Kitsch Attack!

Every now and then, one must do some kitsch! I did some things I call Fairy Houses a couple of years ago, and I still get requests for them, so last week I decided to make a few more. They are very easy but are time-consuming to decorate. I worked at the 15 of them all one day, and got rather bored! As I was doing them, their price, in my head, kept going up!

Once they were in the kiln I got some pink styrofoam, the high-density kind, and Super Helper and I spent a morning cutting, gluing and spray-painting to make a display thingie for the Houses. It turned out fairly good, and I am impressed by how easy it is to make stuff out of styrofoam. A whole new world of display opportunities!

Take a look at the finished Houses, displayed at the Carp Farmers' Market yesterday:

Two questions I got about them: first, why didn't the doors open?, to which I replied that Fairies are magical and don't need the doors to open; and, secondly, why the ladders? I was stuck on the ladders question until it came to me: the Fairies have lots of friends, and they need the ladders!

I put some grasses and branches behind the styro thing to give more of a garden 'feel'. It worked pretty well, and I sold quite a few of the houses. The picture doesn't look very good, but remember, this is just a small corner of a cramped 8' by 19' booth.

The Market overall was pretty good this week. Several of the produce vendors sold out and I did well. It has been a slow Market so far this year, so this is encouraging. Hot, though. It was well over 30C in my booth and the humidity..... oy.

The Last Chicken Died At Noon

Sad, but true.

I decided last fall not to get any more egg-laying chickens until I had a better chicken house for them. Between the raccoons, which just chewed through the wooden walls (or door) to get in, and the squirrels which ate more chicken feed than the chickens, it just wasn't worth the wear and tear on either me or the chickens. By this spring there was only one chicken left. All the rest basically died of old age. I'd come in in the morning and one would be flat on the ground and that would be that. Very considerate of them, I thought, to expire so simply.

Anyway, the last chicken soon became Chicken and I let her run around outside the chicken yard. She had a fine time pecking at bugs and eating bird seed and became quite good friends with Kip the dog and Pepper the cat. It wasn't unusual for all three of them to be settled down on the front porch looking out at the world. And like the other pets, Chicken soon got into the habit of wandering into the Studio. I didn't worry about it because the concrete floor was easy to clean up, although.I did draw the line at her coming into the house. I told my friends and anyone else who came by that she was retired.

So on Tuesday, which was the almost-hottest day of the summer so far, Chicken came into the Studio and poked around as usual, but I looked at her and thought she didn't look as bright-eyed as she should have. She drank some of the dog's water, clucked a few times, and went back outside.

At noon I found her lying in her usual spot on the porch, but no longer watching the world.

I'm thinking a small series of tiles, about a Little Red Hen, will be a good way to remember my Last Chicken.

Tiny Bowls

Wasted the whole of yesterday morning trying to make some very small bowls. Why are small things so hard? You would think that, after 20+ years of throwing pots, I'd be able to make 8 little bowls, 4" across and 1" high, with no trouble. Instead, what did I get? About 50 bowls, no two alike. I tried first to throw them off the hump but found it impossible to make them all the same size. Ok, I thought, I'll weigh them out. 6 oz. of clay was too much..... ever try to centre 4 oz. of clay? With big hands?

Eventually I got the hang of that, but my bowls were too thin, or too wide, or too something. In the end I gave up in disgust and had lunch and worked in the garden all afternoon. Phoo on those bowls, I said.

So this morning I threw a dozen wee bowls, no trouble, and got them pretty much all the same. Guess the learning just had to 'jell' or something.

Of course, now I have my dander up, and I am going to make dozens more, just to prove I can.

Trillium Platters

I'm relieved to say that china paints have once again saved my butt. I had promised a platter with a Trillium design to a local Wildlife Festival and had painted a half dozen of them. When they came out of the kiln, however, they were disappointing. The leaves were alright, the platters were fine, but the flowers just hadn't any 'poomf'. I looked at them for a day or two, trying to convince myself they would do, but it wasn't working. So yesterday I got out the china paints, mixed up a tiny bit of black, and added thin black outlines to the flowers. After re-firing to cone 010, they were much improved!


I bought these china paints many years ago. I only have the basic colours, but they are endlessly mixable and keep forever. I just mix a wee bit of the powder with a drop of mineral oil, and they are ready to go. I'm not skilled enough to paint whole pieces in china paints, and anyway that is a very different medium from pottery, but I can fix the odd piece. I once had to paint back in all the soft rose colour that had burned out in a batch of mugs with pink hearts on them - a lot less work than re-making them, and much quicker.

So now I can bring the Wildlife Festival their platters for their Silent Auction this weekend. Not sure why I am doing this, an ego thing, I guess. I also made a very fine bookmark with info about my pottery and garden and had 1000 of them printed so I'll bring some of them as well. Never hurts to advertise!

