Come See the Show!

First of all, here’s the show I’ll be in on Sunday.

If the image is unclear, it's 12-5 on Sunday, May 6th, 2012, at Evalyn Dunn Gallery, 549 South Avenue West, Westfield, NJ.

 The invitation is misleading. I will only be there on Sunday, and the work will be at the gallery without me through May 11th. But while I’m there on Sunday, I hope 1) to have fun, and 2) sell some pottery!

 “Clay pots” is an un-descriptive term. What KIND of pottery? What will it do to enhance your life? Ah, these are questions that do have answers. You might want to chat with me at the show for the answers to these and other questions. Or you can ask me when you see me next.

This is a photo of part of my trial setup, which I do in my studio before each show to determine what work will fit in the allotted space:

 The new porcelain is REALLY nice. It throws beautifully on the wheel and is so easy to trim. Best of all, the clear glaze that crazes all over my usual stoneware, fits the porcelain like a smooth and glassy glove- no craze lines. This, in case you don’t get how great this is, is really, really great. Here’s a little number that has the clear on it, plus some soft and relatively unexciting green, but where the green goes over the clear and some nice blue ginkgo leaves go with it, oh my. I’m very happy about this! Too bad I don’t have any more of this lively motif to put in this show, but my next show is in November and I hope to have some then:

 Since nothing in my life is linear except the evident passage of time, I also have been watching pottery videos and looking at the work of contemporaries online, possibly when I should have been hard at work in the studio. But potter does not live by the wheel alone. The brain must be fed to keep the ideas going. I went to the Song Dynasty ceramics exhibit at the Morris Museum (NJ)and made a couple of quick sketches, which I refined afterward. Here is a sketch of a wonderful covered jar I saw:

(Qingbai is pronounced ching-pie, by the way.) It’s very cool to see beautiful pots from the 11th century, as lively looking as when they were made- because, except when it is broken, pottery lasts and lasts and lasts. The leaves are lotus, and although you can’t tell from my drawing, they are carved in two levels, with one layer of leaves appearing to lie over the other. I’m planning to make some pretty jars like this one- my carving senses are tingling.

 I also drew this small bottle with its flat rim, storage for wine maybe.

("Jun" is pronounced Chun.)

I had seen other pieces in the exhibit with two parts, let’s say a cup sitting on a water pot, so I thought of mayim acharonim and drew the transitional idea that stemmed from the Jun bottle. I changed the curve and size of the rim, and added a little cup that plugs into the mouth of the bottle like a stopper. Probably I will change the shape of the little cup so that it has a bit of neck instead of being so round, but we shall see once I start fooling with the prototype.

 Feel free to visit my website soon. I have someone looking it over again for holes and danger spots (remember the hack job?) but will update it before long.
Time to go box up the pottery for setup at the gallery tomorrow. See you on Sunday!

"Orphans & Oddments" to the Rescue!

We had dishes for 6 (which is how many we are this year) for Passover dairy meals, but 2 more guests arriving for lunch. To the kiln room! The Orphans & Oddments section! Two plates that didn't match anything else...to the rescue.

Lots of salads, and not enough bowls- same meal- back to the kiln room for two bowls. Here are two tureens, one red with blue interior and one pale green, both orphans because their lids met with accident... presto. Salad bowls.

They are with the dairy dishes here, as are two pots which came upstairs way back: the mug with the slight fissure above the handle, and the oval fish platter with the slightly rough glaze I made back in the '90s.

But we are having coffee! And there is no milk pitcher! Another trot downstairs, back to Orphans & Oddments, to the funky little creamer that didn't match anything else and has been ignored, gathering dust for quite a long time.

And the washing cup we used before got chipped, so last year I brought up this blue one from the kiln room. It has a thin spot on the glaze inside and had been put on the seconds shelf...

My very own little Shop of Oddments. So handy.

Balancing Materials, Process and Gallery

Found a rubber band in my sweatshirt pocket. I must've been cooking when I put it there. It is a fat purple band with Produce printed all over it.

When I was small, I loved rubber bands. I made weird-bounce balls out of them. They came in handy for all sort of things. You could shoot paper wads with them. You could keep together your favorite pencils. Before coated hair elastics, you could use one to make your pony tail. (Ouch.) Truth. I couldn't resist a good rubber band.

