Playing with Clay Again

After a 6 week hiatus, (really has it been that long?) I went back into the studio this week spurred on partly by some frustrations at work. Pottery as therapy. I threw a couple pitchers, or maybe they are jugs, on Thursday. One was OK the other not great both in shape and proportion. Frankly after several weeks of not doing anything, I expected to get nothing at all so 50% is not so bad. With the fugly one I experimented with pulling a handle with the clay already attached. I have never done this before, but as I am never happy with the shape and attachments of my handles I figured it couldn't hurt to try something new, especially on a piece that was already doomed. I am not any more happy with the result as with my usual method. I can never seem to get the shape symmetrical on both sides, or straight on the piece or the attachments as artless as other potters seem to be.
On Saturday we went to Halifax to see the summer craft show of the Nova Scotia Designer Craft Council. It is a smaller show than the Christmas one, but it was still fun to see. It was a recon mission to scope how others sent up their booths and to steal ideas for making things. Everyone has a different way to deal with displaying their wares, my favourite was using drum stands as tiny tables for a jewelry display. Too small for pots, but I did see some modular shelves that were infinitely adaptable to different sized wares depending on what kind of show.
It was also good because I came back jazzed up to make some new things. I began almost right away with some slump molding. I tried this once in Newfoundland, and it was good but the piece cracked before it finished drying so I didn't try it again. It is good to get away from the cult of round and just make fun things for the joy of it. I'm trying a looser approach, at least this week.

My Morning Routine

This morning, as usual, after my 30 minute sleep in and my first cup of coffee, I wandered out to the berry patch to gather some fresh gooseberries for my yogurt and muslix breakfast.

Then after dawdling around some more, I finally realized (as usual) that I had about 10 minutes before I needed to go to work and proceeded to rush around (as usual) getting dressed, making lunch, finding keys and shoes and sun screen and remembering that I should water the greenhouse and turn on the drip line in the berry patch.

Yup. That's pretty much my morning routine.

Except this morning was anything but routine. When I finally went to hook up the drip line (now 5 minutes late leaving for work, as usual) I noticed there was something wrong with the pool. It was only an inch deep.

It had collapsed sometime between 9'0clock last night and 7:35 this morning. The weird thing is, I can't tell you if it was like that at 6:30 when I went to pick gooseberries or if it happened this morning in that 65 minutes. At any rate I had just enough time to tell the pool boy the news before I had to rush off to work, unhappy in the knowledge that for the first time in weeks, I would not be swimming tonight after a long hot stinky day in the sun.
We suspected this might happen but we were hoping it wouldn't. Once we set up the pool and had it filled we realized what we thought was a level piece of ground was only sort of level. It was in fact about 4 inches out which translated over an 18 foot diameter, 4 feet deep is quite a bit of water pushing on one side of the pool just waiting for an excuse to tip. Of course, once the pool is full of 20,000 litres of water there isn't much you can do about that. Now that the pool is no longer full of 20,000 L of water we decided that this was an opportunity to fix the underlying problem.
Pool Boy went to work and ordered a load of top soil to level out the pad. We were hoping it would be delivered today but it hasn't arrived. He did prepare for it by using small stakes you see in the picture to find out what level is. Hopefully, we can get the topsoil tomorrow and begin refilling the pool by tomorrow night.
Unfortunately, we invited friends for a Brunch/Pool party on Sunday morning. I don't think there will be much chance of it being filled by then.

Pools and Pots

If there has ever been a good summer to get a pool, this is it. Hot, Hot, Hot. Which I'm not complaining about because I love it when it is hot, especially if I know I can just cool off in a pool at 4 o'clock quitting time. Which I do, every day. The pool boy and I both notice that we wake up stiff like we have been exercising a lot, and it took us while to figure out that an hour of paddling and splashing is actually a lot more exercise that we would normally get. The pool boy now wants to gear the pool up to be an indoor heated winter pool by erecting a heated poly tunnel around it and putting a wood stove in it. I put my foot down at that one, but as I was standing in the pool at the time I worry that he didn't notice. He did eventually get a timer for the solar heater operation so I lost that battle too.
Recently it has also been muggy, which I'm not so fond of. We had massive rain on the weekend but it didn't help with the humidity and everything was soggy including the washing I tried to dry by hanging up in the house on a retractable clothes line strung diagonally from the living room to the kitchen. It took all day Sunday to dry, 12 hours from 10am to 10pm. And the stuff closest to the kitchen smelled faintly of bacon and eggs after Sunday morning brunch.
Between pool and gardening and getting the bike on the road (yikes! in July, that is just pathetic yes?) I haven't had anything really interesting to blog about.
Sunday, during the monsoon, I fired a glaze kiln for my friend and neighbour Colleen who is also an aspiring potter. I used the medium sized kiln, which had a problem with the top coils the last time I used it. They didn't heat up. It took hours to get up to temperature, but I figured that as Colleen didn't have a full kiln load, I could just put ware below the top shelf and everything would be fine. But disaster! This time the top two elements didn't come on, and all but the very bottom shelf were under fired. Not really a huge disaster, but I did spend all day Sunday watching it and now I have to re-fire the majority of what was inside. I guess I also have to solve the problem of why the elements are not coming on. I am hoping it is a flaky switch and not bad elements. When I bought the kiln I was told it had recently been refurbished so I figured the elements would be OK. Just another thing to put on the ever growing list.