The Life & Blog of Two Potters

One of my favorite things about being a potter is finding unexpected uses for things we- or other folks- have made.  This week, one of our very large platters made it into the house before it got returned to the showroom, and during its stop-over in our kitchen, has been used for everything from keeping hats and gloves out of Lego’s reach, to holding fruit and an oven mitt (also likely placed there to avoid the puppy’s chewing mouth!).  An oval baking dish, back from being used as a demo in Nathan’s class, became a mail-and-magazine holder- a quick way to turn clutter into something a little nicer to look in the midst of a busy week.  (Oh, by the way, that adorable ‘heart woman’ as I call her, is a clay finger puppet by Jane Kaufmann.)

And while I was snapping photos, I thought I’d share a few more non-traditional ways we use pottery in our daily home life . . . an small oval vase turned office-letter-organizer, and an oval plate by Kari Radasch turned olive-oil-cruet-and-garlic-clove holder.   A few pieces we use more traditionally are the ‘barn jar’ I use for sea salt, and ‘puffy’ soap dish by David Orser and Laurel MacDuffie respectively, tiny ring-bowls by Wayne Fuerst, and this cookie jar by Nathan that holds a very large bag of puppy treats on top of our fridge!  (Oh, and believe it or not, I made the pewter spoon in a metal casting class with Paulette Werger!)

How do you use handmade pieces in your home, kitchen, or office?  We’d love to hear from you!  (Oh, and by the way, we’ve disabled our comments temporarily because of spam . . . in the meantime, our Facebook page is the best place to leave a comment/question/photo.)

These days in our studio, we are:

- working at filling the 350 (or so) cubic feet of kiln space we have built- and getting excited to fire this spring

- adjusting to ‘green glazing’, where the slip or glaze goes onto the pot in the raw, unfired state . . . it takes a bit of getting used to, but we’re starting to really like it

- imagining what said glazes and slips will actually look like . . . we’ve used and tested many of them over the years, but some are new to us, and every kiln and every firing is different . . . so we really are imagining (this is both liberating and completely frightening at once!)

- making large pots (ok, Nathan is making large pots) and smaller pots, among them at the moment are cookie jars, giant vessels, bottles for flowers, pasta bowls, put-away pots (our version of Tupperware!), wine cups, ice cream bowls, butter keepers, mugs, and ‘tp towers‘ (yes, really)

- celebrating (oh so cautiously!) that our 1 1/2 year old puppy, Lego, has ‘graduated’ from his crate to free-in-the-studio, passing the hours on his bed by the stove (or right by our feet, or somewhere underneath our wheels smelling dried up flies and clay scraps)

- watching Lego watch and nuzzle with Troy, our friend Joan’s greyhound, knowing they are happy to have each other around

- collaborating!  (the large pot in the photo above was thrown by Nathan and given the ‘Becca treatment’ of a wavy rim)

- enjoying each others company as we share the studio . . . usually our ‘free’ days are spent kiln building or kiln shed building or some such thing at home (roofing) or on the farm (forestry) and the rest of the time I work in the studio while Nathan goes to teach, but this winter we are spending that ‘free’ time in the studio and my goodness, it is NICE.

It is mid-winter on the farm, and I’ve managed to capture a few photos of the ever-elusive snow cover.  What a strange season it has been!  We have more ice than anything else, although a few warm days have allowed us to finish work on the ever-expanding kiln shed.  (It is wonderful!)  With the ‘outside work’ behind us for the next few weeks, we find ourselves mostly drawn to the studio these days, our pup slumbering by the wood stove while we work independently- and collaborate!- on new pieces for our new kiln.

(Got to get this camera of mine to the studio . . . soon!)

I hope this finds you warm and enjoying the beauty of the season.

Happy 2012! I love the energy I feel at this time of year- everything feels fresh and new, and I have renewed interest for productivity on all fronts, especially after some really nice time off for the holidays!  In our world, those bursts of inspiration to WORK (and burn off xmas cookies!) have come at home on the farm, and in the studio . . . I right dove into testing new slips and clays (I actually dislike doing this most of the time, but thanks to the change in the calendar, there are about 12 new combinations that will hopefully lead to enhanced surfaces on the painted pots!), and the studio is full of butter keepers and soup bowls slipped and glazed for the wood kiln.

