Peonies in Bloom

No special title today, but I wanted to share some new photos.  Linus shared an idea a few months back that was a short, shallow dish with a metal frog in the bottom for flowers...  the frog helps the flowers stand up straight...  so when I was working I wondered how successful I'd be at making a pot with a lid, a lid with a single narrow hole that would hold the flower up...  These are not at all what Linus suggested, but I'm pleased with how they came out.

I have been calling them my "peony pots" for a few months now and was getting rather worried that I would not have them in time for when the peonies bloomed and yet (thanks to Francine and some cooler than usual weather) I got them just in time.

Here she is boys!!!

So I got my pieces from the studio on Thursday and spent yesterday getting some photos of them to use on the gallery web-site and for some promotional material for my show in May.  It was quite a site to see me outside with my i-phone and a huge piece of blue taffeta draped over the picnic table trying to get some decent shots.  I even had a raccoon that came to see what I was doing.

Cricket got a good laugh at my technique, but photographer or not, I'm pretty satisfied with the results... here are some photos of my work.

Parade of mugs...

Parade of mugs: Behind the scenes

scalloped rimmed bowl

teapot:short dark and handsome

teapots at odds
the Casseroles have a guest for dinner

large bowl with crawling

some jugs

some jugs: behind the scenes
bowl of fire

the pieces have some really good effects on them...  

I'm very happy!~

~silly

Donuts are easier or "Dip and cross your fingers"

OK...

I guess it's time for an entry about the creative process again... it's been a while and I don't want to lose you all as I immerse myself in the POETRY challenge... so let's just take those little letters E O P R T Y ; we'll add another T. And with a little magic we get P O T T E R Y... Yea... I love word games...

Last Night was pottery class; sans M&M... Francine announced that she'd be firing soon. Of course, I was in the middle of doing something and this announcement made my heart skip a beat (in a bad way)... You see, if all my pieces aren't glazed when she fires then they won't make it into the kiln...  that's a bad thing...  I have a show coming up in May and if I don't have my pots glazed there's no show...

So there I was, elbows deep in clay, doing something else (trimming my one pound pieces - I challenged myself to working with only a pound of clay to see what I could produce and just how thin I could throw the porcelain) time to shift gears (insert terrible grinding noise)... so much for creative process...  

Time to glaze...

I've opted to have all of my work for the past year (nearly 60 pieces) glazed in a Malcolm Davis (some famous contemporary potter) shino glaze.  Shinos [pronounced (She - No) (or however you want to - I'm not the boss of you)] are this cool family of glazes that do weird things and can achieve some fabulous results.  They will pool, they will crawl, they will pit, they will trap carbon and sometimes they just look like snot...  yup...  gross...  

Let's review my track record.  While I was on the cruise last winter I got a free chip and used it on the craps table.  Since I had never played craps, I asked for a little help and the next thing I knew I had a few more chips...   ...before long, I had none.  And so it is with shino and me...

I've been trying this glaze on various pieces over the course of time that I've been doing pottery.  The first attempt was OK, but I was a beginner who wasn't very adept at throwing, so a fabulous glaze would have done little.  The next attempt was better...

Flash forward...

Well, HotDiana asked me to make her something for Christmas and I did.  I threw this wonderful jug with a clunky handle and even inscribed the bottom...  After she had unloaded the kiln, Francine called and asked me to come to the studio.  When I got there, she was sitting at the table with Diana's jug on a turntable.  I cannot adequately describe what the glaze had done.  Francine does not make comments or compliments frivolously...  So, when she turned the piece around on the turntable and said,

"This is a museum quality piece." I was in shock and she added,

"This will always be a prize in your collection of the pieces you've made."

"Except that I made it for someone else."

"Oh, you can't possibly give this away."  Such a quandary was mine, but the piece had, afterall, been made for HotDiana...

Subsequent attempts with this glaze have produced just as many different results, but never the same thing twice...

And so it is that I have rolled the craps dice of shino glazes and come out a winner; once...

Yet (and I add, undeterred) I spent last night glazing mugs and bowls hoping that one or two will reproduce that effect...  ...and hoping, beyond hope, that they will not look like they are coated in mucus or Elmer's Glue.  

Louie's rule number one is "Don't get attached to anything"...  alas...  I should have asked if that applies to a whole year's worth of work or just that one fave piece...

Maybe I'll produce stuff so pathetic that my friends will feel obligated to buy it at the gallery and maybe I'll have a kiln load of oddities...  I'm hoping for the best and at least one piece that I can put in the cabinet...

...right next to the jug that reads, "For my HotDiana".

