Why The Studio Downstairs Means Solo, and Other Nitty Gritty

When I rebuilt my studio into a better workspace over a year ago, it looked like I would be able to offer classes there, the occasional birthday party, or a group session based on ideas like Mom's Night Out, or Make a Project With a Friend. These are good ideas. It turns out, after using the reconfigured studio, that it is a really ideal space... for one person. One person always in one phase or another of a project. One person who cleans one bit of space while filling up another bit of space with work in progress, so that there is no allover clear space at the end of the day. My studio is like a head full of ideas.

Just a year or so ago I thought I might be able to do it all. I blogged about the possibility of doing parties and classes in my studio space. But since then this web site has gone live, my gallery became a reality, I filled the studio with projects in progress and the gallery with finished work, and I had major surgery somewhere in the middle of all that. The list does not seem to lessen. (I will be glad to skip the surgery part though.) If I were to somehow throw classes for schoolchildren and children's birthday parties into the mix, it would have to be enabled by numerous studio elves. Alas, there seems to be a dearth of the little critters.

If you remember sparkling clean photos of the  newly rebuilt studio, here are the current counterparts. Reality.

The clay area as I left it yesterday afternoon. Magically, it  had not been cleaned up when I came back this morning.

The glaze area as left a few weeks ago, with unglazed ware, duds, glaze sample pots, glaze buckets... Where to put the pottery party?

I'm not sure why this doesn't look worse today. It looks, dare I say it, almost clean. But I just hung the shelves last week.

Making pottery keeps a person sooo real. You can't act like a royal princess and make pots. There is, let's say, making mugs, and then there's mopping up after work. Making bowls, and recycling the scrap clay left over. (And then mopping up.) Making vases, and weighing out ingredients to replenish homemade buckets of glaze. (And then, you got it, mopping up.) It's all work, whether I love every part of it or not. There's work that requires wearing protective gloves because it's hard on the hands, and work for which I need to wear a mask to protect my lungs. And there's the delightful work of carving designs into pots, which transcends most of the rest. (After which, yes, there's mopping up.)

Then there are taking photos and putting them on the website, doing the books, updating the inventory, pricing the work, cleaning the gallery (dusting as well as mopping!), assessing supplies, ordering materials, and taking trips to the supplier. I like unloading a kiln full of good pots, but not grinding and whitewashing the kiln shelves periodically between firings to clean and protect them from glaze drips, or the physical act of loading and unloading the kiln, which requires lots of leaning in and lifting. I like talking to people at shows, and selling work, but before that there's packing the work, getting to the show, unpacking, setting up the displays; and then afterward, breaking the displays back down after and re-packing the unsold wares. The creative part is good. Very good. But it is not free. And when I price something, it is not only about "How long did it take you to make that?" It's about so much more. Still (and even though I know very well that the term is relative) I try to keep the work affordable.

While I may not offer classes, you are most welcome to visit the gallery. Come on over in person! It will make all that mopping worth it. (Although we sanded floors upstairs yesterday, and now there seems to be a fresh cover of fine dust. It's called living!)

A Pair of Pots One Summer

Hot summer, 1986 or so, backyard, a pair of wooden stools standing in the grass. 

I had a couple of shallow bisqued bowls lying around my studio. I laid some white earthenware clay in each. I put them out on the two stools and set up clay, water and minimal tools. Then I went to work!

Building from those bases, I rolled big, fat coils of clay between my hands, and walking around the stools, one then the other, I added coils to the two pots. Engrossing task!

They grew taller. Soon I had two big pots going. 

I built them over the course of a few days, several inches taller each time. In between, I took them inside and covered them with plastic so they would not dry out. When the next day came, I brought them back outside and worked on them some more. They grew bigger and heavier.

They ended up fairly tall for me (then still a newbie with clay) and big around the body. 

Cave of Vines. Approximately 19" tall x 41" measured around the body. Cone 04 eartheware. By Mimi Stadler

Coreopsis Wind. Approximately 16" tall x 38" measured around the body. Cone 04 earthenware, underglazes. By Mimi Stadler

I pinched, pulled and paddled the coils into shape. The resulting pots were thick and heavy. The process was all by hand and so satisfying. I had no preconceived notions of what I could or could not do.

When the two pots had firmed up a bit I carved them, spritzed them with watered-down underglazes, and painted designs on them with full-strength underglazes right from the bottle. It was wonderful out there in the grass in the shade, in my summer yard.

Eventually I had these finished pots. Now they flank my fireplace. 

Cave of Vines brings back a woodland memory from childhood. 

Coreopsis Wind brings me a reminiscence of my garden when my children were small. 

The pots make me think of a hot summer in the throes of creative growth. 

I am never going to sell these.

A $20 Mug

Is $20 for a handmade mug expensive?

Eleven years ago (I remember because it was at a major family event) one of my brothers asked me why I make mugs. He said, "You can buy a mug at Walmart for cheap. Why would you make a mug for $20? Nobody will buy it." I responded, "If you don't see a difference between my mug and the one from Walmart, you should buy the one from Walmart!" 