I saved buttons, too, for their colors and textures. Anything that could be used to draw with, I saved: chalk, burnt charcoal ends of sticks, pencils, pens, markers. The sharp end of a little hard stick could be dipped into a squished mulberry (we had some trees) for ink. Anything was fair game and it was all interesting material, particularly on a long summer day.

Material. Ah, this is a good place to be inspired. The natural world and also the man-made world are full of material. While my work is organic in sensibility, I like the visual appeal of bridges and oil derricks, concrete barriers and metal lattice, oil drums and crossbeams. And if you walk with me, you will know I also can't help the tactile materials: I pick up leaves, smell blossoms, trace the shapes of petals with my fingers, pick up colorful or shapely pebbles and closely examine the texture of bits of bark. Sometimes I've been known to hug a tree because it's so damn beautiful and because it is so smooth or so rough. I still (as in childhood) keep bits of flotsam here and there (a box of frosted smooth chips of beach glass!) though mostly I toss these things away, after perhaps storing the sense of them somehow in my head.

Material is also where clutter comes from. Texture bits: cloth, lace, corrugated pieces of cardboard, onion bag mesh. Fresh leaves, and leaf skeletons. Dried sheets of corn husk, grid patterned packing material, peach pits and grooved cedar sachet balls, all can be rolled or pressed into clay. What is clutter? If you watch Hoarders, a reality show to 'scare straight' the collector in all of us, clutter is that situation that overwhelms, that takes over, that represents blind madness. But mine is not just potential texture, but actual and often used. If you open a couple of plastic totes and bins on my studio shelves, potential clutter has been pared way down into the truly usable, and turned into organized and happily accessible textural treasure. (Except for that four-drawer bin of variously sized frame corner samples, from the framer that went out of business...what can I do with those..? Hmm.)

Creativity and the material that furthers it need balance.

It is good now and then to reorganize, or, in my case soon, renovate.

One of the renovation plans (so far on paper) is to build a wall between my workspace and my soon-to-be-rebuilt gallery space. In this dividing wall, I will put a pair of French doors, which have glass panes that gallery visitors can look through into the studio. They'll be able to see my potter's wheel, slab rolling table, tools and texture items, pottery in progress, and a small class workshop space. When people can make some sense of How & Where the Pottery Is Made, their experience looking at the art is naturally enhanced. There may be some people as interested as I am in the balancing act that is materials + raw process + fired process, all the integration of parts that lead to the finished object displayed in the gallery.

Another use of a found rubber band: Stretching the imagination.

Porcelain: thrown vs. rolled

No, I'm not committing violence upon my pottery as I make it. I'm examining the behavior of a new clay as it goes through my two basic forming processes.

Standard Porcelain 551, a new venture in fine white clay, threw well on the wheel, and trimmed well (that's where you use tools to refine the forms after they have been thrown on the wheel and firmed up). Goblets in various stages of trim:

But slab work (rolled between canvas sheets, textured and draped into a form) cracked as it dried. It does not want to be bent and manipulated. It probably wants to be covered and dried verrrry sloooowly. I didn't treat it to the right tender care, apparently, and it misbehaved afterward as it dried.

Well, this project is experimental just now, so anything could have happened. Different clays behave differently. Porcelain has a very fine particle size and this one has a large shrinkage rate. I lost all three of my sample projects, two 17" long by 12.5" wide platters and one square, textured bowl. The bowl, which I handled more in the raw, flexible state, cracked in four places. Here's a platter, in the process of objecting to my handling. It has two cracks forming, one at the top and one at the bottom. They will be much larger before they are done spreading:

The cracks from this one are mostly from settling under its own weight as it dried unevenly. You can see that the middle is damper (darker) than the edges. In short, it has poor standup when it's taken from the form it's draped into before it has dried completely. It can't support itself unless it's dried slowly and evenly. I can try that next, but I won't spend too much time on it. I prefer a clay for slab work that doesn't need so much pampering. It might only be worth the extra effort if glazes show up very beautifully on it. Even then, a high rate of loss of product isn't very good business.

