Easter Market/Up-and-down Week

This year, for the first time in a decade, I signed up to do the Carp Farmers' Market Easter Market. It's next Saturday, from 8am to, I think, 2pm. I get only a 6-foot table so I won't be able to show much of my pottery, but I'm hoping people will like my Bird stuff.

I'm also planning to have a few small pots with forced Forsythia and Pussywillows and maybe some moss, as little gift-y flower arrangements. This is kind of against the rules so I'm hoping nobody will object - I don't want to get busted! We're not supposed to sell anything that hasn't been juried, nor are we allowed to sell more than one type of product. I do think a few flowering stems in a pottery piece should be considered 'accessories', but I have to agree it is debatable.

Funny week. The latest firing of Red Fox pieces turned out really well - the soup/cereal bowls show this glaze at it's best - but I'm disappointed in the latest Bird bowls as the edges are all green-turquoise instead of some being blue-turquoise. My own fault for not washing out the spongie I was using well enough. It looked a bit greenish but the two colours, when raw, are so alike it is hard to tell. OK, new batch of Bird noodle bowls comin' up, and they'll have blue edges, dagnabit.

Super Helper tried brushing glaze onto a bonsai pot. It had a little crack in the corner, so it was an expendable crew member anyway and I thought it worthwhile to give it a try. These pots are somewhat large, and it takes a lot of glaze to dip one. If we could get by with a small amount of glaze it would really help. I already have quite enough small pails of different glazes..... Well. It took a long time to do (I knew it would) and it LOOKS AWFUL! So much for that idea.

Then, having already far too many miscellaneous glazes kicking around, we went ahead and mixed up a few more. I wanted some different greens to do a series of pressed leaves we made and bisqued last fall. Of the five colours we tested, all but one are great (the darkest one isn't Spring-ish enough) and I decided to do some leaves in each. SH mixed up useable quantities of two of them. I went to dip leaves in one and found it was really settling, so I asked her to mix some epsom salts and add it. It worked somewhat too well and now we have about a gallon of glaze the consistency of philadelphia cream cheese. Hmmmm. Adding sodium silicate did not help. In fact, it created a nasty brown puddle on top of the cheese..... every time I stir it in the glaze gets stiffer. OK, more landfill and mix it again, Sam.

I finally got that canisters set done, that is, I finally got four jars with lids that fit. It took more than 20 lids to get four that work. I hate that style of lid - domes that fit on top of the jar with the flange inside because you simple have to glaze the rim of the jar and then the jar warps because it has the added word on one side but the lid sits flat on the kiln shelf and doesn't shrink the same amount and your chances of getting the lid to fit the jar are about as good as brushing a glaze on evenly. That is, it can be done, but is it worth the effort? Nope. Here is a picture of the darned thing:

You can't have a good week every week.

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!

Back to Real Work

After spending the last 6 weeks working on bonsai pots, it sure felt good to get back to throwing bowls! There's something very satisfying about throwing large bowls. They are actually fairly easy, need very little trimming, and you know you won't get all kinds of pushback from customers. Seems if you put mugs out for sale you attract people who come into your booth or shop determined to set you straight on the proper design for mugs, but I have never had anyone try to tell me how to make my bowls.

Maybe it is because there are so many possible sizes and shapes for mugs, and everybody of course has their favourite design. I've had people tell me my mugs are too big.... or too small. I've had them tell me that I'd sell a lot of mugs if I would just make them short and round.... or tall and straight. I should make handles for one finger, two fingers or a whole fist... sometimes I feel there's no pleasing people with mugs. But nobody has told me how to make a salad bowl.

And guess what, they always sell.

I love bowls!

First Bonsai Pots

My bonsai pots look better than I expected! The glazes are great, especially the Slate Blue although we mixed it with less cobalt and more copper carbonate to make it greener. (These pots are for plants, so I didn't worry about food safe-ness.) Take a look below! Now I can hardly wait to see the ones made in the dark reddish clay which are currently drying in the Studio. I made some shallow oval ones, and some more rectangular ones. The ones in these pictures are about 12-15 inches across. The ovals are going to be about 20", assuming they don't crack, or split, or come apart, or explode or...... Anyway, so far, I'm encouraged!

Bonsai Pots Again

Woke up in the middle of the night with the feeling that I had been thinking (or dreaming) about my bonsai pots. I went on thinking about them, and my thought was, 'Why am I trying to make them in white clay?' I'm concerned about having unglazed clay showing near the bottoms of the feet, and underneath where I want to have my signature, so why am I using a white clay? The glazes I am planning to use are all dark and earthy to show off the bonsais.

Good point, so I went shopping today and got a few boxes of a nice dark brown-firing stoneware. Have to do some testing, but I'm thinking the problem of the white feet is solved.

One pot looking good so far - nice dark brown glaze with lighter, bronzy highlights, and NO CRACKS!

Also got some of those bendable plastic 'trugs' they sell for gardening use. I think they are going to be just the thing for holding enough glaze to dip these pots. The pots are too wide to go into any pail, and too tall to go in the trays I have. These (I got two sizes, one about 16" across at the bottom and one about 22" across) will be wide enough and deep enough, and not need a hundred gallons of glaze to fill. Making enough glaze to dip large pots can get costly!

Glazing tomorrow......

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!