A few more new pieces...

As promised, here's a few more of the feltware pieces I've been working on.

Enjoy!

 

This is "Tea Anemone 2". The second in a series I am working on. I have found a way to make the tentacles look more twisty and bendy which I think gives them more character, but at the same time the photograph doesn't really do them any justice. It's hard to get a feel for their movement from one still shot. Otherwise, I'm happy with these pieces. The slate matte glaze makes a perfect neutral to contrast with the colored wool. More colors coming soon!

This work is a set of Nesting Anemone Bowls. I can tell you (as if it's not obvious) there is a LOT of tentacles there. A LOT. I would like to make more of these but we'll see. This particular one I have been working on since October. Yup. October.  I need to figure out how to expedite the anemone-making process for this type of piece. I think everything needs to go bigger but we'll see. The tentacles here are quite thin, which made it very difficult to add the pink tips.

At any rate, I'm having FUN.

Which is the most important part.

I have set aside one day a week for play time. No production allowed! So far it's been amazingly refreshing, but my production for the year really hasn't started yet so we'll see if I can keep it up.

My Latest Stuff...

Since my schedule is a little more open right now than I am used to this time of year, I've been working away on my Feltware Collection.

I was finally able to figure out how to consistently fit travel mug lids to my tall, feltware cups. Look for these at all my shows this year.

The lids are great too, they have a little tab that slides down to close the lid so your coffee doesn't spill and it actually works!

After the One of a Kind show this past December, my tall feltware cups were a huge hit, but some people asked for shorter cups that would fit in a coffee maker.
Well, ta da!

I'm so excited about these little guys! I've been using one myself just to take them for a test drive and I absolutely LOVE it!

I've got some more projects on the go including some custom cozies to fit my round bottomed tumblers so I'll keep you posted. In the meantime, I'll be posting these throughout the week on my etsy shop, so keep your eyes peeled!

Nose to the Grindstone...

With summer officially out of the way, I find myself elbow-deep in clay and glaze. Christmas is coming! (It's exhausting just thinking about it!) Things are in full production here and the studio is already overflowing with work.


My cat Frank, sleeping in the midst of some bisqueware

This coming weekend is my local studio tour. This year is the first time that I will be at my own studio. The previous three years I have been featured as a visiting artist at Linda Rapai's studio in Port Rowan. I'm excited to showcase my creative space. My studio is in a century old barn on my parent's apple orchard. There are hand hewn wooden beams and floorboards up to 19" across. It's a beautiful space and I'm lucky to be able to use it.

AND... you'll be happy to hear I'm still doing really well with my pledge to maintain some creative time amidst all the production. I've got some new test bowls in the kiln as I type this, some more drying out on my work table, and some new felware to show off.


feltware cups


Anemone Teacup and saucer


Feltware Vase

Where the heck did summer go?!!?!!

Okay. So basically summer's over. And exactly where the hell have I been, you're wondering?

My summer has been incredibly hectic. I spent three days a week at an art fair in Stratford, Ontario. Which doesn't really leave me a lot of time for making work, packing and shipping orders, glazing and firing, keeping up with my paperwork, and definitely NO time for keeping up with my blog posts.
My most sincere apologies.

BUT, here's a taste of what I have been working on...

I've tried my hand at casseroles, and I can honestly say I never thought I'd be so excited by them! Working on several different sizes, including an individual one.


I've also been working on my feltware collection. Here's a little covered jar from an anemone series I'm working on. People seem to be a little weirded out by the anemones but I'm having fun. I've also got some other pieces in this series I"ll post soon.

AND.....
there's some functional feltware...


I decided that rather than felting the wool right onto the porcelain, I'd make it removable. This, after listening to customers at shows. So thanks everyone for the feedback! On the left is a travel mug. It was tough getting the top to fit, especially with porcelain's tendency to warp, and I'll admit out of 4, only one was round enough to fit the lid snugly. This guy now happily resides in Michigan! The other pieces are dessert bowls. I fell in love with frozen cherries this summer as a refreshing treat... little bit of brown sugar on them, YUM! But I found I had to wrap my bowl in a towel because it got so cold and there was a lot of condensation on it. So voila! Hand felted cozies that perfectly fit the bowls. Just wash them like you would a wool sweater, in cold water, and then stretch them over the bowls to dry. Perfect for ice cream or even hot apple crisp, or a steaming bowl of soup in the fall to keep you warm!