At least I know I can throw with Porcelain 551, and I like it! It responded very well to the wheel process and felt mighty nice and non-gritty in my hands. The thrown forms seemed to survive much better. I am going to dry them slowly, and see if they want to crack too! Hope not. More tests to follow after Passover.

Hey- if you haven't joined this site as a Follower, feel free! Thanks!

A Visit to the Mingei Museum, San Diego

Mingei is the Japanese concept-word for art made by hand by ordinary people. As a formal movement, Mingei is only about 50 years old. But it is retroactive. It gives a name to works both ancient and recent, work that fits into this idea.

If you go to the Mingei International Museum in San Diego, you will find art made by hand and art not made by hand, a few pieces by people whose names were never recorded and more by people who are known. It is all supposed to be Mingei.

When I learned about Mingei, as a ceramics student in college, I learned that earlier Mingei potters tended not to sign their work. They regarded themselves and their pottery as part of the art of life, above ego. Their pots were their signatures. Ego eventually wins out most of the time, though, and contemporary potters usually sign their work. I do.

At the museum (all photos are from the museum's beautiful website): Jean Balmer’s garden forms.

Forms? These are like big hollow pebbles with holes in the top. Could in theory catch a little rain for a critter with a long thin nose or beak to drink from. Could certainly catch your eyes and take them around and around the shapes. Real function? Visual interest. Environment enhancement. Could a “regular” potter make these? Yes.

Jack Rogers Hopkins’s Mirror Chairs

I wanted to sit in these. They were so curvaceous and sinuous. Function? Certainly. Unusual, but functional. Form? Wowee. Could a regular chair maker make something like these? If one dreamed of this form, or copied Hopkins’s, one could.

Tim Crowder’s Chair:

A rocker made of leather and wood, this had a medieval sort of feeling. Unusual? Yes. Functional? Yes. Repeatable if someone took it into his head to do so? Yes.

Being in a museum, these were not touchable, only viewable. But. Want. To. Touch. (If I may point out the obvious, potters are into the tactile.) And in my own way, that is my definition of Mingei: Can Be Touched. Yes, if we are to see examples of beautiful, usually functional objects made by hand by art-inclined ordinary folks, we have to save some of these things in a collection and metaphorically rope them off. But this roping off always makes me feel subversively inclined. However, law abidement prevailing, I did not touch. Instead, I made a note and decided to sort of touch them with my thoughts later.

A smaller part of the museum is devoted to mass-produced wares, also designed to function well and be attractive or interesting at the same time. I won't agree that machine made objects can be as imbued with individuality as handmade; it is antithetical. But I guess they can be Mingei if you stretch the term a little to mean well designed objects that function artfully. There's where "Mingei" becomes a bit too fuzzy an idea.

But still. Taking "Mingei" to mean art for the people by the people that's also reproducible, machine reproduction has to be figured into the idea. In the gift shop, a set of cast teabowls caught my eye. Four smallish, handleless cups, each glazed in a different color for variety, these were packaged in an elongated rectangular box with a perfectly sized section for each teabowl. The box was part of the presentation. Against my aesthetic will (call it kickwheel potter's snobbery), I found these manufactured cups very appealing, and the whole package satisfying arranged. In Japan, master potters traditionally sold (and still sell) their best pots packaged in individual, handmade wooden boxes, made to order for each size and shape. Mass manufacturers still consider the box as part of the presentation of an object.

Plenty for a potter to think about, after a subversive "touching trip" through the museum in my head.

Necessary Serendipity, or an Un-Chance Encounter

When my gym closed for good locally, I found another one I liked about 20 minutes’ drive from home. Many friends from the old gym relocated there, but there were also plenty of faces new to me. One of them seemed kind of familiar. It was only when I heard her speak that her Midwest accent jogged my memory hard, and I remembered.

I think I was supposed to meet Patricia again. She was a terrific teacher. I took one 10-week course with her. I was at a temporary stopping point in my clay career. Call it potter's block. But much has happened since I studied drawing in her class at the Visual Arts Center. In the 9 years since then, I went back to work in the studio, and grew quite a lot as a potter. My work made the transition to professional. My website became reality. I am only lacking some marketing know-how to make my cottage industry into a better business.