I almost gave up making mugs. Even though I love to make them. Because there is truth in the Walmart comparison. Many people see price first.

Making a good mug is an art. The body must be light in weight and well-shaped for drinking. The handle must fit the hand and perform a balancing act so the contents of the mug don't end up on your lap. The surface must appeal. There should not be uncomfortable seams, or glaze that chips or stains easily.

A Walmart-type mug may be okay. In my experience, and based on what I see on people's mug shelves, the big-box store mugs often chip quickly, and the glaze usually begins to retain coffee or tea stains in the craze lines very soon. There's nothing particularly interesting about using them. They are cheap, utilitarian, and easily replaced. But the go-to mugs in a potter's cupboard will not be those. They will be the different ones, the one with interesting texture or shape, the ones with drinking lips that are neither too thick nor too thin, and that hold just the right amount of liquid to suit particular individuals.

Last year, after attending a workshop, I bought one of the workshop potter's $60 mugs. He gave me a courtesy price, because I am a potter too. It was still the most I had spent on a mug, but I enjoyed this mug for its shape, color and texture, and use it every day.

Steven Hill mug. I use this one all the time and love it.

This year, at a prestigious pottery show, I bought two mugs I liked, one for $55

Love the meticulously decorated, wood-fired surface of this Charity Davis Woodard mug.

and one for $30.

Wood-fired mug by Mark Shapiro. This one is the easiest to hold and the lightness of weight is a real pleasure.

I knew the art and labor that went into making them, especially how the most expensive one had been fired with a group of pots in a kiln that had to be fed with  wood over a 72-hour period to create some of those surface effects. These two potters did not give me a courtesy price for also being a potter. They were at a prestigious pottery sale, and a portion of their sales already was spoken for by the venue.  Potters selling at a show may end up making as little as 50% per item, and must build in fair wage for themselves. I was paying the potters their considered fair value; there is yet another layer to fair value- depending upon whether you are the buyer or the seller, of course. I am not a layman. I understand as a professional what the cost to the potter really is.

I still make mugs because they are so useful. And so beautiful. And so intimate. I don't fire my pots in a wood kiln (although I love the surface it gives the pots), so that cuts down radically on the labor of firing. But I give them good handles, good surfaces, pleasantly shaped bodies, and rims that are made to drink from. I do not cast them, ram-press them, or buy the mugs ready-made for "painting." I make each by hand, with care. And for these, I charge $20. It is up to the buyers to decide whether to go to Walmart, or to check out the mugs on my website (scroll down that page to see mugs!) or to come right to the gallery, hold various mugs in their hands, and decide which are just right for them.

Perfectly Imperfect

About 14 years ago, I had a visitor, around age 20, looking around my studio. He had no specific interest in pottery, but happened to be there because he worked at the camp where I ran the pottery room, and the day that camp ended for the season, I gave him a lift from camp as far as my house. While he waited for his ride for the rest of the way home, I had invited him to see my pots, which were different from the ceramic things I made with the kids at camp.

I showed him one I had recently  made and which I liked. I'd formed it as a cylindrical vase, then I had manipulated the sides and added dabs of clay so that it was off-round and (-I thought-) interesting. 

"But it's dented," he said, wrinkling his nose.

I could see that he knew it through his very pores. This thing was badly made. It is not an uncommon notion: The more perfectly, symmetrically  molded the thing, clearly, the better it is. 

I doubt he'd ever seen someone strive to alter a thing from perfect (perfectly boring) to something other (more interesting). Perfection is an acculturated thing, especially in societies where most of the items with which people come into contact are machine made.

I have a different notion. "Perfect" has little to do with the work I make. I like my work to function well, to look good, be interesting, beautiful, even thought-provoking. But most of all I like my work to have something soulful in it. Like human beings, the pots I like most are perfectly... imperfect.  

Thrown and altered vase, "Rabbit Portal", in a private collection. By Mimi Stadler.

Serving plate and bowl, made from rolled-out slabs of clay hand-manipulated into shape. In private collection. By Mimi Stadler.

Detail of relief tile made from a rolled-out slab of clay and carved by hand. One of a kind. By Mimi Stadler.

Thrown, hand-fluted and carved vase. Currently in private collection. By Mimi Stadler.

People are employed in ceramics factories that are equipped with ram presses and banks of casting molds. With these they rapidly make identical pots. Factory ceramics is a good commercial occupation. It employs people and produces repeatable, affordable wares. A place like that can turn out perfectly decent and even beautiful pottery. If you break one cast fine china plate or ram-pressed stoneware mug with cast handle, there will be another exactly like it available to replace it. Even I can see the excellent value in this.

On another end of mass production, using the same factory techniques but without finishing the surface, bisqued ware is trendy for recreational purposes. You can go to a "paint-your-own" shop, where you will be provided with the pottery bisque blanks you select, and you can buy and decorate it yourself right there. Your piece, exactly shaped like your friend's, will look different because you will "paint" it your own way.

