On Glaze Ingredients and Old Kilns

After conversations with the manufacturer and my local supplier, weeks of deliberation, and some consultation with my favorite business analyst son (who really helps me weigh studio practicalities), I will be buying a new kiln. The same brand (Skutt) and size (7 cubic feet of interior space) as my trusty old kiln, the new one will have a digital controller so the kiln can be programmed to fire better for better glaze development. I will be able to heat it up slowly and cool it down slowly, a possibility much harder to obtain with the old manual switches (low, medium, high). I am looking for richer and more interesting glaze colors and textures, and this will help. (The brownish red color on the rim of the glaze-test cup below will be a much richer rust red with slower cooling in the kiln, for example.) I'm excited to order the kiln today.

Price Green- almost more blue than green. (Viewing the color depends on your browser settings, though.)

 Late last week I went into my ceramic supplier to pick up some wax resist and a couple of small tools. I also wanted some black nickel oxide, an ingredient in a recipe for Price Green, a great, fat green-blue glaze I came across lately when I wasn't even looking.  In an offhand way, without paying much attention, I figured I will make a bunch of buckets of this glaze over the next couple of years, so I'd better stock up. "Five lbs of black nickel oxide, please."

The cashier got it from a shelf behind the desk. (I hadn't asked the price. I should have been tipped off by where they keep it.) Ringing it up, she noted, "I'm just letting you know this is very expensive."

"What's 'very expensive'?"

"$280."

Oops. Reality check. Black nickel oxide is the least ingredient in the recipe- like the food coloring in frosting, if you will. I am not sure where my brain was with that 5 lbs. I bought a quarter lb, less than $15 worth, which will probably do for the next eight buckets of Price Green, after which I may have moved on to a whole 'nother color palette. (Talk about studio practicalities!)

Meanwhile, I still have enough of this color and others, already mixed up in buckets, to glaze a few loads for the kiln. 

Here is a typical glaze phase in the studio. There are bisqued but still-to-be-glazed pots (washing cups and small dishes on the left), glazed but unfired pots (the chalky looking brown and white ones on the right), and fired pots (those black bowls) that need to be refired with glaze touchups.

My old kiln will run one of its last two glaze firings this week. When the new kiln arrives in a few weeks, the old kiln will run for bisque firings only and no longer have the higher wear and tear of glaze firings. My good old workhorse, 25 years old, will be on light duty from now on.

Hand Built Pottery Forms

October 26: 11-12:15 a.m. I will do a handbuilding demonstration in East Windsor, New Jersey. I'm part of the live entertainment at a best-in-state senior art show. I didn't enter this show as it is for 60+ (a few years to go yet!) but was contacted to do the demo. Should be fun!

Since I mostly work at the potter's wheel, this became an opportunity to play freely with slabs of clay for a change.

Vegetable server

Ice cream bowl

Textured serving plate

Dessert plate

Square saucer

For these simple projects I used texture tools like a paint stirrer, carved wooden coggle wheel (an actual pottery tool!), onion bag netting, and a dried leaf skeleton. On the ice cream bowl, I added sprigs made by pressing bits of clay in a butter mold and in the carving along the edge of a picture frame, and sprigging them onto the oval bowl.

The bottom three pieces were actually formed very easily, by draping textured slabs over unadorned wooden picture frames. I cut the edges freely to give them a livelier, hand-formed quality. The vegetable server was formed by draping a textured slab over a hump mold I made by casting plaster in a small oblong meat tray.

Textures, forms, play, effort-  it's all grist for the mill! My first workshop in the renovated studio, probably in February to help some of you out of the winter doldrums, will be on making simple slab forms.

"I can't wait to see your new pieces!"

It's been heavy, dirty work in my studio. I haven't produced a finished piece of pottery in a few months. Prep, prep, organize...many verbs have peppered my days since the studio reno was done enough for me to work. (This is where a studio elf would come in handy.)

