Woodfire Wednesdays and Greece

Community: I have really been enjoying Laurie Erdman's blog - The Spirit of Clay. We met at the NCECA pre-Conference: Making Through Living - Living Through Making". I love her format of "Wood-Fire Wednesdays" (great work there today - John Butler). The format reminds me of radio formats when I was growing up - Double-Shot Thursdays or Two-For-Tuesdays on WBCN or WAAF or whatever rock and roll station I happened to be listening to - usually hoping for some Doors or Creedence or Dire Straits. Some other ceramic possibilities? Free-Form Fridays? Slip-Cast Sundays?

Studio: My aunt Connie is coming over today. She is the Teacher Specialist with The Examined Life: Greek Studies in the Schools. She and her crew will be filming me at the wheel in order to get some visuals for their website. While my own influences aren't specifically Greek, I am a strong believer in travel as a means of learning and growing and understanding. We travelled as a family to Greece a couple of years ago and loved it - wonderful food, spectacular scenery, plakas, islands, history...and we happened to be there for Euro '08 - a great place to take in a soccer tournament. Afterwards, we determined every town in America should have an outdoor movie theater on a rooftop...the best place to watch a James Bond film!

Harlequin Milk Jugs

Been playing with pattern lately - gridding out the bottles, texturing in very specific places. I like that the staid form of the milk jug is livened up by the harlequin design. Harlequin was one of the old world jesters and seems a fitting way of giving these vessels some personality.

Now the trick will be to figure out how to glaze these puppies - leaving some skin available for the wood firing, of course.

Open Studio Weekend

The weekend Open Studio is over and it is time to get back to the wheel. We had a nice flow of people throughout the weekend although Celia's First Communion took priority on Saturday. Here's a couple of shots of the new display areas:

Next up is Meet The Potters, in Brattleboro - this Saturday I will head up there with a carload of the work and see how Vermont reacts to the stuff...

Unloading, Cleaning, Reloading

Today, we unloaded GreenFire. I will post our notes from the unloading on the GreenFire blog tomorrow. Suffice to say, we are pretty happy with our results, especially considering how easy it was to fire. We cleaned the kiln, rewashed the interior and the shelves, and reloaded. I will fire it by myself on either Monday or Tuesday. Nora will be in South Carolina.

This is the firing capacity of the kiln: about two tables worth...

Will post studio photos soon, hopefully before the end of the week...