It Begins!

The Christmas plotting, that is!

Christmas is my absolute, total, no question about it, favourite holiday. I love making Christmas ornaments and pottery with a Christmas-y feel and plotting various Christmas enjoyments!

One of my enjoyments is designing my booth at the annual Carp Farmers' Market Christmas Market.

I'm planning a Woodland Christmas theme for this year - lots of natural things like pine and spruce garlands, bowls of pine cones and leaves, even birchbark curls. I already have a lovely big grapevine wreath, with lots of wild vine-y bits to it for the blank wall in the booth. All it needs is a bit of greenery, maybe pine, and a floppy red bow and it will look most fine. Then some strings of tiny red felt hearts... or should they be stars, or bunnies... red pillows on the chairs... now how can I add some trees...

 How I got the grapevine wreath is sort of interesting. The beavers cut down a small tree along the driveway, which I was sorry to see, but beavers will be beavers and I am determined to try to see them as nature's pruning service. Then they couldn't drag it away because it was all tied up by a huge multi-stemmed wild grape vine. The next day I saw that they had very cleverly cut the tree into quite small pieces, and the day after that they dragged most of them into the marsh near their lodge. This left a lot of grapevine sprawled across the driveway. I started rolling it up and realized it would make great wreaths and sure enough, I now have 5 nice wreaths and one large rather wild-looking one. I'm not worried about the vine, it will re-grow, probably bigger and better and it can climb up a nearby pine.

 I've made a list of Christmas stuff to make... too ambitious, of course, but exciting anyway. One of the first things is to make a lot of terracotta mitts which are always popular. Luckily, my (former) Super Helper is coming on Saturdays in November to help and between us we should be able to get a lot done. Mitts will be the first thing. You've seen them here before but just for fun here is one again.

I'm also participating in the West Carleton Arts Society's new "$100 & Under" sale which will be the same weekend as the Christmas Market, so I am plotting ideas for that as well.

For some reason, my plotting seems to involve a Fox - a red Fox, running along... I guess a Woodland needs a Fox, right?

Sunnies and Leaves

Here are some of the finished Sunflower design pieces:

You remember, last time I was bitching about how long it takes me to paint my pots. I guess it's worth it, at least I hope it is!

Now I'm working on my Leaves design. It is a bit easier because I use stencils for many of the leaves, but it is oddly difficult to keep the designs random. There is a real tendency to start to arrange things in patterns... or to do things all the same. So I have to force them to be different, and then sometimes I get into design trouble! Never mind, the finished pieces are nice:

One thing that doesn't please me much is hearing people say they are buying them because of the red maple leaves, so Canadian, blah de blah. Grrrr. Makes me feel I'm caving in to touristy selling. Maybe I am. Except that I do like leaves.

Hopefully the pieces in the kiln will all be good, so I can take them to the Carp Market tomorrow. The woods all around us are gorgeous right now, bright with yellow, orange and red leaves, so my booth will fit right in! And please don't tell me you are buying my mug because of the red maple leaf, I might snarl!

Speed, if any

One thing I really wonder about. I see pictures of potters posed with their work - masses of work, whole battalions of work. Hundreds of mugs drying, tables full of bowls waiting to be trimmed, all lined up so neatly.

I must be doing something wrong.

Today I worked for almost 3 hours to paint sunflowers on 6, count 'em, 6, mugs. The rest of the day disappeared on decorating 8 more mugs. That's 14 mugs, and all I did was paint the designs on them.The designs were not new, so I didn't have to do much thinking, the stains were ready to go, the mugs were glazed. All I did was push the brush for 7 hours to paint 14 mugs.

Here are the Sunflowers before firing:

The others were a mixed bag of special orders (2 mugs are not in the picture, they ran too fast):

Maybe I could advertise myself as the world's slowest potter?

Ah well, they're in the kiln now. I'll post a picture of the finished mugs in a few days, assuming they fire up OK.

Tomorrow I get to throw yarn bowls and chili bowls. Whoo hoo, speed!

Personal Victories

What a week! I'm just racking up the Personal Victories here, right, left and centre!

First, my garbage got picked up yesterday! Don't laugh, these days getting rid of your garbage is not that easy. We only get garbage garbage picked up every second week... the alternate week they pick up paper re-cycling and compost. Cans and bottles go the same week as garbage. Since I don't have much garbage, I tend to only put it out every 4 to 6 weeks, and of course I get totally confused. When I got to the road Sunday night I noticed my neighbour had his compost bin out. So I turned around and drove home (my driveway is l-o-o-o-n-g) and checked my calender. Still looked like garbage week to me so I put my 3 bags out. It worked! Garbage is gone! Yahoo!

Garbage is so complicated these days my husband threw up his hands and quit. He hasn't thrown anything out since 1976.

Then today I managed to cancel the insurance on the car we haven't had for more than a month! I thought it would be simple, but it took a number of phone calls, waiting for the right person, discussion, negotiation, deliberation, looking up of rates etc etc until I really felt I should just forget about it and let them insure it in perpetuity. But we got 'er done, folks! And with all the nifty deals and discounts my agent was able to get for me, it will cost hardly any more to insure my truck now than it used to cost to insure both it and its late stablemate.

