Bonsai Pots.... and Muffins

Bonsai Pots

Still at it. There are now over 30 bonsai pots in various shapes and sizes, all bisqued. Only one shows any cracks. Of course, it's the one I liked best..... never mind, I'm going to glaze it anyway and even if the crack shows it should be useable. I plan to make myself a bunch of pots for my Amaryllis bulbs and it would be good for that.

I've re-made those dog-gone rectangular pots and they are tucked up in 2-mil plastic drying s-l-o-w-w-l-l-y. Probably take a month to dry. By the way, what do other potters use to cover pots with in order to slow down the drying? I've always used dry-cleaning bags, they are very thin and soft and don't mar wet pots, but now that I live a non-dry-cleaning lifestyle, how can I get more dc bags? Husband never gets anything dry-cleaned, daughter rarely does. I don't even know anybody who gets stuff cleaned anymore. The thinnest I can buy is 2-mil and it's not the same. I did ask at a dry cleaners, but they said they weren't allowed to give away or sell the bags. One of the stores offers to take back used bags as a 'green' idea, but apparently nobody does it, and even if they did, they still wouldn't be allowed to give them to me. Don't understand why not but such is life.

Muffins

Made the world's best Blueberry muffins for breakfast this morning. I was about to put butter on a hot muffin when a Blue Jay sailed by the kitchen window. I swear his beady eye was on me - ready to eat a treat, and his feeder (and tummy) empty. So I got my old rubber boots and parka on over my pj's and slogged out to fill up the feeders. I'm too good to those birds.

If anybody, anybody at all, tells me they want me to, I'll put the recipe up here. It's just as easy as any muffin recipe and the muffins are AMAZING! Potters like to eat, right? So it's not off-topic!

Still Challenges

Well. This hand-building gig is just not exactly all it's cracked up to be. You'd think a few rectangular pots would be easy. Hah. Take a look at this:

And they looked so good on Saturday! Then I took the plastic off so they could finish drying and you see the result. The smaller pots are all OK, but I guess these cracked because the bases took longer to dry (and shrink) than the sides.

Live and learn, and learn.... and learn.

If I continue to learn from my mistakes, I'm going to be awfully smart some day.

The other thing we've been working on is testing some glazes to dip the bonsai pots in. So far I have one black glaze (the three on the lower left in the picture) that works quite well for bonsai pots. And there is a lot of it, so I have enough to dip the pots. The little textured tile next to it is an old glaze which always works well on texture so I know I can mix up a batch of that. The tile on the extreme bottom left is the black glaze with the brown one on top. A nice oil-spot if you can see it. Above these are 4 tiles of Ron Roy's 'Slate Blue' from his book Mastering Cone 6 Glazes. It looks nice on the buff stoneware I use, but of course none of the bonsai pots are in that clay.... on the white clays it looks a bit drear.

The blue ones above that are Ron Roy's 'Stormy Blue', which is always nice.

The top row is the 'Waterfall Brown' from the book. I don't know if you can see it here, but it is very nice on texture. Definitely worth mixing a large batch and trying it on those bonsai pots that have some texture. Not too much fun on plain vertical sides, but it'll make nice edges.

And the butter dishes? Well, if someone would explain to me how come, when we made a prototype which worked perfectly and then made six 'real' ones in exactly the same way, the 'real' ones are too small for the butter, I'd be grateful.

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!