If This Is Saturday, This Must Be Earth

Here is a new-ish vase:



That's a kind of clay called, for whatever reason, B-3. After I threw it, I used white slip that I later carved through to make the calavera design. After it was bisqued, I used underglazes and a clear coat of glaze over the top. This vase sold to the studio director (along with two others, neither of which I photographed); he specifically requested that I use the studio underglazes so that he could have an example of them in use to put in the gallery.

I have ten or so similar vases in progress. They take a lot of work to move through to completion so I tend to let them sit. Today instead of working on them I threw mugs, twenty seven new mug bodies that now have to have handles put on them. I may do that tomorrow. (I had been throwing mugs in pursuit of a second 100 mug challenge, but mugs have gotten to be so easy that it's not much of a challenge. Although I was reading an article in Ceramics Monthly about a potter who went to Japan as an apprentice to a master potter there. In the year that he worked, he was expected to throw approximately 6,000 pots, the first 4,000 in sets of 1,000. One thousand of the same pot is like a nightmare to The Brain and me. Interesting though. I tried to figure out how many pots you'd have to throw per day to throw 6,000 in a year and it seems simple to divide 6,000 by 365, but in fact most days are not spent throwing. There are also whole days that must be devoted to trimming and glazing pots--not to mention prepping clay and loading, firing, and unloading kilns (and wood-fired kilns are no joke--a firing can take up to 13 days). And none of that includes the pots that don't work out, the ones that flop on the wheel or whose bottoms you trim through, for example. I doubt I would make a very good Japanese potter's apprentice considering I get bored after 100 of the same thing.)

Here is some dirt:



David, Kelly and I went out to Soilutions today to check out their soil. Pretty awesome stuff, soil. We're going to be buying some soon to fill out some raised garden beds.

Here is some reading: I just finished The Good Earth, Pearl S. Buck's novel about a Chinese farmer. It's a very plain story, very straightforward, an easy read. But I'm glad I read it. Buck is credited with changing American views about Chinese in the years just prior to WWII via this book, a pretty major accomplishment at the time.