30 Days and Counting

Countdown to move; 30 days to go. I have finished any throwing I needed to do (I insist on making an urn for my kitty's ashes) and will trim those pieces early next week. A bisque kiln comes out today to be immediately replaced with a glaze firing - which will be followed immediately by either another glaze firing or another bisque.

I'm also starting to rearrange the house to find space for 27 50-pound boxes of clay. I have space in my kitchen workshop (there's a reason I'm single), but all that clay in one spot won't be good on the sills. Time to jettison some furniture I'm not using.

Spoke to the local paper about this yesterday. No ire, no complaining. Nothing but thanks for the property owner who, after all, has allowed me to use this space for five summers rent-free. As much as I wish I could have had better notice, I can't be mad at her. We both knew this day would come.

Just wish it hadn't been so sudden. Now, off to the pottery. I have a busy day ahead.

Ready or Not

My how things change - and not always for the better.

I have been given less than one month to vacate the building in which I have been operating since 2010 when I first opened my doors. I will be finishing up any projects that are currently in the works and will cease production until I can find or build new facilities. I guess the time for the Kickstarter campaign has come, if a bit sooner than expected.

For now, I am in dire need of storage space. Any assistance and ideas would be greatly appreciated. Once that is taken care of, what stock I have will continue to be available online or by phone. But I will not be able to accept orders for items I do not have until further notice.

There will be further notice.

Wow. Just as things were really starting to warm up.

Gearing Up

Well, I think it's trying to be Spring. I'm not sure about that. Day after cold day of clouds and rain can keep the perspective in limbo, but the last time I checked the calendar, it was late April. Someone needs to bring the date up with the Powers That Be and tell them that the thermostat is long overdue for a cranking.

We had a long and very cold winter here in the hinterlands. You come to expect that when you live in Maine. All the same, it gets old by mid-February. And when March comes along, people start looking forward to the return of warmth and light. I think the colder the Winter, the greater the expectation of Spring's relief.

It doesn't work that way, though. We forget that April tends to be pretty chilly - and that it snows at least once in April (we've had that this year, so I think it's over). Actually, I remember once in my teenage years when I was mowing the lawn in May and suddenly found myself in the midst of a snowstorm. It didn't last very long, but you can imagine the emotional trauma.

The point is, Winter doesn't let go easily here. We tend to forget that as March turns to April, but as Garrison Keillor once noted, that April, May or early June blizzard comes along to teach us all that lesson we have learned so often. Winter leaves when it's good and ready.

Personally, I think we have earned a nice long Summer season. I would really like to collect on that even though experience says it may be warm - even hot on occasion - but it's not likely to be long. Even as the days grow longer, they seem to go by faster. Still, I can hope.

Oh yes...pottery. There is news along those lines.

The water finally got turned on last week and I have been in the pottery doing some cleanup. There is a lot to do before I can start production again, but things are pretty much where they are at this time of the year. It is cold in the building, of course, and that will need to change. I'm waiting for a couple nice warm days so that I can open the doors and windows and heat the place up. For now, I'm pretty much restricted to cleaning and straightening things up. Good enough.

The tile project continues to move forward slowly. Nothing like this ever moves quickly and I think that's just fine. I'm in no hurry. But early indications are that there will be tiles this season. Not bad since I first thought I'd have tiles in Summer of 2012.

I am looking forward to working in the glaze lab as well. Goals there include developing an improved clear glaze (I like the one I have but it's tricky to use in the raw state), finishing development of the new Seagull Gray, tweaking both the Evergreen and the Duckshead glazes and who knows what else?

The Kickstarter project is still in the works. Like any other creative work, it takes time to do well. I can't thank my friend Evan Jones at RBY Productions for his help in producing my "ask" video. I hope the project will be up and running very soon, but it won't go up until I think it's ready. Please keep an eye out for it. I need a new studio space that I can use year round. Right now, I'm focused on producing as many of the premium items as I can so that they will be ready for delivery when the project starts. That's a whole lot of mugs! And dinnerware! And vases!

But for now, the cold wind and rain are whipping at my windows. It's dinnertime and I'm hungry. Check back for more news soon!

Tiles

Some time ago I started working on a tile project. I was inspired by a visit to the Moravian Pottery and Tile Works in Doylestown, PA a few years ago and decided to teach myself a process for making different types of tiles. I blogged about it in December 2010 and January 2011 - four posts in all.

At the time, I was working on tiles with a mosaic look. I am still working on that idea, but it has been modified. The tiles are now taking the form of three-dimensional sculptural pieces. The metamorphosis was sudden, following as it did, a visit to the now closed Higgins Armory Museum in Worcester, MA. There I saw a collection of armor and arms that was quite impressive. But more importantly, I saw heraldic animals and crests that gave me new ideas. I stopped in at the museum's gift shop and found several books of designs including mythological animals found in architecture the world over. One appealed to me and I started working on it.

