Sweet!

Honey jars here! Get your fresh new honey jars!
And they're pretty sweet, too.

The shellac resist technique I mentioned here produced the elegant raised design with its nice crisp edge. This celadon green breaks lighter over the raised edges and pools slightly into the indentations, so it is a perfect choice of glaze type for shellac-resist decorated ware.

This next jar is really pretty, but the rich blue glaze covered the raised leaf design just a bit too much. It's still a beauty, and I'm very happy with it, but they were very nice leaves... Next time, a less opaque glaze would be even better. Maybe even just thinning the wet glaze a bit could do the trick:

Meanwhile, these honey jars and lots of other handmade stoneware vessels are for sale on my website, with another red honey jar (nice one! love that red!) coming as soon as I glaze the matching plate, and some interesting bowls tomorrow. After some more glaze work and another firing, I plan to have more by next Thursday! Adreneline.

Thanks for following my blog so far. It's great to know that though I work in the basement on my own, there are those interested in seeing what goes on there and I am far from alone. I am going to slip in a plug here... If you like the pieces you see on my website, (which you see a small sample of here from time to time) would you be kind enough to pass the URL to friends, by phone, Twitter, Facebook, face time, or other vehicles a kickwheel potter has no clue about? I would really appreciate it. This blog is about a potter's processes more than about the commerce of the craft, but it is true that commerce funds the process. I'm a really big fan of customers, and who knows which of your friends and family might be interested? As always, it is found at http://www.mimistadlerpottery.com. Onward and upward, and sweet times to all of you!

Feeling Glazed

Glaze kiln loaded. Check.
Glaze area shelves cleaned. Check.

Wish I loved glazing as much as I love making the pots in the first place. I don't. Glazing is my struggle and sometimes, my Achilles heel. But a woman's gotta do what a woman's gotta do. As my favorite husband says of even my best work, "It's not the steak, it's the sizzle." In short, make it red. Or blue. Or shiny. And here's another pithy and pertinent one, "No one wants to hear about the labor pains, they just want to see the baby."

This blog is about the labor pains AND the baby.

It's almost that honey time of year!
I'll be loading a few nice honey jars up on my website on Wednesday of next week. Check the site for the new ones. http://www.mimistadlerpottery.com

In fact, if you want to bookmark the sucker, that would be great.
Now if we can get the Contact and Checkout pages to work...

Shellac Resist Honey Jars

Last week's honey jars were bone dry. It was time for them to get their surface designs. Instead of drawing on the pots, I decided to make raised designs on them.

That started with a pencil drawing. If you know me by now, you know that's probably leaves and stems to start, then random this and that as I go on. So it went today.

The pencil drawing areas got a coating of shellac. I used amber-colored shellac, so I could see the design outlines clearly. I brushed on two coats for a tough, durable shell.

Shellac dries pretty fast on bone dry pots. In 15 minutes, the honey jars were ready for sponging. A well-wrung little sponge wiped round and round the jar cleaned off a superficial layer of clay everywhere except where shellac had been brushed on.

The whole point of this exercise is, the shellacked areas stand out. They are raised from the slightly eroded, wiped surface.

You can see the raised designs of grass, leaves, those Cheerio kind of circles... They really have texture.

The shellac burns off each honey jar completely in the kiln, leaving the entire piece
the same uniform white when it comes out of the bisque kiln (the one where pots are changed from raw clay to bisque ware). These pots will then be ready to be glazed with colors and fired again.

Looks like I have a new craze for the moment. This was waaaay fun. My nephew Yoni took some short video clips of the process, and I want to put them up on my website once I have shots of the glazed, finished honey jars.

Mimi Stadler is a Woman With a Kick Wheel

As a woman with a kick wheel, I celebrate the simple level of the technology in my studio. Unlike my electric-wheel peers, I could use my wheel, powered only by my right leg, by candlelight in a electricity outage. So you can imagine my frustration with technology when my first blog post got eaten by the ether due to some unknown error on my part while trying to log in the very next day after I created the blog. Frustration mounted while I attempted over several days to find my way back in. Can't I just kick it back into place? But no. Somewhere on Blogger my first post still exists, but alas, access to add to it is not for me.

So this is the first post of my second blog.

First, I am going to say some words I will not put down here. (There, done.) Then I am going to be philosophical about this and say that the first blog needed improving anyway. Notice my name in the title? Now you can probably find my blog by trying my name if you should forget Mimi-Among the Pots. You couldn't do that before.

The plan is to update this every week or two. As I spend part of at least four days a week breathing some clay dust down in the dungeon, and a good bit of my off time reading about pottery, watching pottery-making videos and making little sketches of potential pot designs, clay is on my mind a whole lot. Musings are going to come up.

Meanwhile, if you haven't gone to my web site, it is www.mimistadlerpottery.com . It is being put together by web woman Deborah Berman. We are almost done getting it together. It is going to be my retail shop very shortly.

For the new year- honey jars!