Patricia is a passionate artist. She has lots to say, both with spoken words and with materials like paper, metal, wood, charcoal, paint, ink and more. When she taught, she rarely stopped talking, teaching every moment as her students drew. She is as focused as a laser. It is Patricia’s passion for her art that struck me afresh as I stood in the new gym chatting with her.

We gave one another our business cards, the ones with our website URL’s.

Patricia began telling me that her work is now in museums, galleries, private collections, and public outdoor installations. It is traveling around the United States, with its theme of endangered regional birds.

I've been selling nice pieces here and there, enough to keep me motivated. But I haven't been, shall we say, buying steak on my earnings.

She launched into advice about finding your target audience and focusing on bringing your work to it however you can. She doesn’t make art that goes over somebody’s couch, she said. She has to find and bring her work to serious art collectors.

I made as if to snatch my card back from Patricia, because I really have my work cut out for me at the moment, learning how to improve my marketing skills. But the card-grab was pretend. I was glad to send her to my site. I welcome her genuine interest in clay and the techniques of pottery-making, and something further: what is art when we talk about clay? I know I will have lots to talk about and plenty to learn from Patricia. There may be some thoughts I can offer her in return. She was, in fact, excited to run into a fellow artist. I was excited to re-meet an artist I once knew, one with great drive, who has thought hard and worked hard to find a niche in the art world.

Recently, I read Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers. This is a book about what makes one person succeed while another does not, though they might have equal abilities. He writes about times, places, special opportunities and birth dates, and how they play a part in a person’s success or lack of it. He posits that having the right factors in place gives even a less qualified person an edge over a technically better-qualified one.

I read Patricia’s bio on her website today and pondered whether the premise of Outliers applies. I made inevitable comparisons. Patricia was encouraged at home to choose art above other professions. I was actively discouraged. (Artists cut off their ears, I was told.) Patricia traveled with her parents around the country and parts of Europe in her youth. I stayed in our little neighborhood and played in the woods near our house, a small world, though admittedly interesting. She was an only child, with choices made possible by an economic and educational boost. I was one of many children, with extremely few economic advantages and less than optimal cultural access. Patricia read extensively, with parental advice and encouragement. I read whatever I could get my hands on, whenever there was space and quiet (limited commodities then).

I focused on positives as I mused about Patricia’s path and mine.

This is my conclusion: in the absence of money or culturally rich education, I did not flourish in my profession till quite late. I read, took courses, learned my craft, and began putting my own personality into what I created. I began to recognize that my situation had changed. There's moral support from friends and siblings, who have seen me grow and concluded that I really mean it, and who want me to make great pots, and sell them. My husband and kids want that, too. Friends are willing to listen to me when I think over what to do next, and I've got associates in the clay world to mull technical and artistic subjects over with. I’ve learned to ignore those snobs who sneer at the “little woman painting pots,” who are totally clueless about what I do. (They had a fun time at a paint-your-own place once.) And last week, I had the fine fortune to bump into Patricia, and to start some good straight talk about the business of art.

Hacked & Troubled

After posting nothing for quite a while, I now post for the second time in a week. Normally I would save this up for a week or so before posting, but I wanted to share this sooner.

Malicious damage was done to me personally this week. My website was hacked. If you go there (http://mimistadlerpottery.com) you will see a red bar telling you this is a “reported attack page.” Uncovering the code, Leah at iPoint Web Design discovered that the hacker operated from Syria, and that attached to the infecting snippets of code were anti-Israel phrases.

My Wordpress website had a vulnerable point of access, and the hacker entered. (I only noticed when Google blacklisted me.) But what drew the attacker there in the first place? Based on the geographic origin of the hacker (probably a machine programmed to do what it did) and the anti-Israel phrases, and taking into account that nowhere does the word “Israel” appear on my site, I make an assumption. In About the Artist, you can read that I am Jewish. And in the meta data, you can see “Judaica” as one of the terms used a lot, and “Jewish holiday” as another. Those had to be the targeted keywords that the mechanical hacking program with the offending code was looking for. Any pretense that Israel (and not Judaism itself) is the reason for hate here, is false. I was targeted because I am Jewish. And because I am Jewish, an Israel-hater would like me harmed.

