That’s what I’m calling my latest cream & sugar set. Don’t they just look like those dumpty twins? These two are handbuilt instead of wheelthrown, not something I normally do. I do like the very organic forms you can get with handbuilding, but it takes so long and I am not a patient person. Thank […]
My dream of homemade bricks has been put to rest. I dug, dried, powdered, sieved, powdered, resieved, reconstituted, aged, and wedged up 8 lbs of our pond clay and took it into the pottery studio a while back. I made little testers, enclosed them in saggars (to prevent their harming anything else in the kilns) […]
I found the pictures of our new woodfired pottery! Here they are: See how it’s brown where the smoke hit it, and greyer on the other side? If you click to enlarge it you can actually see some of the ash deposits on the grey side, which give it a kind of silky-nubbly hand feel. […]
I can’t believe I haven’t yet blogged about my first woodfire experience. For as long as I’d looked forward to it, and as ecstatic as I am with the results, you’d think it would have been the first thing out of my mouth as soon as I got home with my lovely, smoke-burnished pots. We […]
I led another raku workshop this last weekend – or was it the one before that? – that I thought I’d share with you guys. Raku is an ancient Japanese technique in which red-hot ware is unloaded from the kiln and placed in metal bins filled with combustible materials. The lids are clapped on once […]
A few members of the Greenbelt Pottery Guild, myself included, did a reduction firing down in Mt. Rainier a few weeks ago and just got the results back on Wednesday. You can see a slightly larger photo here. We had no idea what our glazes, designed for oxidation firing (electric: think an oven that can […]
I was so disappointed that when I left New Mexico I hadn’t found any micaceous clay to bring back with me. I wanted to experiment with it and see what I could make it do in my electric kilns. Unfortunately no one on the reservations would sell it to me; and since I left on […]
I just attended the most inspiring workshop that I have ever had the privilege to be a part of. Tony Clennell of Canada’s Sour Cherry Pottery was at Hood College in Frederick demonstrating (among other things) composite throwing techniques. I, who have never successfully thrown more than 10 pounds, learned how to make a beautifully […]
Because of a serendipitous confluence of circumstances at the Community Center, I have found myself in charge of leading this semester’s Intermediate/Advanced Wheel class. At first I was only on the list as an alternate if one of the other teachers couldn’t do it – but then not just one, but three teachers who had […]
No, wait, that’s supposed to be “you win some, you lose some,” isn’t it? Huh. Hey, I heard this joke from my potter friend Bill Van Gilder the other day. A glass artist, a wood crafter, and a potter put their funds together and buy a lottery ticket, and end up taking home a million […]