Photography Day

Well, I'm off to a great start, not. Blocked off the whole day to take new pictures of my pots for my new website, cleaned off a table in the Studio to use, got my lights and background ready..... and discovered that I had let my camera battery run down.

So I'm waiting while it recharges.

It's been slow month in the Studio anyway. I won't go into detail, but will say that the family member worried about her job is still and more happily employed, and the seriously ill family member is on the mend. Big 'Whews' from me! Now I can dig through the chores that I've let slide a bit and get back to work on my pottery.


Making some cereal bowls. I'm going to try out several basic shapes, and see which ones sell the best. A cereal (or soup) bowl sounds so simple, but I haven't been able to get it right yet. One of the problems I have with them is, where do I decorate? My flowers don't fit inside, the outside isn't very visible. Then there is the problem that if I spend too much time decorating a small bowl, it becomes too expensive to sell well. I've already tried some ideas, such as making the outside a solid colour to go with the flowers, or leaving it white, or putting a small line of colour around.... but none have hit the spot. I'm not happy with them, and they haven't sold well. I've made lots of cereal bowls to go with dinner sets, and people seem happy with them, but the ones I just put out for sale sit there. I get requests for other sizes, other shapes, other decorations. Cereal bowls seem to be like mugs - you can't please all of the people all of the time, but maybe with work I can please more of the people more of the time!

I'll post some pictures when they're done.

Should my camera battery ever get fully charged....

Real Potters

This morning, even though I knew it was silly, I was in the mood to make some New Year's Resolutions. OK, so maybe my first resolution should be to do things on time instead of a week late.... Anyway, there's just something about a quiet snowy morning, the start of a new year, a new decade even, that makes you want to pull up your socks, and I got thinking about what I should concentrate on in 2010. Right at about this time, a potter acquaintance phoned up to ask me a question. She didn't understand something about her kiln so she decided to 'ask a real potter about it'. That made me laugh as I've never felt like a 'real potter' myself!

Not that I'm too sure about 'real potters'. I really do wonder about them sometimes, things I'd love to know but could never ask.

For example, do real potters spend hours and hours scooping bumpy glaze out of giant pails and brushing it through a sieve to make it usable again? For one mug?

Do real potters ever spend many hours painting something on a set of plates, and then decide at the last minute to use an untested colour on the rims? Not the colour they've carefully checked will work with their glaze, kiln, and so on, but the one they just bought that is labelled 'Autumn Cinnamon'? It sounds perfect, you're tired, the order is due in two days..... and you can guess what 'Autumn Cinnamon' does in the kiln.

Do real potters ever reach for a damp towel to lift out a hot kiln shelf? More than once?

Do real potters ever dump a handful of cobalt oxide into half a bucket of some left-over glaze or another? And then get a fabulous blue...... with no idea of how to make more of it? Do real potters write the name of the glaze on the lids of the buckets, lids which fit other buckets just fine?

Do real potters get customers who come into the shop, gush extravagantly about how they just 'loooove' your work, and then say 'Can I get one just exactly like this.... only can you make it a bit larger, and don't put this stupid handle on - make a plain one, and, like, you know, this colour isn't quite right, it should be bluer and don't bother with a lid but I'd like a saucer underneath?' And do real potters then allow her to leave undamaged?

Do real potters spend hours tightly focussed over their drawing tables cutting complicated stencils of some design in several sizes and then use them on a set of pieces.... which promptly sell out and make you want to do more..... only you didn't label the various stencil pieces so now you have no idea which ones go together?

Do real potters sit at their wheels working with the studio door open for the wonderful spring air and their dogs bound in because your neighbour has come to visit and they are so-o-o happy.... and all those lovely fresh mug bodies are right at tail level?

Do real potters have their helpers mix up large batches of glaze, which they then use to glaze a whole kiln load of pots, at which point Invaluable Helper says, 'Oh, by the way, I think I may have forgotten to put in one of the glaze ingredients, but I don't know which one?'

Do real potters ever forget to glaze the inside of a teapot? Forget to make the strainer holes? And then put them out for sale?

Do real potters ever accept an order which needs an inscription on the bottom of each piece? The first ones, you carefully follow the script you wrote out, then your concentration begins to slip, and you leave out a word? On all the rest of them?

Do real potters play Pin Tool Ball? You know, you've been getting along with one pin tool for months, and it's all corroded and the handle is loose, and then you treat yourself to 6 new pin tools, all of which are gone within a week, leaving you with one, which is all corroded and has a loose handle....

The list goes on.... will I ever learn? Will I ever be a 'real' potter?