As hate crimes go, this one is relatively benign. It prevents me from carrying on my e-commerce, of course, and this is a pretty unpleasant situation for me. But I am a studio potter, not a school, let’s say, or a business with numerous employees. Hacking my site affects only me and no one else. Indirectly, you might even conjecture that in a back-handed way I gained, as the security on my site, which was weak, is greatly improved now, and the code in general got quite a nice tightening up. Assuming Google un-blacklists me soon, the harm done could be considered pretty insignificant in the grand scheme of things. But the stupidity of attacking a peace-loving clay spinner, who desires to live gently and do no harm to this earth or its people, and to attack me because I am Jewish, is indeed troubling.

I've Got the Many-Day-No-Clay-pre-Reno Blues

This is what used to be: a big mess. I had a jewelry corner filled to bursting with beads and wire, and a cabinet of out-of-date office machines. There were three folding tables, and about 80 pieces of pottery on tables, stands and shelves. Long ago, I had improvised onother table of cinder blocks and a board, and yet two more tables of sawhorses and boards. It all stood in the drab, poorly lit space I want to call The Gallery Downstairs. (I can’t yet; but you can bet I’m going to, when it loses its sad old vinyl floor and stops being a playground for mouse visitors).

First on the agenda was saying bye bye to that mouse and any of its family. I set traps, found and sealed a hole, and hung a Not Welcome sign below the sink that read, Adios, ratons.

The cabinet full of defunct office machines took up prime real estate. Machines were sent elsewhere so that I had a big, empty cabinet. It filled up quickly with the collection of beads (thousands, in many little drawers), spools of wire, and all other non-clay craft supplies. I kept the jewelry bench and my tools out, though. An artisan always has use for good files and pliers and a Flexi-Shaft tool for fine cutting, polishing and drilling.

I packed up the pottery in bubble wrap and old clean towels and boxed it for storage. There was more pottery than bubble wrap, so I loaded up the ware cart and rolled the rest of the pots to the kiln room in shifts, where they’ve been transferred to shelves. Tired and far from done, I took a little "Pot Drop therapy", also known as the Breaking of the Pottery, which not only kept me calmer but also rid the studio of bad “seconds.” This activity is surprisingly good for releasing negative energy. The only downside is sweeping up after.

Too nice to give away, too sentimentally connected to sell, boxes of my mother-in-law’s china and keepsakes from her house got hauled from their old home beneath the open gallery steps and were stowed upstairs to an attic crawl space instead.

We have yet to roll the extra fridge out of the future gallery and into the laundry/extra kitchen-ish room, but when we do, there will be more room yet to display art.

With tables folded, sawhorses too, big boards stowed away, three ugly old bookshelf units emptied of children's toys and pottery and removed; (with that attic area also cleaned and the toys relocated to it;) with eight cinder blocks hauled out back under the deck; suddenly you can see lots of floor.

Tony the Floor Man came to talk estimates with me, for putting down a new vinyl floor. The price was twice my expectation.

Robert the Electrician came to discuss wiring, upgrading the existing can lights to show the work better, and adding adjustable spot lighting. He could not give me a price because I have yet to figure out the display shelving and thus the placement of spotlights. Robert is a stickler for code and safety, and he’s slow and meticulous. I expect better lighting to cost fully as much as the floor.

Meanwhile, a hacker attacked my website yesterday, and it was blacklisted on Google and made inaccessible to the public. Leah at iPoint Web Design is on a search and destroy mission as I write this.

Very long story made very short, it’s been a while since I had my hands in clay. Withdrawal symptoms are too many to enumerate… sing with me...I've got the Many-Day-No-Clay-pre-Reno Ba-lllu-uuues!

A Hiatus, and Studio Plans

Out of the studio for all of December, of necessity, I found it hard to sleep. With my hands not busy in all things clay, my mind compensated by percolating way overtime during the night.

Plans for studio improvements have been going down on paper. I have little post-it bits cut to scale that I am moving around the rough floor plan sketch, representing potter's wheel, ware carts and tables. The new layout is a work in progress.

The pottery in the gallery part of the studio is still partly packed up from the show I was in the first Sunday in December. I have more pots to box up, tables to fold away, cinder blocks to take away, a jewelry kiln and supplies to sell, and many, many beads to store somewhere else. The jewelry corner is going to become the bookkeeping, sales and pack-and-ship corner. The rest of the gallery plan is for a new floor, much better lighting that can be adjusted to spotlight the work, fresh paint on the walls, and a much improved display system.