But because customers never touch fresh clay, there is a certain sense of "Presto, change-o!" After customers brush glazes onto the pre-made pieces, they leave the kiln-firing part to the paint-your-own shop employees, and return to pick up the magically finished piece in a few days. This is a fun thing to do, and has its own validity. I have only one thing against it. The instant gratification found there fosters a lack of understanding of what it is like to take a bit of clay and turn it gradually, through experience and acquired expertise, into an unique work that begins well before the cosmetic skin of glaze is applied. The necessary, equal and opposite reaction on the part of a clay artist, is the necessity to educate people about what it is potters do, and why it has effortful complexity, as compared to the one-two-three-done that is experienced at "Paint-It-Yours".  

The experience of the studio potter is a sequence of learning and innovation that is like gathering seed, planting it, helping it grow and getting the end result born. Studio pottery in 2014 continues to be a cottage industry, a gentle backlash to assembly line automation, a challenge to individual creativity, and it is an educated endeavor significantly distinguished from hobby activities. The sequence of making pots professionally by hand reflects the human condition, which is flawed, laborious, and very interesting. Interesting pots are individuals, as I've said before and will again; perfectly imperfect. 

Move Over, Kick Wheel.

1979 or so: Greenwich Village street fair, bought a set of four stacking mugs from the potter who made them. Thought, "I'll bet I could do this!" Newlywed, still in college.

1981: Got busy with young family, but kept thinking about working with clay.

March, 1985: First lessons with a potter in East Rutherford, NJ. Hooked, but good. Continued busyness with family, but the clay was calling, too. Fall semester: back to college, which was unfinished business anyway, haunting the ceramics studio mornings, evenings and Sunday afternoons.

Summer 1986: Excitement! Bought my potter's wheel, a Lockerbie kickwheel. Put it in the basement away from the sump pump and laundry machines, set up a couple of shelves, and began making pots.

1987: Bought my first electric kiln, a clean-burning very-high-temp oven suitable for the suburbs.

1985-2013: Built a working life in clay, using my sturdy, wonderful kickwheel. Through a house move and the life and times of my family, I never put away the clay for long. Built a wonderful studio over time.

2013: After several false tries over a few years, finally launched a functional website to sell my work: http://www.mimistadlerpottery.com. Completed The Gallery Downstairs, 732-492-8558 (by appointment).

2014: Not such a kid any more. A combination of wear and tear on the body and a wish to make bigger, wider pieces on the wheel has convinced me to work smarter. Meet Brent IE, the new electric companion to my steady old Lockerbie! 

The new wheel, not yet moved into its new spot due to lack of studio elves just at the moment, needed to push the old wheel sideways. Look well; this wheel will never be this clean again. 

About an electric potter's wheel: For some, this is an expensive toy. 

For me, it is a familiar, professional, ever-growing means of expression, like a pen to a poet. It is a tool, not a toy.

It is also a challenge.

This is a blank spinning machine, with cold metal and plastic parts and bits of wire for electric connection. It does not have ideas. I do. But it is also like a fresh ballpoint pen that flows faster and smoother than the fountain pen that came before (which has its own, different beauty). A continuous speed may sometimes be a good thing when throwing, and sometimes not. I will see which pots want to be made more slowly, with a more gradual and contemplative process, as I have done for so long, and which pots want to be thrown at a higher rate of speed. The process of centering bigger pieces of clay will be much easier. For the rest, I will adapt. It may take a little while. It will be a learning process. Maybe I'll throw bigger. Maybe I'll throw wider. Time will tell.

New Jersey Potters Strut Their Stuff

The NJ Potters Guild is an interesting group of potters, numbering over 100 by now. I was there when the Guild started in 1987, a rank amateur, having just bought my first kiln. Although for quite a few years I kept a low profile in meetings, being the quiet type slowly finding my way with clay, this group has been an anchor for me in my professional life. Over the past 26+ years I have been seeing some amazing things from them. Here is a small sampling (alphabetically) of the work of several of my interesting and diverse peers. 

Barbara Fehrs

Iris Vase   Description: Red Earthenware clay, stretched slab construction. Surface treatment: Raised images with terra sigillata. Glazed on interior and exterior. 7"x15"

Lily Pillow Vase   Description:  Red Earthenware Clay, stretched slab construction. Surface treatment: raised image with terra sigillata. Glazed on interior and exterior   8"x8.5"

Barbara's work is available at m.t. burton gallery, Long Beach Island, NJ, and in Monmouth Museum Gift Shop in Lincroft, NJ. Her website is http://www.blackbird-pottery.com/.

DeBorah Goletz

Round Pocketbook Teapot, 6"x6"x3". Handbuilt stoneware clay, cone 6 oxidation glaze. Can be found on DeBorah's website: http://www.ForLoveOfMud.com and also found int he book 500 Teapots Vol. ii by Lark Publlishing: http:www.larkcrafts.com/craft-your-life/introducing-500-teapots-volume-2/

DeBorah designs and makes incredible murals in both ceramic and glass materials. (Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn- that's DeBorah's mural in your subway station!)

