warmth

Today felt like the first day of spring here. My tulips are coming up and have been eaten off again by the passing deer. So much for festive colours in front of the house. The classes at both mohawk and DVSA are between terms and so I had a very short day in a mohawk today. Kiln shelves were washed, platter were checked on and the studio had a quick once over with the mop.

This left me with most of the day to spend in my own studio. For the first time I managed to sit down at my wheel and be bathed in sunlight. My old studio for those of of you who had never been here was in the basement. As was my studio before that and most peoples first studios. They are the unwanted spaces of most homes and are easily converted to a messy area. Finally having a studio above ground is wonderful. The warm sun on my hands as I through made up for the fact that I was wearing a tuque and that the water almost had ice in it. Luckily my clay lives beside my heater and so it too was warm.

Here are a couple of pics of some brie bakers and some new slab dishes with feet on my new rolling racks. The dishes are decorated with roulettes as slabs and after setting up they are slumped over a plaster mold and the feet are added.

The brie bakers all received a generous coating of slip after only a couple of hours of drying. The warmth of the sun was making them happy as well today. Seems like my window placement was a good choice.

mix ups

A couple of weeks ago I re-wrote my glaze book. It was a mess with glaze spills and oxides. Not to mention all the formulas that were written in the margins. In doing so I seem to have miss labeled my slip recipes. This was twigged by a friend and fellow Potter Jordan McDonald who comment that my recipe seemed to be lacking a lot of plasticity (clay). Was he ever right. I had switched the titles of my Robin Hopper Slip with my Casting Slip. What a goof.

Now that the problem is solved I have two new buckets of slip aging. I took the opportunity yesterday, to make some more platters to try it out and make sure the slip is right this time. It was nice a creamy in the bucket and stood up well to some brush work. Hopefully these 30 inchers will last this time. My pile of reclaim only seems to be growing these days and not going down. Luckily one bucket of reclaim equals 4 platters so the pile will go down quickly once it is processed again.
I love when I can get the slip to clinging to the underside of the rim like this. I try as much as possible to have at least one on each platter. It comes from the brush pushing the slip out over the edge when I'm swirling the leaf pattern on. I think it references the wet slip really well. They end up looking dynamic like maybe they might drip off.

identity issue

Well I have the first pieces back from the gas kiln now and am wondering if I need to work on my identity? I think this new work is going in a wonderful direction but am concerned some of it looks an awful lot like fellow potters Tony and Sheila Clennell. They have been very good to me and I respect both them and their work very much. Sometimes I wonder if my admiration comes too close copying? The surface on these plates is very much the surface that Tony and Sheila often achieve on their Shino work.


While I wonder about the shino surface, i do have to admit that the slip decorated work is working very well. I love the way it carbon traps on the ridges of slip. Carbon trapping is formed by the soluble soda ash in the glaze coming to the surface on drying pots after they have been glazed. This surface soda ash traps carbon int he form of soot in the early reduction stages of the firing. It then melts into the glaze leaving areas of carbon suspended int he surface glaze matrix. You can really see this well on the surface of the white shino cup and bowl .

I have more cups in this weeks firing and hope they turn out as well as these did. The latest batch are in a couple of colours, red, celadon, and raven's blue. We'll see if I feel these give me more of the identity that I was looking for.

Last week I kept working on the large platters with slip decoration. I have now busted through 8 large plates ans 14 small wall plates all having slip cracking off them in the drying. Something seems to be a miss in my bucket of slip. Perhaps I need to make yet another batch and see if I have mixed it incorrectly?

Back to the wheel!

one step in the wrong direction

I've been working on these slip decorated pots for a couple of months now and finally ran out of slip. In my infinite wisdom I decided to mix up a new recipe that was supposed to be whiter and promptly put it all over these great little wall plates. Guess who should have tested for fit. All the slip flakes right off. So 4 wall plates and 4 large platters later, I now have 2 buckets of my old slip mixed up and aging.


The slip I am using is Robin Hopper's White Slip.
30 g-200
20 EPK
10 OM-4
40 flint

I'll be working on more porcelain cups this week as the slip sets up a bit. It needs to settle for at least a week so that any excess water comes to the top of the bucket and can be drained off. The slip needs to be quite thick, almost like hard peak egg whites so that it hods its form on the side of vertical surfaces. It grabs on to this clay so well that it can actually rip off the surface if it shrinks too much. From one extreme to another I guess.


I made 20 cups today. They have set up a bit and have already had the roulettes rolled on and are drying as always, upside down. I try to keep the band right at the form change so that the roulette creates a little lip or shelf at the base of the side. This will catch ash in the wood firing and hopefully pool a little. They'll get handles later in the week once they can be trimmed.

a fine line between wet and dry

This week I'm working on some large vase forms. This one is my favorite so far and stands about 20". I'm using my roulettes to create bands of texture and then pushing them out from the inside to give the surface more undulation. I trim these very wet, almost to the point of being able to wedge and throw the trimmings. This allows me to get a good impression with the roulette and move the surface without cracking the clay surface.

Last week I showed you this large square plate, well, sometimes I push the limits of clay. I thought until now the clay that I am using was infallible, well no more. I didn't let this dry long enough under cover and it cracked in a circle right where the foot ring attached. I've made another and we'll see if I can get this one through to being dry and the cracked one is off to the reclaim buckets.


I am the lucky recipient a lot of reclaim from friends of mine who don't have the space or the time to reclaim there own clay. They had been paying to take it to the dump as they had no way to process it themselves. Here is a pic of the latest batch drying out before I slake it down. It is always fun getting clay from someone else. You never know what you'll find in it. Before Christmas my biggest surprise was a ball of yellow tissue paper from their show room, today was a 6 inch piece of ribbon in the middle of a platter.

Everything goes back into my reclaim bucket, even slip decorated work. It all adds plasticity and doesn't change the colour or working properties of the clay. The nice part of the symbiotic clay relationship is that I haven't bought clay since May of 2009!

well done boys

My wife and I managed to have a night out last night for the first time in what felt like a long time. Dinner and a show, and what a show it was. Friends of mine and fellow potters Cam Fisher and Chris Hierlihy opened there show at Carnegie Gallery 'cause and effect'. Their new work is stunning and complimented each others well. Both had warm inviting surfaces with incorporated imagery from their lives. Cheers to you both well done!

the good and the bad

As well as being a studio potter, I am also the Ceramics Technician in the Ceramics Studio at Mohawk College in Hamilton. This is a wonderfully equipped studio with 16 wheels, 5 electric kilns, and a 16 cu.ft. Geil Kiln. We run continuing education classes most days of the week and have about 100 students. I find this environment inspiring. The students are always asking great questions and some produce really beautiful work. Of course there are also those who don't listen and never ask the right question, but that happens every where. Some times well meaning students also learn the hard lessons the hard way. One of the day students was admiring this wonderfully decorated square platter and picked it up. Lesson learned as she had it fall apart in her hands. ' don't touch the work that isn't yours', even if it is with good intentions.


I fired the Gas kiln this week and so I was there for 12 hrs yesterday. This always affords me a little time to make. Teapots were on the bill as usual and also some new cups. The teapot is made with 'Tony's Hot Bod' a clay body from PSH and decorated with Robin Hoppers white slip. The cups are porcelain, decorated with a roulette. The platter is about 16" and is slab built with roulette patchwork decoration. It has a thrown foot ring. I find if I make for about the first hour I'm there, I can trim and assemble in the last hour.