-silly

Throwing better goals or "bowls for the easily distracted"

So, last night was pottery class and, as always, I had a tremendous time.  (and as usual, I didn't take photos like I had planned)  Last night I worked on a series of bowls that I'm throwing for a pottery show that I'm doing in May at the gallery.  I had thrown 6 stoneware bowls last week and trimmed them last night.  Trimming is to a pot what a good trainer is to an athlete...   it can make a so-so one better and a great one fantastic.  Let's just say that I started with "better than so-so" and ended up with "pretty darned good"...

I did a little bit of ornamentation on the bottom of five of the six bowls.  I have a stamp that I picked up at the pottery supply place; working a pattern with it can produce an effect that I really like...  as I was stamping away Louie commented,

"You're throwing better..."

"Thanks..."

"No, you really are..."  Now, why thanking someone causes them to reiterate what they have already said; it is beyond me...  I guess in some vocabulary "Thanks" actually means "not really"...  but then Francine (she specializes in teaching pottery to the middle aged-klutz) added...

"Actually, you are really getting to the point where you throw what you intend to throw."

Let's just pause for a moment of silence...

In the pottery world that's huge!!!  More often than not, when you are learning to throw you end up with something that is not exactly what you set out to make.  Oh sure, you may want to throw a vase and you get a vase, but instead of a tall narrow vase with a flared collar you end up with a short round thing that's just about big enough to put short stemmed violets in...  show me a beginning potter who doesn't have 10 pencil holders and 25 ash trays and I'll tell you that you've got a hand builder (and hand building is also hard)... 

Oh that I were as successful in life as I am in pottery.  I've kind of specialized in making the most of what I end up with instead of setting a goal and achieving it.  I had goals early on and realized that goals were for people with drive and drive was for people with vision and vision was for people who (a bird just flew by the window and Beestro jumped up on the ledge to see what's going on) aren't easily distracted.  

I am easily distracted.  While my enumployed counterparts were surfing the net today, I found myself waist deep in a pile of leaves that needed pushed into the empty lot behind the house... and under those leaves there were iris and peonies and hyacinth and stuff reaching to get to the sun...  YEA!!!  and the neighbors took the day off and have people over and I went to Wal-Mart to get one of things that dumps salt water into your nose (they neglect to tell you just how much ends up in the back of your throat)...

My old bosses used to berate me (for lack of a better word) during review time because I didn't have 5-year plans.  Now, I knew (and they knew) that it was only because they had push all of their people into a managed bell-curve at review time, but none-the-less this was a consistent theme that came up...  (I had my own view of my personal weaknesses, but my managers didn't necessarily agree with it... when I mentioned in an interview what my old bosses thought my weakness was it cost me a job and when I mentioned what I thought were my weaknesses the interviewer went, "Ooo"... nonetheless I am still enumployed... [apologies for the tangent within a tangent])

I guess all the world wants you driven and undistracted...  or employers at least.  I find myself less impressed with people who set out to become an "X" and end up an "X"...  ooo, you knew what you wanted to be when you were 10 and you achieved it...  and find myself intrigued with people who left behind the job they wanted @10 to pursue something that was consistent with who they had become as an adult...

So here I am, getting better at pottery and actually thinking about who and where and what I want to be in five years...  get ready future boss, I have a plan th

...there are deer in the yard, I gotta go...

-silly

RAKU-Feb 08

So Cricket and Wolf and I took another Raku class over the weekend. What fun!!! This time at Ceramic Supply in (Lodi?)... I have to tell you, I just love doing raku... maybe it's the instant gratification, or the crap-shoot of how things will come out of the kiln, but it is really an exciting process.

It was a whole different group of people, but what a fun selection of different types of work. It is always funny to me to find how much potters have in common when we get together for a workshop. Plenty of odd people to be sure, but some really great folks overall.

Well, here are a few of the new pieces. Oddly enough the green one and the brassy one are the same glaze.

-silly

some pots...

so these are a couple of my pots... well, a vase and a jug... I got a real digital camera from Cricket for Christmas and I need to take some good photos of my stuff (like Wolf does), but, as I gave these away already, I figured that these are the best shots I'm going to get. -silly

Raku Class

So we decided to take a raku class at Peter's Valley... What a scream - fire, smoke and glowing pots! Working with Bruce Denhert I came away with 12 great pieces... ("great" being relative for a firsttime raku-er who only learned to throw last spring) ... I got to work the propane torch and managed to singe all the hair off my hands (no I didn't have the gloves on at the time), but "It'll grow back"... ...we're taking another raku class in February wish me luck...