Fountain Glass Mosaic Mural, 9'x11'   Water cascades over surface.  Private residence in Austin, TX.   This and other murals can be found at http://www.ForLoveOfMud.com

Norma Messing

Mugs and Bowls, cone 6, oxidation. Porcelain inlaid with colored porcelain, by Norma Messing

Quadruple Bowls, stoneware, cone 6. Great for anything you like- olives, dips, snacks, side dishes, you name it! By Norma Messing

For more of Norma's lively work, you can go to her Flickr site.

Ellen Mulligan

 Two Goat Mugs, porcelain fired to cone 6,  with inlaid decoration, terra sigillata and glaze, by Ellen Mulligan

Possum and Babies, three porcelain mugs, fired to cone 6, with inlaid decoration, terra sigillata and glaze, by Ellen Mulligan

Ellen's beautifully crafted work is also found at Gallery 23 in Blairstown, NJ. She shows with Tomo Potters and Underground Potters in New Jersey. And for those who knit or sew, Ellen makes these porcelain buttons  as well. 

Su Nottingham

Su's Face Jugs are a large, varied family with tons of personality. They seem to name themselves as she makes them. Su makes other pottery as well, utilizing her painting abilities, but today we feature the fellas...

Su says, "The shot glasses shared mighty rolling giggles as they emerged. They never shared their names and I often suspect that even if they had names, they probably wouldn't ever remember them. Had I been certain that they were teetotalers and hold only toothpicks, I might have reconsidered that decision."

Su says, "This is Walter. He introduced himself right after he had eyes to look me in the face. We bonded over the grand mustache he told me he preferred, but he never got around to telling me his whole story. With his ship captain facial growth and his choice of green glazing, perhaps in another life he enjoyed rum... perhaps a little too much. " 

Su's entire family of Face Jugs can be found at  http://facejugsbysun.blogspot.com/. Other work can be found at http://sunottinghampottery.blogspot.com/ and http://www.icehousepottery.org/Icehouse_Pottery/Member_Gallery/Pages/Su.htm

There are many more potters with fine work in our guild. I recommend visiting our Guild site and seeing some more! 

Putting the Potter on a Diet (of Videos)

I'm on a perpetual intellectual diet of pottery videos. Education can go on in depth and indefinitely, via diverse videos from around the world, and old potters learn new tricks with the help of seminars, DVDs and my two free favorite sources, Youtube pottery channels and Ceramic Arts Daily.

The hands are mine, throwing a mug on the kickwheel I've used since 1985.

Simon Leach is perhaps the king of pottery videos. He has over 900 of them on Youtube, as well as a book recently published that happened as an outgrowth of the sheer number of his videos and the size of his viewing crowd. His vids are geared toward beginner to intermediate potters, but there are nuances in his teaching that benefit a longtime potter. For starters, he is super hardworking and has a seriously can-do philosophy. A third generation of the Leach family of influential British potters, he lives in Pennsylvania now and gives workshops in his studio periodically.  I took a workshop with him (when he lived in the Catskills in New York several years ago) just to get the heck out of my basement. He makes good pottery tools you can order off his site, too.

Dan of Ingleton Pottery, Wales, is really great to watch at work. If you're a dyed-in-the-wool American, like me, his Welsh accent adds some flavor to the adventure. The pots have a classic and simultaneously earthy vibe. He throws with so much water it amazes me, but he also throws so quickly that the pots don't absorb so much that they collapse. Some of the forms he throws on the wheel, like the tureen (terrine) in this video, inspire me to push my comfort zone up a notch and try different things. I will never throw as quickly as Dan unless I get myself an electric wheel. Which I might just do soon...

A favorite of mine for his perfectionism is Hsin Chuen Lin, a California potter (160 videos and counting) who throws all sorts of forms meticulously. In contrast to Dan of Ingleton Pottery, Lin uses very little water, reusing the slip created by his throwing, instead, and remains clean as a whistle after throwing an 18" tall vase. Lin expends extra care perfecting the curve of the belly and the angle of the rim, and the results are impressively classic, yet surprisingly lively. I look at his videos and think, "Slow down, self! This is what you can do with focus and patience!" It's a contradiction to what I'm seeing from Dan at Ingleton, but why not? It's all (as I say in rare posts about inspiration, on my other blog) grist for the mill!

I just discovered and subscribed to Mark Peters's channel. The videos that are of him throwing have good music, and instead of talking through the demos he intersperses notes where they would be helpful. The vessels are pretty cool and most of the videos fairly short. (As an aside- He includes Isaac Button videos on his channel; if you haven't seen them, they're wonderful old footage of a master potter single-handedly mass-producing wares in England about 60 years ago.) 

As for Ceramic Arts Daily, you can subscribe for free to receive excerpts of videos currently for sale, from all sorts of really good potters who also tend to be really good communicators. Although I haven't listed any women on my short list of three above, there are many excellent women potters to be found doing demos in pottery-making clips on Ceramic Arts Daily.  It's a great resource

Learning, learning, learning, no matter how old we all get!

