New Year - New Plans

This year has started off with some changes. Susan and I have signed all the papers to go deeper in debt and have closed on a 100-year old farm house! For me, this means a real place for my pottery studio. I figured I would show the before pictures now of where I am going to initially set up - once I move out the present tenant (a snake that must have eaten a poisoned mouse). I hope to show the metamorphosis as it happens in each blog post. My big goal is to find a place to set up my kiln and start firing some at home, experimenting with cone 6 glazes.











I finally got up the nerve to glaze my plates with the cave art designs and am really pleased with the results. The plates have drawn "oohs and ahs" from most who have seen them up close, especially the deer/elk drawing. I glazed another shallow dish last Thursday with the horse design and plan to do more dishes in this line in the future.




















The weather was so cold over Christmas break that I was not able to work much at my wheel - something that I hope to remedy with the new space at the farmhouse. However, I am determined to produce more this year so I can do more craft shows. I spent some of today investigating arts and crafts shows in the North Carolina and Virginia areas that are already scheduled for 2010 and will start the process of filling out applications and planning out my year (weekends).











Finally, a shot of one of the real "straydogs" - Bear is our 90 pound Akita who loves to dress up. So, he looks forward to when the boys come home for a visit because he gets so much attention. This picture of Bear sporting gym shorts and a hooded dog coat that is much too small for him is from Thanksgiving. You just can't help but love this dog!

Getting in the "Habit"

Alright! If this blogging thing is going to work, I am really going to have to be intentional about consistently posting to it each week. I doubt that daily is realistic, but my hope is that by posting a couple of times a week, I will also be more intentional about a regular schedule of throwing and finishing pottery. Having to juggle time for pottery around my "real" job of teaching sometimes causes it to take a back seat in priorities. What I need to do is to get myself in a rut - create a schedule that I can follow that will allow me to do everything I need to do in addition to everything I want to do. Sounds easy enough, doesn't it???

Today, my first order of business is to clean up the corner of the utility/furnace room that I call my studio. It really is a corner that I share with the washer and dryer, furnace, some shelves and a cupboard. Not a lot of room, but enough for my wheel and a portable workbench that I can use to prepare clay for throwing. The countertop of the cupboard becomes the drying rack. There is very little room, but the dogs, Josie and Bear, do manage sometimes to come lie at my feet while I work, and Voltron, the nappy yellow cat, likes to use the wheel from time to time.

Once I get things straight in the "studio" and can set aside a good couple of hours to devote to throwing, I need to get to work on a few projects that need to be finished in the near future. I really have been pleased that I was able to sell most of what I made in my first year of pottery, but really need to work on not openly looking terrified when someone says, "This is so beautiful and so nice and heavy!" So, my goal this year is to really work on making more with less - cutting down on the weight and thickness of the pieces - and to make more pieces of larger size. Hopefully, I will have something to show for my efforts in my next posting.

cmj