 I never did understand economics, but I used to understand insurance. Not anymore.

I'm delighted to report that I did not leave the portable phone outside in the rain yesterday! Alright, so maybe I did, but it was under an old pail and didn't get wet. That counts, right?

My phone handsets have a rough history. I take them along with me while I'm gardening and stuff happens. I'm pretty sure at least one got planted, and one got carried away by an enemy critter. I found it years later in the woods in a place where I have never gardened, so I don't think I should be blamed. They should sell replacement handsets, really.

And the laundry is almost done... ha, take that, underwear! No doubt you, Dear Reader, do yours on a reasonable schedule, but I operate on the 'wait until you have absolutely nothing left to wear' system. Then I do several loads in a big hurry and forget all about laundry until next time... today I did some work in the Studio, dashed into the house to move the wet into the dryer and re-load the washer, did some work in the Herb Garden, dashed into the house to move the laundry on one step, went out on an errand, came back and dashed into the house... you get the idea. In between I searched for the phone and had an earnest discussion with my insurance agent... maybe the laundry basket should 'ping' like my oven does.

If I won a lottery, I'd buy enough clothes to last a year, and would throw them out as I went along; wait, would that work? Are t-shirts and jeans garbage, re-cycling or compost? And I wonder if I could get insurance on my phones, then I could put one in the garbage bag and phone the road and if the ravens answer maybe they could sort out the whole compost/re-cycling/insurance thing for me... After all, they are garbage experts.

And it's only Tuesday.

Getting Ready for the Carp Market

Busy day! Got up early and threw some bowls - need to fill a kiln and need bowls... think I can get them done by next Saturday? The Carp Farmers' Market opens next Saturday, May 9 and I'm getting all kinds of good stuff ready.

Then I went off to the Market to get my booth ready. Spent 4 hours painting my furniture! Painted the shelves, the tables, even the chairs. Chairs are a beast to paint, and wicker chairs are the beastiest. I found out that the paint roller does a pretty good job; who knew. Of course there were still all the legs, edges and trim to do with the brush. It was a bit cramped working in my booth and I kept bumping the wet paint. I was nicely decorated when I got home!

Any alert reader who would like to hazard a guess as to the new colour, leave me a comment or zip me an email and if you are right I'll give you a free mug! (Course, you'll have to come to the Market to get it!)

I hope there is asparagus at the Market on Saturday. I've made some serving dishes, and sauce jugs, for serving asparagus in its various guises. Did you know you can roast it? Just sprinkle some olive oil over, add a pinch of coarse salt, and roast for about 15 minutes. Leave it a bit crunchy. Yum!

Hint: Your Mother needs a nice dish to serve asparagus on, and it is Mother's Day on Sunday May 10!

One Bird Walkin'

I've been busy making stuff for the Carp Farmers' Market which will be opening soon (May 9 in fact) and I plan to have some Bird mugs, bowls and plates.

To me, this is a Blackbird, hopping around on the ground looking for whatever he can find. Since it is Spring, I've given him some large flowers to hop under, lots of little seedlings and even some snow drifting down.

The bird is just a little cut-out slab attached when the clay is leather-hard. The only tricky bit is where he sticks up above the rim, where I add a little blob of clay to support his head and to make the rim smooth and even.

Here is a finished mug:

Now to make bowls!

Scope Creep

Beware of Scope Creep!

Yesterday I began making the items for a certain customer's order. She asked for, among other things, 4 Onion Soup bowls. Getting my clay ready, I thought '4 onion soups... better make an extra just in case... actually, onion soups would be a good thing to have on hand and the shelves are empty, better make 4 extra, no, better make about 8 extra'. So that was 13 bowls. Then I was throwing them and realized that I could put the handles on a different way than I have been doing if I made the rims differently. So then I decided to make 13 the old way and maybe a dozen or so the new way.

But wait! From needing 4 onion soup shapes for an order, here I was making 25 of them.

Normally, that wouldn't be a problem, but in this case it meant I wouldn't have time to make all the items in that order that day, or trim them all the next and then I'd be behind on the next order, etc etc etc.

That is Scope Creep. Where the project expands until it's more than you can handle and gets you bogged down so you get behind on other things and you can't get it all done so you get discouraged and it's no fun and maybe you should quit...

Mind you, a table full of items not suffering from scope creep doesn't impress anyone - one of these and one of those and so on. But at least one customer's order will be done, and in reasonable time.

    Not impressive, but done.

Note: Over the next few months, I will be writing an occasional post about, to quote Robin Hopper's book title, 'Stayin Alive'. After 25 years as a self-employed craftsperson, I feel I have learned a few things and want to pass them on. Lots of the things I'll talk about you will already know, or at least have heard about, but it you learn even one thing it will be worthwhile, both for you to read and for me to write. You'll be be able to access them under the category 'Stayin Alive'.