Warped, or, Learning Curve Keeps Curving

This jar, which had a nicely fitting lid,

received underglaze decoration in the raw state

and I glazed it with Clear after I bisque-fired it, and fired it to Cone 6 (about 2232 Fahrenheit).

The lid was placed separately on the kiln shelf to fire in the glaze kiln, and it warped as it was heated to maturity. It no longer fit. What a shame! It was, in fact, one of 3 lids that did this. Here is another jar with a lid that warped...

Second warped lid. This one was spoken for, too. Back to the drawing board. I mean, the wheel.

And another one...

Off-round, jar 3. 

The reason the lids warped was probably twofold. One, my clay is a porcelain I only started using in the last year, and these are new lid forms that I may have made slightly off-round on the wheel. Porcelain is a delicate beast. Even if I corrected the lid shape while it was still soft on the wheel, it may have "remembered" (clay does) and reverted to off-round in the firing. This porcelain may "remember" more actively than my previous stoneware clay did.

Or, Two, while firing, the lids may have caught on minuscule rough spots on the much-used kiln shelf as they moved slightly during shrinkage. 

If the problem was Two, about catching on rough spots on the shelf, maybe I could fix it by putting something on the kiln shelf under each lid, to allow it to move in the fire, without catching on anything and thus distorting.

I tried it. I have a small bag of kaowool, a refractory fiber that withstands great heat. So I made four little wads of kaowool fiber and sat the first  jar lid on it, and re-fired it in the next glaze kiln. 

Amazingly, it worked! While the lid has to be put on the jar in a specific way in order to fit properly, it does work. There was a downside, in that some kaowool touched the glaze inside the lid and fired onto it, and I had to grind those spots where it stuck. So I'm thinking maybe I'll try something else as the "gliding agent" next time. And I will use the gliding agent (maybe a fine dusting of dry alumina, and only on the lowest shelf to avoid sifting down to other pots?) under the freshly glazed lids the first time they go into a glaze kiln. Who knows, maybe it will cut down on re-firing, which is a waste of my efforts and electrical resources, and an iffy proposition.

The re-fired lid fits the jar now. Kooky, rehabilitated Kookie Jar! 

Learning, lifelong! 

A Good Ole Chugging Head of Steam

Some jars that were a departure for me to make, made purely for the fun of it. I post them here because this blog entry needs a spot of color...

I was not surprised to read in the survey* that came out in November 2013 that CERF+ (the Craft Emergency Relief Fund) found that "only about 1/4 of full-time (U.S.) craft artists provide over 80% of their family income." In fact, the study confirmed my general conviction that it's the rare American craftsman who brings in enough bucks to really live on. "Craft artists do not rely solely on their craft businesses to support their families" rang true through everything I know from nearly 29 years working with clay, and now I know it to be true of craftspeople working in wood, glass, metal and more. "72% of full-time craft artists net less than $25,000 per year from their art-related income," the study finds. In short, most of us have another job as well, and/or a spouse with an income.

I respect and admire the great effort and ability to make a "go" by the other 28%. I've met some of them. They're amazing. They create their work for years and market it with tons of effort. They also teach in schools and art centers, travel around giving seminars, submit entries to museum shows and national and international competitions regularly, and really, truly give their all to their craft to make enough. They make how-to videos and write articles and books about their craft. They tend to be extraordinary people who are savvy and well-traveled, and I have really enjoyed spending time with those I have met.

Another figure arrived at is that 60% of craftspeople are uninsured should they suffer illness, fire or flood. Whoo! I imagine those do not tend to be the 28%'ers.  

So I have to ask myself, being one of the 72%, why do we do it? Most of us work with a medium that requires equipment we must maintain, often using heavy or unwieldy materials that are hard on the body to shape and complete.

A box of clay weighs 50 lbs. At my studio, we carry in a dozen each time I replenish my materials.

Potters like me have to be super conscious of maintaining body fitness and general health in order to keep going. On a non-physical level, we have a job of constantly educating people about what we do, which  is another sort of endurance run. Yet we keep going with dogged determination.

If you know us, you probably already know why we do it just as well as I do!

Dang, we love it. We love creative work so much we move mountains to make it happen. We really do usually have spouses and friends and partners who help us pay the mortgage and bring home the bread and care for the kids, and who also help carry things and set up things and, if we're lucky, talk about our work to people they know so the word gets around. We know we would be hard-pressed to do our work without them. So we look for small successes and good friends on a regular basis, and find enjoyment in them. The average craftsperson, like me perhaps, can't afford to crash and burn out. We need to chug along on a basic, enduring head of steam. 

(I wasn't sure about that exclamation point). Welcome to my website and gallery. For The Gallery Downstairs, call before visiting to be sure it's a good time.