I modified this and started a rough cut. It became clear that I would need a combination of addition and subtraction to make this creature come alive. Here is the first rough cut:

Like a quilter, I quickly figured out that there was too much detail for this to work, and I also needed finer tools for the detail I would keep. I ordered a set of dentist's tools and kept at it. :After carving and adding clay, the tile looked like this:

The feet...yeah, I know. The idea was to start big and carve them out. They went on and came off several times before I figured out that the whole creature was pretty goofy, so goofy feet wouldn't really matter that much. A little while after I drew that conclusion, I also decided that carving the feet wasn't going to work and I started sculpting them instead. That resulted in:

Snowshoes! Well, this was a learning curve, and at least I was moving forward. With a little more perseverance, I managed a pair of acceptable feet:

Then the process of casting a mold could begin. Plaster is not a medium I have a lot of trouble with, so this was pretty easy. Of course, it did mean destroying the original because I cast with a moist clay original. It has everything to do with the way clay shrinks and my lack of desire to do the appropriate math. But once you have a single mold that works, you can cast as many originals and make as many more molds as you wish. Here is the result of my first casting in the new mold:

Note the bits of plaster around the edges. The border was a bit off as well. More castings needed to be made before I got some good, clean tiles. Once I had them, I was free to make more molds!

These five are currently drying over a heating vent and should be ready to go into production in about one week. Then there will be tiles! In time, I will use a press to make these (for now, I'm using a rolling pin). The process of getting a press made that will do this has also been one of discovery, I started with a homemade one-armed bandit that had no mechanical advantage and was impossible to operate without hanging from it like a crazed monkey:

I'm no engineer as this picture illustrates (although I must say I was pretty proud of my work here). From this humble beginning, I looked to make improvements. Books were read, websites were Googled, lots of research was conducted. And finally, I found this great idea:

It's a 12-ton shop press that I will be modifying into a tile press. There will still be a learning curve. I'll have to figure out how much pressure to apply to make a tile in a press mold without turning the plaster mold into dust. I probably better make more molds...

Celedon

In an earlier post, I mentioned that I was working on a faux celadon glaze. Celadon glazes can be traced back many centuries to Korea and China and are still very popular today. I call this a "faux" celadon because traditional celadons are made by firing at very high temperatures in reduction atmospheres. Since I don't fire at high temperatures and use an oxidizing atmosphere, the closest I can come is through appearance.

Some may say this doesn't look at all like a traditional celadon, but the color of the real thing actually varies from a very light green to a gray color. So I didn't feel the need to duplicate anything too closely.

This vase also represents a new foray into products that are exclusively Lowell Hill Pottery and not Rowantrees reproductions. While my dedication to that great tradition hasn't wavered, it's nice to travel off in different directions and see what I can think up on my own. The design was created through a process called water etching. The design is painted on a dry pot using wax resist. Once the wax is dried, the pot is blasted with water using an air gun (which I normally use for glazing). Areas coated with wax will resist the spray while areas of bare clay will etch away leaving the raised design.

This represents a work in progress and was one of the first vases of this type to emerge from a firing. I already know what I need to do to improve this and take it to the next level, and I'm going to test that theory in the next kiln. Stay tuned!

News from the Hill (Lowell Hill, that is)

It's not always easy coming up with something to blog about. Either events are moving too quickly to stop and take stock or nothing at all seems to be happening. Either way, there you are with either too little to say or no time to say it.

Summer has come and gone. Wow. That was fast! Right now, I am all about throwing as much pottery as I can. Soon I will be all about glazing all that pottery I threw. Then... ah yes.

There have been some subtle adjustments to fate here on the hill. While my plans to build a new studio space are still coalescing, the circumstances in which I find myself have changed just a bit.
For starters, the house tenants have moved out. They were the driving force behind my need to leave and while I take nothing for granted, it would seem as though any deadline to be out of the building probably went with them. The owner of the building has again affirmed that she likes having me there continuing the Rowantrees tradition, so that would seem to indicate that at the least I do not have to panic about clearing out of the place.

Mind you, that puts nothing on hold as far as my new studio. There are still plenty of reasons to keep moving forward with those plans. The old building is barely standing and trying very hard to fall down in places. There is still no heat in the winter, making it necessary to stop production at a time when production is most feasible. The fact remains; if I want Lowell Hill Pottery and the Rowantrees Tradition to continue - much less to flourish - I have to be able to work all year long at it.

So what do I have planned for the coming months? Well, production stands out as the first and most important item on the list. I am throwing, glazing and firing as much as I can and as fast as I can to increase inventory. At the same time, I am meeting with a contractor to finalize plans for the new studio. The Kickstarter video will soon be ready to go and then the fund raising project will go live.

Then we will see!

Petal Cups: The Final Product!

This picture represents the first batch of finished petal cups. I now have them in all colors except Evergreen (which is next!).

This has been a great adventure and I'm glad to have this trove to show for it. Other great developments of the year so far include a new Ducks Head glaze that is more beautiful than ever, and designs for one-of-a-kind vases for my KickStarter project.

With all of this going on, I have arrived at a design for a holiday ornament that will go into production soon. I have also begun work on a new glaze that will be exclusive to Lowell Hill Pottery and that will look like an ancient celadon glaze. It can't be an actual celadon because that is created by firing a glaze containing iron at temperatures I don't reach and in a kiln atmosphere I don't use. Rowantrees once had a glaze they called celadon that was a good imitation of the original, but I'm going for something distinctive to Lowell Hill Pottery. I have a vision, but I'll have to see it in front of me before I know I have it. The first set of tests will go into the next glaze kiln this week. Exciting!