Keep Calm and Carry On

Well the past 10 days have been utterly crazy.

With winter on its way (I still CAN'T believe it's actually OCTOBER!!!!), it was time to rip out the north wall in our studio and replace the 4" of insulation, wasps nests and chipmunk droppings with 6" of new insulation and two new windows. At first we were hoping this would be a weekend project. In fact, we were hoping that when I returned from a weekend show it would all be done and things would easily get back to the standard pre-Christmas craziness.

Yeah, riiiiiiiiiiight.



The weekend turned into a full week of construction. Of course, nothing could go easily or smoothly, really it was naive to assume it would have! And it's pretty hard to get anything done when the routine has been thoroughly upset. And so, as a result panic set in. I'm frantically trying to get ready for all the the shows I've got coming up, to get wholesale and custom orders out the door and I have to time my pugging around when there's going to be space cleared around the pug mill. The entire week the old propaganda line: Keep Calm and Carry On, kept running through my head. At least it gave me something to smile about.

So after a full 10 days, things are ALMOST done. In addition to a new wall and two new windows, I now (almost) have another (desperately needed) drying cabinet. With a little bit of luck I'll be able to get back into full production mode this week and start feeling like I'm getting things done again.



Annnnnd of course,
now is the time I finally find myself teeming with some fantastic ideas for the direction I want to take my feltware.
(sigh...)

Yup. Keep Calm and Carry On...

They're BaaAAAAck!

Well, the last few weeks have been nothing if not completely frustrating.

So here I am, custom orders on the go, wholesale orders on the go, desperately trying to stockpile work for upcoming Christmas shows, frantically trying to replace stock that has sold at summer shows. I'm busy. VERY busy. And I don't really have time for things to fall apart.

But alas. It had to be...

Remember that problem I was having a while back with my brand-spankin' new pug mill? Where my clay was corroding the inside of the mixing barrel and pesky little chunkies were making their way into my pieces?

Weeeeeeelllll....

The pugmill manufacturer recommended that I add epsom salts to my clay body. What this would do, I was assured, was change the pH of the clay which would in turn, prevent all those pesky little chunkies from forming in my pug mill. Okay. No problem. 44 grams, dissolved in hot water, added to 25 lbs wet clay. Mix, pug, throw.

No problem, right?

WRONG!!! What a complete disaster. Have a look for yourself:





Yup. Three kiln loads and counting. Ruined.

After much crying, cursing, Clayart-ing and phone calls, here is what I learned:

Too much epsom salt can cause blebbing. As a piece dries, the salts migrate to the area of the pot that is drying the fastest (the rim in most cases). During firing, the salts will turn to gas and generally burn off. However, if there is too much salt, and the clay begins to mature before all of the gases have escaped, you will end up with what I have in the photos. Lots and lots of little blisters, all over the rims of a couple of thousand dollars worth of pots. As my luck would have it, my clay manufacturer ALREADY adds epsom salts to their clay. So by adding more, I overloaded the clay.

So there you have it folks. My advice: talk to your clay manufacturer before adding ANYTHING to your clay body. No matter WHO told you to add it.

Aaaaaaand in addition to that...

Those f'ing chunkies are back, busily corroding away at my pug mill.

Yup.

oh! And that would be the NEW version of the pug mill. The one with the corrosion-resistant coating.

Yup. My luck.

The Perfect Pour

One of my favorite teachers from art school always said "if you're going to make functional pottery, use it!" So when I made one of my first functional teapots, I brought it straight into the house from the kiln and made a pot of tea. (Steeped for 5 full minutes for the perfect cup of Bourbon Vanilla). I picked up the teapot in great anticipation of my perfect cup of tea, and was horrified as the tea gurgled and blurbled out, down the side of the pot and everywhere but the mug, strategically placed beneath the spout.

I was so disappointed.

BUT...back to the drawing board.

Functional teapots are one of the biggest challenges for potters. They employ a great variety of throwing techniques, complete with lids, knobs and handles. They have to pour properly, hold enough tea, and not be too heavy. All of this adds up to a steep challenge. (No pun intended.)

So what exactly is it that allows a teapot to pour?

Well, first there's the obvious: the spout. Spouts need to be wide at the base and taper to a narrow opening at the end. This helps to push the tea out and far enough away from the pot to keep it from clinging to its side. But we're not done there. Spouts need to have a relatively sharp end to help cut off the flow of the tea as the teapot is righted. Unfortunately with pottery, too sharp will often lead to a chipped spout. If you can find a teapot that lets no more than ONE drip back down the outside of the pot, you've done good!

Spouts aren't the only important aspect to a good teapot though. The handle also requires some special considerations. Handles must be placed in such a way that the pot is balanced as the user is pouring the tea. This relieves strain from the wrist, and lets the pot do all the work. For best results, look for a 90 degree angle between handle and spout. The handles also need to be beefy enough to hold a full pot of tea. No one wants to see a full teapot release from its handle and go crashing to the table.

Some other small considerations include a wee little hole in the lid. Air needs to be able to enter the teapot as the tea is exiting to allow for a continuous, uninterrupted pour. And if the teapot is meant to be used with teabags, have a look inside to make sure there are holes creating a strainer of sorts, where the spout attaches to the pot. These will catch a teabag and prevent it from plugging the spout.




It's been a few years now since that first disastrous teapot of mine, which I still have. And I've abandoned the Bourbon Vanilla for a quieter Tongyu Mountain Green tea from one of my favorite tea stores, Distinctly Tea in Waterloo. But man, I do love a good cup o' tea.

Testing, Testing, 1,2,3...