I've planned to make bisqueware molds (forms that will not be glazed, used for supporting handbuilt work as I construct it) and "trimming chucks."* I began to wedge the "chuck clay" I reserved to make these chucks* and molds-

from this nasty looking slop

30 lbs down and just 150 lbs more left to wedge. (Day at a time!)  

wedged (kneaded) into this nice looking clay

Potter, Pottery, Rawware: Notes on the Potting Life

 Photo update: My friend came by and took a new photo for my website. 

 Here I am, doing what I like to do- make pots.

Trimming a bowl. Photo: Maddy Hoffman

It engrosses a sizable chunk of my life. In our home, there is pottery of one sort or another in all the rooms.

One nice perk I get from being a potter is that I keep seconds, and also anything I like too much to sell. After a meal, this is a pretty typical sight in the kitchen dish drainer. There's something about using handmade dishes that is very satisfying!

Different clays, glazes & forms over the years

I have rawware drying at the moment, and there's a fired load of bisqueware to unpack from the kiln and glaze. (There's hardly ever just one thing going on.) Today's freshly trimmed bowls (below), for the next bisque kiln, are approximately 7.5" tall x 10" diameter, and will shrink a little with firing.

Trimming, and decorating with my homemade stamps

 

 

Happily, it's a typical day in the potting life!

Studio Renovation Builds Biceps

Right now in the basement, a  man is installing French doors. They are going between my studio and my gallery space. Someone standing in the gallery will be able to look through the glass panes and see the workshop area. When I work in the studio, I can close the doors to keep the dust from entering the gallery, while retaining light from the gallery area.

If I do not have bulging biceps, it is not from lack of trying. Pottery materials and tools are heavy! It's been a big job pulling this together the last two days, but I am at least 75% there.

Yesterday, I moved my wheel from its old spot to a new one, My trusty Lockerbie wheel, which I've had since 1985,  has a 90 lb. flywheel at the bottom, and its frame is made of cast iron. I found it helped to use old bits of vinyl floor tile below the 3 feet of the frame, to get it started moving. I had washed the floor (needed it- sloppy buckets of glaze used to live here) and I managed to slide it into place along the damp floor. Oof.

First thing in place is my kickwheel!

The big blue pail is half full of stoneware, about 250 lbs worth, from  my student days in the 80s. It slid across the studio floor pretty well. It is very well aged clay, nice and soft. It matures at a higher temperature (over 3200 degrees F) than I fire my kiln to now (about 2800 degrees F), so I am going to make a lot of unglazed garden pots out of it. It's OK if they are a bit porous, which happens when a clay is underfired- it's better for freezing and thawing, in fact. The plastic container with light blue lid is full of my clay tools. I want to hang a couple of shelves on the wall to the right, and put them there. The mirror standing against the wall, reflecting the shelves across the way, will get hung on the wall angled near my wheel (not visible in the photo). It will help me see the profile of whatever pot I am making on the wheel, without having to crane my neck around. You'd be amazed how that constant craning takes a toll on the  nerves and disks in a potter's neck over time.


Clay boxes were everywhere. My husband helped me move the slab roller to its new spot this morning, and then stowed 500 lbs of clay under it. There is room for 900 lbs of clay:

2nd thing in place is clay and slab roller!

This is my craft cabinet, full of beads and epoxy resin supplies and more. It stood (up until now) sort of nowhere, in the midst of the basement, with other junk:

Son of a gun was full of supplies and way heavy, but I stuck a couple of putty knife blades under the front edge as slides, and pushed it bit by bit out of what will be my gallery space, and into its new place. The crafts cabinet now lives between the glaze-colorants cabinet (white), and the wall of buckets and bags containing my more basic glaze ingredients.

Supply cabinets make friends

Oxides and colorants:

Cobalt carbonate, Red iron oxide, Mason stains and much more

Non-pottery craft supplies:

Beads, wire, findings, glues, epoxy resin supplies, tools and more

Too bad I didn't take a photo of the glaze bucket mess before I moved it. It lived under a table  made of an old door, which sat on two filing cabinets and stood where the slab roller now lives. I first had to shlep out the wet glazes, get rid of those that don't work for me any more, and wash out still-useful buckets. It was a sloppy job, but done now. Here is the mid-stage of cleanup:

And here are the glaze buckets and glazing tools where they belong, now stored under a 7' long table placed in that same area:

On the side wall you can see more buckets. They are dry ingredients, powders used to make pottery glazes from recipes. They used to live on a pallet, three rows deep, making them hard to get at. They contain 25 lbs. of powder each, so it was heavy lifting to get to the ones at the back and at the bottom when needed. Now they are in a single row. No need to move the buckets in front to get the the ones I need. This makes me surprisingly happy:

Ball clay, flint, kaolin, tin oxide, nepheline syenite, and more.