*(The CERF+ study can be found at http://crafthaus.ning.com/profiles/blogs/cerf-what-3-500-american-craft-artists-are-telling-us)

A Pair of Glazing Shoes

Meet a decidedly unbeautiful pair of glazing shoes or, as one of my nephews said twenty years ago on espying my feet, "nasty gyms." 

Some grousing: There's not a lot I like about glazing pots. Not wearing the HEPA approved mask to weigh out dry, powdered ingredients on a gram scale, and not mixing the resulting recipes with water to make batches of wet glaze in 5-gallon buckets. I don't think I'm alone among potters when I dislike  sieving the heavy stuff from one bucket into another a couple of times to de-lump it. I'm not a fan at all of the inevitable splash-up while making glazes, or the dripping and spattering  and spilling while glazing the pots themselves. I'm going to have to sponge and mop tables and sink and floor and everything everywhere really well to prevent the glazes from drying there, where it gets raised as powder into the air whenever I walk around. It's fine, insidious, health-threatening stuff, the kind that lodges in the lungs and doesn't like to leave. Rolling up the sleeves yet further to get it all cleaned up in a must.

And a reality check: This work keeps me pretty grounded. Not a bad deal. I'm not big into the princess thing.

Back to the shoes: Part of the mess ends up on my nasty gyms. And so my shoes live in the studio,  never getting to pass the mat between studio and gallery, let alone go upstairs into the house.

An un-grouse: I may not like glazing. But that does not preclude having to do it well anyway. I sure like the results when my well-glazed pots come out as hoped! 

I'll post results early next week from the glaze kiln I'm firing now. 

Putting the Work Ethic on a Diet

An Achilles' heel of my work process in the past has been my sloooow work cycle. Habits of daily life for years as a full time parent and part time potter have been pretty firmly entrenched and ARE hard to break. But enough excuses!  I've been cleaning up my act. Old habits. Feh. It comes down to this: with my own venues available now- website and The Gallery Downstairs- and, face it, me not getting any younger, that nose to the grindstone thing is getting realer.

A snippet of to-do list from my blackboard easel. Some of it has been there for a while...

It's a challenge 'losing the laze'. It's like eating a certain way for decades and then finally understanding that a strict diet is necessary  because your metabolism has changed. In the same way, the time that passes between making and firing the work, then glazing it and firing again, is getting blessedly shorter. Trust me, this is a really good thing. I have to work smarter to get it all done, and "down times" away from studio and gallery and website have to be shorter, too. Grandkids to visit or not...

I always wanted a magic wand when I was a child, to get my homework and chores done with a fwhissh and a swooosh, but this is different. True, the creating with fresh clay is the part I like best. But unloading a successful kiln has grown to be as important as making the ware in the early stages. Because if I don't finish it and get it on the shelves and advertise it, it's not going to be sold. And then I won't have the wherewithal to make more.

Have to mix up fresh glaze batches, and glaze these tomorrow. (Colors already on them are underglazes, not topcoats.) Truth- I do not like glazing, but it is the sizzle on the steak.

And the office sure is a mess. New bags need a home and I need to decide to keep or discard the old chicken-wire  mug pyramid... Truth: I do not like organizing, but it keeps my head clear to work in an organized space.

No calling to chat tomorrow. I've got to be a lean, mean, working machine. 

Winter Snow, Kiln Thoughts

Wow, the kiln room is cold. It's January, and the kiln room is an unheated addendum to my basement studio. The pots have been sitting in it chillin' in winter cooldown while I was busy with our children and their sweet, beautiful new son. (How many times have you heard me say "Life intervenes"? I'm sincerely grateful for that, too.) The bisque kiln is ready,  full of thoroughly air-dried pottery. Tomorrow, it's back to business, and the warming of that room with a red hot kiln, firing the ever so patient bowls, vases and mugs. While the kiln will finally climb to over 2200 Fahrenheit, I'll be sure to go that first 200 degrees very, very gradually. I don't want to shock the ware with rapid temperature change, or it will go crackers on me!

When I unload the bisqued ware, I'll be ready to glaze it. I'm making two kinds of glazed ware recently. There's the pottery coated with the earthy, intermingling colors of my regular glaze palette. Then there's the kind that I put lots of color on in the raw state. Once it's been bisqued,  I glaze over the fired-on decoration with clear. It's the difference between this sort of color palette

Dipped, poured, sprayed and sponged glazes

and this.

Underglaze colors brushed and inlaid in the rawware stage, then bisque fired, then covered with clear glaze & fired again to maturity

Variety is interesting!

I love to see the cycle of make-dry-fire-glaze-fire become complete. It's really satisfying to put new work up on my website and on the pedestals of my Gallery Downstairs! But now...to the glaze buckets with the next group of pieces!

Pulling it all Together

In a push to the finish line, everything has come together. The Gallery Downstairs is assembled. Pots are on shelves and pedestals! Here is the sight you see as you come downstairs into the gallery:

Coming downstairs, this is what you see.

When I am at work, looking from my wheel out the French doors into the gallery space (aka The Gallery Downstairs), this is what I see:

Sitting at my wheel, looking through the studio doors into the gallery

I can notice whether I need some tall pieces or some bigger ones for the shelves and pedestals right as I work. It's very helpful in keeping me focused!