The clay and glaze areas are going to be switched, with a wall removed in the process and, I hope, some glass doors between the gallery and the very dusty studio.

I've made drawings of pots. There's a small pile of drawings on the beds in the spare room. Here's a page of items I'm thinking about for the Gift Registry I want to put on my website.

There's a bookmark migrating slowly through The Business of Being an Artist. I'm in the website marketing section. I hope this will be helpful. Not sure yet.

I have a new, super nice business card. Shaindy P. cheerfully steered me through 12 adaptations. She swapped the work for studio time. This is the best kind of barter. A good time was had by all.

What happens to a one-person studio operation when the one person is temporarily out of commission? My wrist has to heal before I can push and pull clay, but heck, I can stay up nights, planning. And I can line up helpers... Studio time, anyone?

Who Won the Honey Jar Set?

I've been a little under the weather and out of the studio, so you haven't heard from me in a while. But I want to post the result of the raffle drawing from my last show finally, in case you didn't see it on my Mimi Stadler Pottery Facebook page!

Shana Lowell now owns a lovely black honey jar set.

Shana has been having a lucky streak with my raffles! When I post the next one, give Shana a run for her money! Enter!

Win a Free Raffle, Get a Really Nice Honey Jar

I'm celebrating being in this good show by offering a free raffle to browsers here, at the show, and also on my Mimi Stadler Pottery page on Facebook.

The very nice piece of pottery being given is a black honey jar with a few turquoise dots. It comes with its own plate and stoneware dipper. It's a nice size for lots of honey, or, with a spoon instead of a dipper, makes an excellent jam jar.

This is FREE. It would be awesome if you would come to the show, to which I previously posted an invitation, (and bring friends!) and fill out a raffle ticket there. But if you can't come, and you live in the U.S., you can send me an e-mail at mimi@mimistadlerpottery.com, with Enter Me for the Honey Jar Raffle! in the subject line, and I will enter you into the drawing automatically.

I will draw a ticket from the jar around 9 p.m. Sunday, December 4th, 2011. Go for it!

Come to the Show!

Leading up to a show, life is always a bit busier. The vessels are mostly made, with a glaze kiln still firing as I write this, and one more glaze fire to do. Now the vessels must be priced and tagged, inventoried, wrapped and boxed. New business cards are almost ready. A few more show invitations must go out. After that, an hour's drive and a show setup, and then it’s just ‘enjoy the show’.

Come visit my booth and see what I've been up to, at the

show I am in Sunday, December 4th, at Nanuet Hebrew Center (10 a.m. to 5 p.m.) at 411 South Little Tor Road, New City, NY!

Becoming an artist bit by bit is certainly work. The learning-by-doing never ends. Ever and always, there’s room to improve. I’ve been complimented on my “talent.” While the early bud of talent took me a step or two along, the desire to learn and years of practice took over from there a long time ago. Willingness to work hard and develop skills became my pottery life. It is ongoing. I aspire, like the art potter Beatrice Wood, (click on her name to see a video of the amazing Beatrice) to work and develop my craft till I’m 105, and plain old talent sure isn’t going to get me there.

Pottery at its best has very little to do with what you do at a paint-your-own place. Nobody provides the “bisque” ready for you to “paint.” It has everything to do with taking an idea and a lump of clay, and following the idea through until a special object is created. Sometimes you’ve made something poetic. Sometimes you've made a vessel that needs to be part of a chain of vessels, where the first ones will be an idea with promise, and the last ones will be poems.

Hope to see you on Sunday!

The Way It's Supposed to Be

I think this is the way it’s supposed to be in a business. Busy, and varied.
Tureen (not pictured but it's a nice one!), Seder plate and teacups are drying on the rawware shelves.

Someone is creating a new, better business card for me.
Someone else is fixing a broken Contact link on my website (which, if you haven’t seen it in a while, is http://mimistadlerpottery.com).
I am discussing details with someone else about the space I will have at an art show in Nanuet, NY on December 4th.
Bisqued tureens with vinelike handles, and salad bowls with raised (shellac resist) designs cover the table in the glazing area as they await coats of glaze.