 This is the before-the-door-is-installed view, from the doorway space:

The new LED lighting is super

The studio that used to be two smaller rooms is now one long room that you can see from one end to the other when you enter. I love how light it is now. You enter the clay area first- those are buckets of re-hydrating clay under the table, which I will recycle and re-use. Further in, where I have a shop sink in the far right corner, is the glazing area. Way up against the far wall I have an old farmhouse table my mother got secondhand for me thirty years ago. It will have to find a new purpose. Right now it is just a catchall for mess.

I am banishing mess and creating an orderly workspace. There is still plenty to do, but the end is coming into focus.

A Glimpse of Warren Mackenzie

I am happily distracted with the birth of twin grandchildren this week, but in my "down" time I have been watching some pottery videos. I am looking at a wonderful set of DVD's of Tom Turner teaching a workshop. It's good to "go to class" sometimes.  I looked for short videos of Turner's to post for you, but there is just one, not really aimed at perpetual pottery students like me.

I came across this one of Warren Mackenzie (born 1924) made sometime around 2007.  (Posted on YouTube by Paudoo1 in 2009, but Mackenzie's website states that he closed his studio in 2007.) I've been a fan of his beautifully fluid, warm, almost primal work for a long time. Mackenzie's studio is in Stillwater, Minnesota. He made his "everyday pots" (and perhaps still does) with a dancing spirit of fun for many years. This video shows him in his studio working on a Leach treadle wheel. When he mentions "Bernard," he means Bernard Leach, the early Master of folk pottery himself, with whom I believe he studied at one time. The video is not quite 7 minutes long and is a truly enjoyable treasure:

Here are two images of Mackenzie's work that I found by searching the Web.  His forms, surfaces and

(found on sequoiamiller.wordpress.com- a nice blog, by the way)

(found on mmaatreasures.org)

faceting are wonderful. There are literally hundreds of images of his work. It is widely collected and has been for years. I love the warm earth colors of these. As I always say, I can only aspire.

Last Days in Maine, Microcosm-Gazing

We are leaving Maine tomorrow. Today will be a day on the lake, then grilling dinner. Relaxing.

Away from my studio, other creative outlets just have to pop up. It's how I function.

Looking at birds, writing and drawing... always observing.

What kind of stone is this (below)? Click on it for a bigger image! (You do know you can always click on any blog photo for a bigger image, right??) I know those are quartz inclusions, but what's the rusty colored stone? Seriously. I want to know. I fell in love with it on a hike two days ago and lugged it the rest of the way in my daypack. Fortunately we were already going back downhill after a savage uphill hike. I think it weighed six pounds.

Crazy Quartz Rock

The quartz inclusion and crystals are testament to the turbulent, heated core of the earth. The heat of my electric kiln in the studio is much more serene and steady. I wish I had the capacity to fire my pots in a fluctuating, flickering, oxygen-sucking environment that makes randomly beautiful things happen, but "I got what I got."

So many textures and contrasts in birch and bush! Lines, curls, flaking, feathering, lights and darks, warms and cools. What an interesting visual world we live in.

Kayak Landing Spot

A little notch in the bank of the lake serves as the spot we pull in our kayaks, one by one. A soft, sandy spot, it is easy on the feet and, once I got deep into microcosm-gazing, I found the picture extremely engaging. Such is the effect of quiet, lazy days of observing and writing. Brain gets very attuned to nuance. It's like looking into a crystalline glaze.

Back home, I should get some edge back next week, lose this particular focus, and gain some further insights in clay- such is life. See you then.