Any potter will tell you that testing glazes sucks.
There is just no easy way to do it. It's time consuming and tedious, truly an evil necessity if one is looking for their own glazes that stand out in a crowd.

So I spent many hours this past week doing what I hate: testing glazes.

It has taken me many years to get to a point in glaze testing where I'm no longer rushing through it as fast as I can. I've made WAAAYYY too many mistakes doing just that. I've finally learned to slow down, clear my schedule for the afternoon, pull up a stool and get it done right.

So this time around I'm working on two different glaze bases: a glossy from the geniuses at Digitalfire, and a matte, a recipe that was given to me from the amazing and talented people at NSCAD. I will spend hours researching the colors that I am looking for: what ceramic oxides will yield what results, what ingredients are necessary in the base glaze to give the desired effect. I hunt down appropriate base recipes and calculate them using Insight, a downloadable glaze calculation program (highly recommend it!) and make sure all the numbers look good.

With all the research out of the way, I mix up 500g batches of each, with no colorants, and run each batch through a 120 mesh sieve. Then each glaze is weighed and divided into 5 different containers, all carefully marked with my trusty sharpie. It is at this point that the real test mixing begins. Colorants and stains are carefully measured into each well-labelled container (learned that the hard way, more than once!) and are then ready to be applied to test tiles.

I used to use lots of itsy-bitsy L-shaped tiles that I extruded. Each glazed surface was no more than 1" x 2". I have since moved on to larger surfaces. I found I just couldn't get enough information off of that small a surface. I need to actually SEE what the glaze is going to do, in the manner in which I'm going to be using it. Now I extrude tubes, about 3-4" tall, and 2 1/2" wide. This gives me lots of room to try as much as I need to on the same surface. Each tube is CAREFULLY labelled (also learned that the hard way, more than once!) and at the same time, I make very thorough notes in my sketchbook (again, the hard way...).

Glaze testing is painfully slow. After the research, there's the mixing. After the mixing, there's the firing. After the firing, you have to wait for the kiln to cool. After the kiln cools, you FINALLY get to look at the tiles, and inevitably, try to figure out what to adjust the next time around to get the results you are looking for. It can literally take weeks, months and even years to finally hit the jackpot and get what you were looking for in the first place. As frustrating as it is in the thick of it all, when you finally get that perfect glaze, all of that time spent doesn't seem so bad. It's like hitting pay dirt.

So for all of you out there who are also enduring glaze hell, hang in there! Without all the testing, you'll never find what you're looking for, and sooner or later your efforts will pay off.

Stress and the birth of Ideas

About two weeks ago my very old Plymouth Voyageur Minivan died.

I was busy glazing away in the studio while my husband was out running errands. When he came back, he very slowly walked over to where I was working and cautiously asked: "So...........how's it going?"

"Fiiiiinnnnnnnnne......" I replied. I knew something was up. He never greets me like that.

"I have some bad news...." My first thought was something happened to all the pottery I have in tubs in the van that I cart back and forth to my weekly Art in the Park. "The transmission went on the van."

I honestly didn't know whether to laugh, cry or throw up. We knew it was coming. The poor van was 13 years old and had been with us from coast to coast.

Now these types of events never seem to time themselves so that it is convenient for US. And the last thing I needed was to spend what little I had saved up on another vehicle. (sigh). If you've ever gone through this sort of thing, then you understand just how much stress is involved. Need a new vehicle right away, have no other means of transportation and live out in the country. We stressed about what we could afford, we stressed about trying to find something we actually WANTED, we stressed about borrowing a car to get groceries, we stressed about the plans that now needed to be put on hold. Stress, stress, stress....STRESS!!!!

And in the midst of it all, the ideas began to flow. I haven't carried a sketch book with me everywhere I go, for a while now. I think I need to bring one along from now on. I couldn't believe it. Here I was, supposed to be looking for a new car, and all I could see were colours, blossoms, flowers, patterns, glazes and shapes. It was like the floodgates had opened and ideas were pouring out of me faster than I could get them all on paper. And these ideas were evolving, from one to the next.

I guess it was a bright spot on a temporarily gloomy horizon. Needless to say, we found the PERFECT vehicle. A truck like this one, in a lovely burgundy. And with it sitting comfortably in my driveway, the ideas are starting to slow down. Now I can take some time to digest them, work through them, and figure out what the hell just happened.

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!

They always say...

They always say that the squeaky wheel gets the grease. I'm gonna have to agree with that.

You'll recall from my last post the problems I was having with my new pug mill. Well, I removed the paint as recommended by the company, and sure enough, within two weeks those pesky hard chunkies were back. My frustrations were growing, to say the least.

So I posted a comment on Clayart, an online clay forum, about the issue of porcelain in my Peter Pugger. I explained what had happened and wanted to know what others had done about the situation. My timing couldn't have been better. It just so happens that the same week I posted my question to Clayart, that ceramic gurus, industry reps, galleries, schools and enthusiasts were meeting for the annual NCECA conference and someone was kind enough to pose this question directly to Peter Pugger. Apparently there were others in my position who were also frustrated.

The company was aware of the problem and were currently working on the solution. I couldn't be happier! I called the company first thing the following Monday morning and was immediately passed on to the owner. They offered to help me resolve the problem right away. I must say, the customer service was amazing. They explained to me what was going on, that it's the alkalinity of the clay that's corroding the aluminum. Just the fact that they seemed to know what was causing the problem has led me to believe that they have thoroughly researched the issue and that their fix will work.

I know that other people, with other types of pug mills have not been so lucky in dealing with other companies. So I guess I got the right machine after all, especially considering the price tag of some of the others!