On the home front, we’ve been gathering slab wood from our neighbor’s new saw mill (serendipity at it’s best- more on this later!), cutting it to dry for future firings, and building onto our kiln shed! Thanks to the non-winter weather we’ve had lately, we managed to get the kiln shed addition nearly complete! If the pictures don’t do it justice, let me tell you that adding ten feet onto the building makes it feel exponentially large and spacious. (Holy smokes, we are the proud owners of a fifty-foot long kiln shed! And yes, this makes it’s square footage larger than our house. What does that say about our priorities?!) There’s something about closing in the back wall makes it clear just how large and lovely a space we really have. We love the ship lap boards that our friend at the local saw-mill made for us, and the fact that we have all these great shelves, in the form of the ‘nailers’ for the siding, throughout the building. Next week, Becca will finish refurbishing some old windows for those holes, and we hope to finish the sliding door and a vent for the heat that will eventually come from that there chimney! Oh, and finishing the roofing, we’ll need to do that. It’s been sort of funny to shovel snow out of the area that’s closed in on the sides, but we’ve been awaiting the arrival of some semi-transparent roof panels that will allow light to filter through into the back of the shed. It is SO nice to see all of these dreams coming into form . . .

On the kiln front, we’ve finished the insulating layer!!! Last weekend, we had some hours (and some cold hands) to lay the last soft brick onto the arch of the first chamber, leaving only the adobe/skin coat layer to officially complete the kiln! We are holding off for some warmer weather for this, since we’ve got all these pots to make in the meantime. There’s also a little bit of earth buttressing and site work to do before we’ll feel secure burning out the wooden form that still stands inside the kiln.

We hope your start to the new year has been happy.  We leave you with this image of our puppy, who seems to find joy in climbing into recently occupied chairs.  Or maybe it’s that he finds comfort, and we find joy in watching him do it.

As the holidays near, we take a break from packing insulating bricks with icy fingers and turn towards cozy inside things- like putting every blanket and pillow we own on the beds for arriving family, and nibbling at a fresh batch of homemade peppermint bark!

We wish you all a very merry season . . . wherever you are and whatever you believe, we can all hope for more peace and love in the coming New Year! 

All the best,
Nathan and Becca (and Lego!)

Every once in a (very long) while, we take a wee bit of time away from our projects to travel.  This past week, we spent in the glorious late-fall sun in Tennessee, visiting Nathan’s parents.  The highlight for me was a trip to Cades Cove, now part of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.  Nathan’s mother, Julia Oliver Webb, is directly descended from the first European settlers of this high mountain valley, and it was very special to spend some time appreciating the lives of those passed, and to imagine what it must have been to live in a tight-knit, isolated community of homesteaders.

Now, back to work!

It was nearly two years ago this Thanksgiving week that our family and friends gathered on our farm to help us raise our kiln shed. We are so grateful to them for their support on that day (we finished raising 42 rafters just before the sun set!) and on the many days (ahem, years) that have followed. We couldn’t have done it without you!

An extra special thanks to our friend Bob, who is one of the most hardworking and loyal people we know, and who did the fancy math and co-ordinated this big project and countless others.  As Bob likes to say, our shed is “good enough for this place.”

Hoping you enjoyed a Happy Thanksgiving, too . . .

We are covering up all our pretty (hard) brickwork with ceramic fiber and soft (a.k.a. insulating) brick. Frankly, I’m not too sad to see it go after the past few months . . . the insulating phase means we’re one step closer to burning out the forms and seeing the brickwork where we really want to see it- from the inside!!

At this point, it’s official: the kiln will soon be more insulated than our 160-year old farmhouse. (Hmm, this seems to be a trend . . . our craft show booth is nicer than our house, our kitchen is full of seconds . . . I guess it’s clear where most of our energy goes these days!)

Over the past few weeks, when asked what stage we were at with the kiln project, the answer was consistently “the chimney.” We knew it would be sizable, but it turned out we used over 2000 bricks!  In fact, nearly every last hard brick to our name went to the cause. (We did manage to save a bunch of nice bricks to cut into posts for stacking up our shelves.)