With all of the fun I've been having taking my work in a new direction, I have found I've come full circle and have added several new pieces to my Arabesque line as well. And you remember some of these tests I did a while back? I've found my way back there and using some techniques involving transfer paper. I have some ideas on how to incorporate this into my work so we'll see how this works out over the next little while.

Making new and different pieces has been very invigorating. It's been really hard to "fit" in the time to make them, but has been well worth the effort and stress it caused. And with the hectic fall/Christmas schedule I have lined up, it will important for me to take these creative diversions for my own sanity.

More Feltware

Here are some of the latest additions to my feltware collection. I'm feeling pretty confident about the process now and have a system that is working really well for the templates I'm using for this type of 3D felting.

I'm especially enjoying playing with the colours available to me with the wool roving that I am using for the felt. And my slate glaze has become a perfect neutral to pair it with.

As usual, it's my limited time to play that I find the most frustrating. But I have been adding a few 'extra' balls of clay to my daily 'to throw' pile and this means making a few pieces a week to felt. While I would love to focus MORE of my time on this new venture, it's just not going to happen. I've got orders to make, bills to pay, and shows to get ready for. So, while my pace may feel glacial, at least it's moving forward.

Feltware 2.0

Nothing like the thrill of a contest to light a fire under my feet.

Every year the One of a Kind Christmas Show has a contest. This year the theme was teapots. Each vendor was asked to make a teapot in the medium they work in. How could I resist?

During my last year in school, I focused on sculptural teapots, so this was an opportunity to go back to my roots, so to speak. And while I was excited and up for the challenge, it was terrifying.

Even I was surprised at how much pressure I was feeling over this silly little contest! Having gone to a high-profile art institute, I felt a lot of pressure to produce a spectacular piece. This was an opportunity for me to show my peers that I was capable of more than just production pottery - (though notably, some of my customers may not view my work as 'just production pottery', I can't help but feel that sometimes my potter friends view it as such, but that's a whole other issue, and no doubt mostly in my head, anywaaaays...)

Where was I? Oh yes. Pressure. Yup. Lots of it.

One of the ways I like to work out new pieces, is to throw the idea to my subconscious and let it stew there while my conscious forgets about it. A few days/weeks/months later, it usually spits something out that surprises and delights me and I can get busy manifesting that idea. This time was no exception. I knew I wanted something in feltware and let my subconscious do the rest.

Here's what I came up with:



The teapot is fully functional. And while it may not be the spectacular piece I was hoping for, over all I'm pretty pleased with it. It didn't win any awards at the show, but I did sell it (yay!) and I even had an order for another, smaller version.

And while I was finally getting back to the feltware I had started in the spring, I also made these:



No doubt now that my biggest show of the year is over and I finally have some much needed time to myself, I'll rework these pieces. My subconscious is still spitting out ideas (I can't seem to find that off switch!) so I've got all kinds of ideas I'm anxious to work out.

And all that pressure? It was pretty weird at the show to see people's reaction to the new feltware. Those familiar with my functional work were quite surprised, and those who saw the teapot before the functional stuff were surprised as well. After a few days of digesting people's reactions, the pressure melted away and I became excited about this new creative outlet that I've been looking for.

Now, if only I can manage a balance between the work pots and the play pots...

Maintaining My Creative Sanity and the Introduction of Feltware

Well. I've been making my current line of work for about 4 years now. I still get excited when my kiln is finally cool enough for me to peek inside. It still feels like Christmas when I finally get to unload it. And, I am still learning when it comes to my decoration, glaze application, throwing, trimming, and even my slab work. I've done my best to add some new pieces ever six months or so, but despite all my efforts, I absolutely fear the inevitable boredom that comes from doing repetitive work. I know its coming, and I dread its arrival.

Last year, I finally decided to get serious about this looming issue (Okay, LATE last year!). I am now making a conscious effort to work on NEW pieces. The year began with me adding a glaze test to at least one kiln load a week. Since I don't have a lot of 'extra' time for playing, this snail's pace turned out to be as fast as I needed to go. With glazes coming out of the kiln, ideas began to swirl, and after following several paths for a brief while, I've narrowed it down to a new line that I'm going to explore.

I call it Feltware.

I fell in love with knitting about 7 years ago when I moved back to Ontario from B.C. It gave my hands something to do during the week when I couldn't be in my studio. Once I got to be in the studio full time, however, my hands just couldn't muster up the strength to knit in the evenings. But I still found myself drawn to wool as a material.

Enter: felting.