By the same token, the decidedly unglamorous space that houses my kiln is also off my workshop, away from the gallery, in a separate little cinder block room. When I load the kiln I think about what is needed to pack the shelves economically. Do I need skinny pots, or short or tiny ones, to fill in the spaces between bigger pots? If I'm not in a big hurry to fire the kiln, (giving the new pots a couple of days to dry) I can go to my wheel and make some things to fill those spaces on its shelves. With the gallery on one side of the clay studio, and the kiln room on the other, I am kept thinking in a far more linear way than I used to. All the phases of work, from raw clay to finished porcelain and stoneware pieces, are essentially within easy range.

Loading the kiln. No glamorous space, this! I've just added some skinny vases to the shelf with big bowls.

The gallery is a space I renovated over the last year and a half, after more than a decade of thinking and making sketches now and again. A new vinyl floor (eminently washable and with the look of wood), white walls and black ceiling, LED lights (good lighting is key), shelves and pedestals represent the bulk of the work that needed to be finished before I got to put pottery on the shelves. The French doors came into being because I needed to keep the dust from the studio out of the gallery as best I could. 

Here is a virtual tour!

View of the gallery from the right of the stairs, while standing at the French doors to the studio area.

View from the left of the stairs. I've blocked the under-area with furniture and pots to keep you from bumping your heads when you visit.

View from behind the stairs, including my photo booth where I take photos for my website.

The wall behind the stairs, with a shelf unit and a pedestal. You can just see a little of my office corner to the right.

Suddenly, with gallery and website in place, the working life has become so much more complete! 

Cookie Jars with Hats and Stems

Last week I made much needed mugs, as my inventory was low. Here are some, drying after just having gotten their handles. They are still raw clay.

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11 mugs

I also made cookie jars, if you want to call them that. I made them with lids like hats, or maybe like a cross between Russian onion domes and the tops of squash on the vine. Here's one:

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Domed cookie jar

These are all unfired. The clay is firm and  not yet dry.

I had a request for a different sort of cookie jar as well. I like the stem lid and jar handles, so I went with them.

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Stemmed cookie jar

I added some underglaze (glaze with high clay content that can be put on unfired clay) in green, let it dry, and waxed over it to prepare for the next step.

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Cookie jar with first underglaze color

I added peach underglaze, waxed over that, let it dry, and went to the next step: cutting through the waxed underglaze to add lines and leaves in another color. These, and additional finish decoration, were in black underglaze. 

Rawware cookie jar with underglaze decoration

It looks almost finished, but it still must dry, get bisque fired, glazed, and glaze fired. I'll post a photo!

Website and Gallery, Ready, Set, Go!

Remaking my space from cluttered basement, to construction zone, to The Gallery Downstairs, was an exercise in patience, planning, and sweat equity. We are now down to just finishing the office corner, that important final bit. Then, I do believe, some partying will be in order!

The third incarnation of my website is freshly launched. My son and I used a few basic design images from the other two sites, but we built everything else from scratch. This template did not require knowledge of code. This time I can manage the site without much help at all, adding and removing items; writing the text; taking photos of my work, editing them (correcting for color and cropping, mostly) and putting them up on the site. It has been pretty fascinating, occasionally frustrating, and now that sales have begun, rewarding.

What a rocky year this was! I did not write anything for this blog during illness and recovery or during renovation of the gallery space or building the website. But I’m happy to start again. Life’s about starting over and over, isn’t it? For me it is.

So I’m back at the wheel and the glaze table, making new pieces. Someone wants mugs, so mugs it is today. I do love to make them. But looking at my new empty gallery pedestals (came yesterday), I am also planning cookie jars, and matzah plates, and maybe, who knows, sculptural objects. Life has possibilities as long as you believe.

 Meanwhile, as I went about unpacking stored pottery and putting it on the shelves in The Gallery Downstairs last week, my best seder plate was nowhere in the boxes. Neither were a couple of other important pieces. Garage? Laundry room? Boiler room? Where did the box get put during the reno? Not anywhere. Was I losing my mind? I went by the last gallery where I had a show. The owner was almost offended; wouldn’t she have called me if I had left a box of my work accidentally? True- she would have. It was my husband who suggested I check a craft show venue from over a year ago. I never dreamed I’d left anything behind when I packed up after that show, but sure enough, they responded to my voice mail, saying they'd put the box in a closet after the show, assuming I'd be back this year. As the owner of that other gallery might have said, shouldn’t they have called me right away to come get it? I can't make everyone be a mensch, but wouldn't it be nice..? Looking on the bright side, I guess I’m supposed to go there again, for reasons unknown to me. I’ll cling to that thought, even as I drive an hour each way...

Welcome back, readers! Ready, set, GO!

Off the Drawing Board… Executing Those Stored-Up Ideas

I took an unexpected break for ill health, including surgery and gradual recovery, between June and October. Once I was happily (and most gratefully) well, I got back to the work I love. So…if you’ve missed my blog entries (and thank you if you have!) you now know why. 

