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.

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.

Lake, Tree, Glazing

How is the mood of a lake expressed? The ruffles of the waves are colors. The dark of the underside, purple and slate, the push of the top, gray-blue and near-white. Laced in the movement, white and bright peach, elusive. Sitting at the picnic table in the yard of the house in Maine this morning, colored pencils flicking in time to the breeze ruffling the water, broad strokes and small, I try to capture the mood of the lake. Trying, that is, because I won't capture the lake actually, as it moves and moves; and as it moves, changes too quickly to pin down with the naked eye.

As night fell last evening it would perhaps have been simpler to draw. The darks are broader and fill the canvas better as sunset dwindles. But the lake is never really simple to capture, not while experiencing the moment. It takes a photograph to lock it down:

And what of the circle, circle, turn and circle of the water bugs as they skate rapidly over the reflected afternoon sky in the water? How do I catch that complex circular movement? Can I?

Yesterday on a hike, I took a photo of a tree trunk. Why? In the same way that I look at the lake and see the colors and textures of the water, I see lines and colors in the bark of a tree. The green in the trunk was unusual, and the lines went up and down instead of across. What's a potter to do? I immediately thought of wax resist effects in glazes. (To Be Explained at some later date.) This may or may not be applicable in some way to my glazing ideas (which always need work), but who knows? Inspiration. As my kids have known for years about their mom, the word is "texture."

Whatever "beautiful" means (and it varies), if the surfaces of my pieces invite hand and eye, I will be glad. I have lots of work ahead of me with glazes and surface treatments. Twenty-seven years a potter, I still have so much to learn.

Motto for life: Never stop noticing!

What Does "Trim a Pot" Mean?

You're at your potter's wheel. You make the bowls. (Or vases. Or plates. Or jars. Or most anything.) The clay is nice and responsive to your touch, and you succeed at making the form you intend. Still, the odds are good that you needed to leave some extra clay at the bottom of the piece (the "foot"). A little extra at the bottom helps you lift the piece off the wheel without distorting it. It gives the wet clay a sturdier base.

It does not look very nice, though. Hiding inside it is the true profile of the foot. These two bowls were thrown the day before I took the picture. They are firming up, but not dry. Call them "leather hard."

Notice they are not very graceful.

Now I put one back on the wheel, upside down and as exactly in the center as possible. I "trim away" the excess clay. The bowl turns and I move various sharp tools over the surface to refine the form, creating the finished foot that is longing to be revealed. I remove it from the wheel and put on the next bowl. When they are finished (though still raw clay, not having been heated in the kiln and not having been glazed with color), they look quite a bit different.

(Note: The clay color looks different because I photographed the trimmed bowls in much better light.)

The one on the right is the same bowl as the one on the right in the upper photo, the one on the left the same as the one above on the left. Quite a difference, isn't it?

When I "threw" the bowls, which is the term for making them on the spinning potter's wheel, I left a nice thick bottom, about 3/4", with the intention of making a raised foot. A foot like this, narrow and well defined, raises the bowl from the table surface, showing its graceful profile to advantage. A shorter, wider foot would give the bowl a more utilitarian look. It's all valid, all choices I have to make before I slap the clay down onto the wheel. I plan this sort of thing, in fact, while I'm weighing out and kneading up the amounts of clay I will be using that day.

So now you know what it means to "trim a pot!"

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...