MUCH easier on the hands. And results come a lot faster than just knitting. I started felting about the same time I started trying out the new glaze tests. The ideas merged and this is the results:


The bands of felt are actually felted right to these cups. They make a perfect barrier against the heat from a hot cup of tea or the freezing cold from a tall pint of beer. And they are just the beginning. I have some ideas of where I want to take the shapes, and of other forms that I could apply this technique to. I'm super excited!

Once I found my direction, branching into another line of work was not as daunting as I thought it would be. But like I just said, ONCE I found my path. Ask any artist and they will probably tell you they have more ideas than they know what to do with. So narrowing them down, to accommodate limited time can be a challenge, to say the least.

I'm happy with where I'm going with this work. There's a LOT of potential here for me. And while I can only move at a snail's pace in terms of making work different from my main line, I now have a direction to go in. And with that direction comes the motivation to MAKE that time.

Watch my etsy shop, I'll be posting these soon!

More felt, more glaze tests, more frustrations...

Okay. So this has been a rather long and somewhat frustrating week. I managed to get a glaze firing in, along with some of those tests that I am working on. You'll recall from my last post, the problems I was having with my glaze running too much


I mixed up a couple more tests. Both tests are an altered version of the original matte glaze recipe, G1214Z from Digitalfire. I changed the glaze with my Insight Glaze Calculation Program to allow for a 5% increase in Silica. I thought I'd start with this alteration in my tests because it would help to stiffen the glaze and keep if from running, by slightly bumping up its firing temperature. I'm not very happy with the results. The tile on the left has no opacifier, the tile on the right does. You'll notice that I managed to correct the problem of the glaze running too much, but I think I prefer the matter surface of the original glaze recipe. So back to the testing... I think the next round, I'll work on the levels of EPK. If I increase the EPK and the silica at the same time, I may be able to both fix the running, and push the surface more matte. If I simply remove the extra silica and increase the alumina (EPK), then I'll make the glaze more matte than the original, which I don't think is what I want to do. I have to be careful adding too much more EPK, because that can cause the glaze to crawl. Here's an article about this glaze recipe, for further reading.

Back to my felting, I've started decorating some of the tiles I was working on last week:

The small piece on the right is a test piece I tried. The red stripe was wet-felted in place. This creates a very soft and fuzzy line. For the tile on the left, the red lines were added by needle felting. The two colours of wool do not blend the same and the red is much crisper. Personally, I'm leaning towards the look on the right. So I guess I'm testing more of this as well. (I see lots of testing in my future...)

I found some craftspeople online who are willing to answer my questions about felting so now I've got some brains to pick. The RagingWool has offered to help me (I know! Great name!) and so has LaLaFelt who has some amazing roving in stock!

So I'm off for another week of testing: glazes and felting. Enjoy!

Feltware

I've been hard at work trying a bunch of new glaze recipes for a line of work I'm going to call 'Feltware'.

After trying several cone 6 matte glaze recipes, I've decided to narrow it down to this one that I got off of the Digitalfire website


I'm loving the glaze. It mixes well and goes on very easily. It also has great colour response. I'm currently looking for a dark, slate gray. My first tests gave me this:

The surface is incredible! There is so much depth to the color, it's fantastic! HOWEVER, see those runs? The next few tests made a mess of my kiln shelf. NOT GOOD.

Soooooooo, a few more tests:

The first picture, confusingly marked '2', is the above mentioned glaze recipe with twice the colorants as the original test piece. I was hoping that if the glaze was darker, I could apply it thinner and get the effect I was looking for. Aparently, I was wrong. (surprise, surprise!) The glaze has a distinctly green tinge to it. The second picture is that original recipe, from the first test above. I wanted to see if I could repeat the results. The answer is sort of. Oh boy. More testing in my future...

As you can see, I still have the problem of the running, and in defense of the glaze, I AM overfiring it by about a cone.

Soooo, back to the testing. I can increase the alumina in the glaze to help with the running but that will also make the glaze more matte, which is not what I want. If I want to keep the current matteness then I could increase the silica along with the alumina which would also raise the firing temp a bit, which would probably help me out anyways, so that's most likely the route I'll go.

As for the feltware, it's coming.
I'm really enjoying felting. I've been working on a series of tiles:

This roving I bought at Romni Wools in Toronto.

This particular colour, eggplant, came in a bag with red and black roving. I LOVE this color. And ordered more along with some complimentary colors from A Childs Dream

These tiles will look very different by the time I'm done with them. I'll just have to be patient and check the mail.