My electric kiln moves well along towards 2000 degrees Fahrenheit, loaded with glazed tureens and more. You can't see the heat, and it looks cold and prosaic in this photo,

but this kiln is the facilitator of poetic unions. When I put the pots into the kiln they wore coats of powdery dry raw glaze, but right now, every glaze in the kiln is molten stuff, insinuating itself in a close and gleaming interface with the skin of the pot it is clinging to. It's like the core of the earth, only cooler, with rock melting and re-forming.
And last but not least, the room where I display the finished pottery between shows is my next big project. It will turn into the Gallery Downstairs. With some de-cluttering, added lighting and shelves, paint and new flooring, and the addition of the work of a few friends to enhance the collection, it should become quite a nice place to visit.

If at First (2nd, 3rd, 4th) You Don't Succeed...

A customer asked me for really nice, big handmade tureens to give as wedding gifts. It’s been a long time since I made any, and since all I could make were small ones back then, I’m glad to have the challenge of making a new item.

So I made a group of big tureens over a couple of weeks. They really are the perfect serving pieces for soup, or your-mama’s-recipe chulent, or whatever hot food item you want to look extra nice and keep hot when you bring it to the table.

This took place in the last few weeks before the freak snowfall, when the leaves were changing colors and the gourds in the farms and markets were making their splashy debut. I thought of squash and pumpkins as I worked, and some tureens grew vines and leaves for handles.

I've applied handles for two dozen years and more. For some reason, I used (do not fear, this is a really isolated instance!) too light a hand when pressing handles onto two of the tureens. So these nice, curvy, textured handles began to separate from the pots. They were a bit too dry to fix, so I took them off completely, smoothed the spots where they were inadequately joined, and I now have two tureens that have a handleless, clean, modern style. Accidental design! The other, handled tureens will be easier to carry to the table, though. All in all, nine lidded tureens are drying, almost ready to go into the kiln.

Today I woke up with a seder plate design in my head. I think it could work this time. (Hope springs eternal!) Over the years, I’ve designed and tried at least five Seder plate versions with various levels of complexity, from way simple to image-heavy. Some were fairly nice but none, in my opinion, was quite right. THIS is the one. (I’m telling you, THIS IS THE ONE.) Try and try again. (If this one is NOT the one, I will try again.) I made the first one today, the trial run, all except for the little dishes and the graphics, which I plan to do tomorrow. The handbuilt plate is firming up, upside down on a piece of upholstery foam, on the slab roller table in the studio. Can't wait to turn it right side up tomorrow. Here's hoping I'm right about it being The One. Photos soon. And I hope to put up some new tureens on my website in about two weeks.

Peering From Under the Brim

Have to grow into some of these hats a potter wears...

Videographer. Turns out one needs more clean hands than I possess when attempting to film videos of oneself making pottery. Will need a guest videographer from time to time. Especially a videographer able to get to iMovie and edit! Will trade wheel time. (Apply to potter for opportunity.)

Gallery owner: It's true, dust and disorder make a poor setting for clean, shiny pots. Also, people visiting the in-person gallery (my euphemism for a certain pottery-filled portion of our basement) expect price tags on the pots. Why, I don’t know… I price-stickered lots of pots yesterday, dusted shelves, and removed the ironing board from the "gallery." Will need helpful husband to move junk out of the basement for me very soon so all euphemisms can be done away with, and a real gallery, without quotation marks, will materialize. Brought helpful husband downstairs to visualize this yesterday, Step One.

Website marketer or, PR department: “Hello. I'm a potter. How are you? I have a website. If you get the chance, you should go there. It’s really pretty. And everything there is for sale." Ew. There has to be a more professional way. Informing one person at a time is a pretty slow way to go, too. Will need excellent advice from Number One Son, Marketing Expert.

Like all things, these are sorting themselves out inch by inch. The "hat rack" is crammed with new hats that are still too big.

New goals arise weekly. If I fall a bit behind on the blog, it's because I can't see under the big ol' hat that's fallen over my eyes.

Happy and sweet new year, Shana Tova u’Metuka! May it be healthy, fulfilling and prosperous all around!