It’s a fact in the life of a studio potter: In the absence of mechanized production, this is a slow process. It is utterly reliant on the ability of one person to be there to plan, explore, create and just plain work steadily. A break in the process can turn the pace to g..l..a..c..i..a..l...

Here are some of the new vessels I partly planned while I was out of commission, and partly did spontaneously as I worked. Liking the porcelain a whole lot! It throws like a dream, and lets me make what’s in my head and on my sketchpad without much fuss.

Glaze Tests Unloaded From the Kiln

New: Porcelain 213 from Standard Clay, Cone 6 white clay ("Cone" is essentially a temperature indicator; Cone 6 means the kiln will heat to about 2235 degrees F to bring this particular clay to maturity)

Old: Cone 6 stoneware glazes I've been using for a long time

Hypothesis: These stoneware glazes will work just as well on the porcelain as they did on the stoneware, since the temp is the same, except run a little more and be brighter on the denser, whiter porcelain body. Unknown: whether the glazes will craze (form little crackles) on the porcelain where they didn't on the stoneware; opposite might also be true- where the glazes crazed on the stoneware, they might not on porcelain.

Conclusion: Very slightly more running where two glazes meet. Colors brighter as expected. (Time to discard the Licorice Black which doesn't like the porcelain.) Underglazes have great potential for added color under Elaine's Clear. So far Elaine's looks like it isn't crazing on the porcelain...it did on the stoneware.
Gut reaction: Good!

an array of color

Dragon Lady was still at 255 degrees Fahrenheit when I unloaded the ware. Hence the gloves.
Except for the bigger blue bowl, these test pieces were all thrown from 1-lb to 1-lb 2-oz balls of clay. I gave the pots free-and-easy ridges and bulges for the glazes to find their way into higher and lower areas. Randy's Red got busy in the ups and downs and ins and outs of this bowl:

Randy's Red went all groovy

and Price Green had a nice time with this one:

Price Green with Randy's Red at the rim

Chinese Blue-Green and Nutmeg were quiet and soft on this mug:

Come upstairs to my kitchen, you muggy thang

I played with Shelley's Blue speckles (used a mouth atomizer) on the Chinese Blue-Green bowl. Shelley's Blue, as you can see from the topmost photo in this post, will knock your eyes out because the cobalt blue is so strong. Some love it, but I prefer just a touch of Shelley's instead. This looks like old-time spatterware:

Chinese Blue-Green with speckles of Shelley's Blue

This is the first of a group of tiny hand pleasers that I've glazed, with Randy's Red. Hello, hedgehog.

Little Hedgehog

I had 10 stripey test pots, which were cylinders thrown without bottoms and brushed with stripes of underglaze in various colors. Bright commercial underglazes used to be able to stand only several hundred degrees of temperature below Cone 6, but they are now being formulated to hold up to higher temps than they used to. Two that were especially good were a strong red and a strong orange that are true and glossy under the clear glaze. Several more, like chartreuse and salmon, stayed very slightly matte but I think they will be workable.

The purpose of these underglazes is to add otherwise hard-to-get bright colors to my palette. I am going to experiment with underglaze designs next, using paper templates and freehand brushwork. Stay tuned!

It's already been a very interesting morning in the studio.

Poetry Pottery

Rhythm

Purring like a cat, the heat pipes

gurgle on-and-off rhythm, a

breathing rhythm overhead

rumbling like a living pet

and music's on in the studio

while clay shavings peel away beneath

my trimming tool like

skin off an apple, and

the bottom of a cereal bowl

is shaped and smoothed.

Phone rings and I don't answer.

Rather hear the purring

of the pipes, my potter's wheel turning,

these blues thumping and wailing

than break it with nowhere chatter.

I love this dusty vault

this cluttered order

these spinning bowls one then

another. Conversations

between the senses.

(copyright Mimi Stadler 2012)

Waxing and Waiting...or, Little Pot Feet

The last thing I did in the studio was this past Tuesday...Just half an hour spent, to get these porcelain test-pot feet brushed with a thin coat of wax in preparation for glazing. That's all. This time of year, I'm all about prepping for a holiday instead. I'll be able to get back to the pots in a little over a week from now. ...They're so patient. Much more patient than I am!

1-lb porcelain test pieces

A Seder Plate

Busy cooking for the Passover holiday! There's nothing like a clean house and wonderful meals as the accompaniment to spiritual events.

Double-rim Seder plate, underglaze brushwork, cone 6 white stoneware, oxidation fired, 2012.

Here is a Seder plate of recent vintage. If you have patience to wait a whole 30 seconds (slow load) it's there in the Gallery>Judaica section of my website along with others, at www.mimistadlerpottery.com. (If you want this one, or any other works from my site, email me; my site is due for an overhaul.)

Working on a new plate design for next year, because ideas have to stay fresh to make the work most fulfilling!

Have a wonderful, spiritual season.