servicing kilns and all of us who had purchased them would have been in the soup if it hadn't been for Jim getting into the business. I'll always remember one thing Eric said to me once. He was late and explained it by saying he'd been delayed by a truck ahead of him on the road. "Everywhere I go," he said, "there's a slow truck following ahead of me."

I got the new element in without too much trouble and turned to the real work of the day.

First of all, it has been extremely hot this week. Even without the kilns it was over 30C in the studio.

Secondly, we seem to be having the mother of all mosquito crops. Late every summer we get a hatch of a certain species of mosquito. I don't know what it is, but it is a tiny critter, only about a quarter of an inch long, and I swear it has a blunt stinger because it hurts.

So I painted small bowls all day in the 30C + heat with a zillion microscopic biters sneaking up my pant legs, into my hair and under my glasses. I had to keep the doors shut and even Kip the dog couldn't stay outside. He lay under my feet on his dog bed and snapped at the mosqies. Really relaxing!

A possible customer called and wants a custom canister set. Fine, but she doesn't have a car so can I just come down and see her kitchen so I can see what it is she wants to match.Where is she? Right down in the busiest part of the City, of course. Is there a place to park at her condo? Of course not. Did I say, 'no'? Of course not. She sounded so sad about having been forced to sell her house (mansion?) because she was getting so old and couldn't do all the work anymore and her daughter made her get a modern kitchen and it just isn't 'home' etc etc etc. I fell for it and didn't even hear the violins in the background until too late.

Grrrrr.

It had better be cooler tomorrow.