Working on a Video

I hinted so hard before Chanukah. My family got the hint and bought me a Flip video camera. I tried a few times to take my own video footage. With pottery in your hands, it's hard to get up and set the camera on Zoom or pan out for a broader shot. I let it rest, hoping for a guest videographer. Eventually, my great nephew Yoni came and took some footage.

(I need staff who will show up now and then and do this sort of thing.)

Yoni came back to teach me how to edit the video in iMovie. I think I got the basics down. We will see, when I finally settle down to do a good job with it.

Two of the honey jars on my website have starring roles in this 2-minute video. You will be able to watch how the raised decoration on them is done. This one (looks like apple pie to me)

and this one

with its stylized birch branch design.

The video editing technology is not too complicated, I think. As Yoni showed me, a bit of explanation goes a long, long way.

It's as my son said to me a few years back. People of my generation are afraid of technology. (OK, some of you may be the exception to the rule.) His generation explores it fearlessly. Let's see how I do...

Why This Pot is a Second, or, the Slip-n-Slide of Glazing

Some have asked me about this bowl, recently mentioned as being so bad. They said they kind of liked it:

It isn't bad outside except for the uneven glaze smoosh at the top. It is stamped with decoration from a swirl stamp I made a while back, and the swirls became sort of naive-style flowers blooming in a sea of grass. So far, so good. It had the grace to dry nicely, fired well to bisque, and then...it was glaze time.

I got all fancy and did some dipping in nutmeg, then wax resist overpainting to keep the grass delineated. So far good, right? Then an inside pour and outside dip in the celadon green for the rest of the bowl, and that's where I started to mess up. The new coat was too thin. I should have held it longer in the wet glaze to absorb more. It came out of the kiln a little rough to the touch and looking a bit pale.

Re-glazing is not an easy feat because the pot isn't porous any more and won't absorb the new coat. A very thin coat will dry on it if you hit it quick with a heat gun, but results are hardly worth the effort. But this was a nice bowl and I hated to sideline it. I decided to use a handy dandy tip I'd read years ago but never tried.

Brilliant tip: Coat the shiny surface with a layer of Elmer's glue and let it dry. Glaze over that. A thick enough coat should stick.

Sure enough, it worked. Into the kiln went the glue coated, re-glazed pot. Hotter and hotter rose the temp inside the kiln. Out of sight, the bowl rose to red heat. And as the glaze melted, it ran on a glue Slip-n-Slide, down into a weirdly shaped pool in the bottom of the bowl.

There you have it.
Another one for the next Seconds sale...?

Addendum: September 18. Reglazed the bowl a second time. No Elmer's glue this time, just a very soft paintbrush and a dark green glaze that had been thickening in its bucket, forgotten for some months. The key is to use a really thick glaze, I guess, that glides on and doesn't run off again. Because now this bowl is no longer destined for the Seconds shelf. It is now fully moss colored inside, a greeny-brown like a fallen log.

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!

Fixed Website, Ready to Load Up New Work

The Checkout and Contact pages are working now on my new pottery website! Just in time, too. What good was an e-shop without these? Not that much, if you want to know.

Tomorrow: photographing new work and putting it up on the site!

Have a look there tomorrow evening for pictures of some very nice new honey jars, fresh out of the kiln and ready for Rosh Hashana. You will also see that beautiful red bowl, a funky nutmeg and green serving dish, and assorted little pitchers, among other wheel-thrown and handbuilt things. The mini-pitchers, for those inclined, double as great "kiddush middlemen." (Feel free to ask me about that!)

Opening the Next Kiln

It is so hard waiting for that kiln to be cool enough to open!
I waited all day today, doing maintenance and business sort of things, but around 4:30 in the afternoon, had to see how those honey jars worked out. I handled the hot shelves and pots with kiln gloves on.
Some things made me very happy, some things...let's just say I am kept from getting too proud for good reasons; but the rest came closer to the happy side today.

Those red pieces!! Ooh la la! A really good bowl:

And this honey of a pot:

These two red pots were decorated in the raw state with shellac resist- you can read about it here.

But this sadly disastrous bowl! It wasn't so bad outside. But inside- Bleagh. It was an experiment that failed. Maybe more on that another day:

Still having to eat a slice of humble pie with most kiln loads, but I'll take a few bad ones if the rest are as good as those reds!