What we did know was that the chimney had to clear the building for good draw and for safety’s sake (at peak temperature, the chimney will spew an amazing flame several feet in the air, and our shed is built of, you guessed it, wood) so we positioned the scaffolding around the base, and rigged up a pulley + milk crate system to get the bricks from Becca on the ground to Nathan on the chimney. And then we hauled and hauled and hauled, and leveled and laid, and leveled and laid . . . here are few photos of our autumn chimney building!

We got a little help from Becca’s family early on.  (Dad was a very eager hauler!) Lego, not so much helpful per se, unless you consider cute-ness to be a morale booster.

Bricks waiting for their trip up.  Becca did most of the hauling, while Nathan did most of the brick laying.  These bricks weigh about 8 pounds apiece!  I guess we’re feeling pretty strong after this part of the project . . . phew.  For a good portion of the chimney, we used a double-thick stack, with each of those courses using 32 bricks. And with each course we gained 2.5 inches of height.  Yup.  Once we switched to a single course, things went much faster, only 14 bricks/course.

The chimney building tools atop the staging.  The bricks of the kiln are mostly dry-stacked (i.e. no mortar) because of the incredible expansion the kiln will undergo during the firing.  The one exception is the chimney bricks, where a thin coating of fire clay and fine grog was ‘painted’ on to help them set.  We also built this little jig (below) to help ensure the correct placement of bricks from course to course.  A lot of leveling needed to be done in every direction, but this jig helped Nathan ensure the inner dimensions stayed the same.  (By the way, the inner dimension is nearly 27″ square!)

The last pallet lays empty . . . celebrate!  Oh, and some of you are probably wondering why there is an arched area in the back of the chimney. (below)  When we configured the active dampers, we decided to span the area with a piece of steel and refractory castable.  (We believe this area, with it’s distance from the firebox and the cool air intake, will be cool enough for the steel to survive.)  But just in case something goes wrong with this span over time, we wanted to be able to rebuild this area without taking down the entire chimney.  So essentially, we hope to never have to use it, but just in case we do, the idea is that the arch supports the weight of the chimney while we scamper about with repairs.  (It’s not much fun to think about our kiln aging, moving, cracking, what have you, but it’s good to try to plan ahead!)

Ta-da!  (OK, there’s still a bit of work to do in the little arch, but hey, we think it’s looking pretty good!) Now, on to insulation . . .

Happy Thanksgiving to you all!

It’s been a busy fall here on our “pottery farm,” as we like to call home. (For now, at least, the primary crop on this farm is pottery.) It’s hard to believe it’s already time to put on the flannel-lined work pants in front of the wood stove! But there’s nothing like the impending winter to motivate the outside projects, and we’ve been working steadily on all fronts.

Over the past few weeks we have been:

~enjoying visitors to the milkshed gallery during leaf-peeping season, including the first-ever Foliage Studio Tour (a success!)

~loving when said visitors bring their dogs to play with our oh-so-very-exuberant beast rascal puppy

~sending out kiln shelf share certificates to our “csa” members (number 70 just went out this morning, wow!)

~loving the last of the fall flowers in our vases (or collaboratively-made tumblers, as the case may be)

~putting the finishing touches on two wedding registries for two fabulous couples

~traveling to a good friend‘s kiln for a kiln-firing sleep-over to complete one of those registries (thank you, Tiffany!!)

~packing and shipping and packing and shipping, and occasionally finding treats left-behind by the co-op in our recycled packing peanuts (most recently a small water-based nail polish for our potters’ fingers???)

~oh, by the way, one of those boxes of pottery went to the Artisans Gallery in Northampton, Massachusetts, for the 4th Annual Cup and Mug Invitational, where you’ll find a great collection of handmade mugs and cups, november 11th-december 31st

~most of all, building the massive collection of bricks that is the chimney of our kiln! (we’re really gaining on it- more on that soon)

~and most importantly, truly enjoying the work, especially when that means being home together for an uninterrupted string of days, working steadily towards this wild wood-fired dream of ours . . .