July 2006 Archives

Lately I have been trying to become more involved in the ceramic community. When I entered this hobby I felt like I was on my own clay island, far away from others who shared a similar interests. In the past weeks I have made several actions towards becoming involved, the first of which was joining the ClayArt List (http://www.ceramics.org/clayart). The list seems to be the most common resource for potters to exchange information with each other and share advice. Tonight I also decided to join the Potters Council, which comes with a lot of benefits, including a subscription to their newsletter, a member gallery and an interesting mentor/mentee system. I have found that there are a lot more people in the Charlotte area who work with clay either as a hobby or as a profession than I originally thought. I don't want to stay alone in my hobby anymore. I would love to get to know more people and possible do things like pit firings with groups of other potters, and other fun stuff like that.

I'm diving in head first and im hoping to make friends.

I have been collecting my left over slurry for the past few months, mostly trying to save the largest pieces of clay and the least water. Last week I finally drug the heavy 5 gallon bucket outside and set up for reclaiming the clay. I wasn't sure exactly what to expect during the proccess, since the only way I had ever done the process before was at the university with the aid of a pug mill and dry clay mix. I first started straining the clay, thinking that i might need to remove water from the solid and then rework the solids, but quitckly found out that the best product was coming out of the strainer. I moved to pressing the slurry through the strainer, this worked well and I managed to get the entire bucket of slurry through the strainer fairly quickly. The solids that remained in the strainer were returned to the bucket, to be included in the next batch. Presently the "clay" is about the consistency of pudding and is sitting in a plastic lined box to slowly lose its excess moisture. I suspect in about a week or so I should have some usable clay in the box (but i will let it stew in plastic for a few more weeks to get the plasicity up a bit).

I don't really enjoy manually reclaiming clay as much as I enjoyed working with the pug mill, but it was an interesting experience. I like the conceptual part of the proccess more, in some ways it is like having guilt-free clay that I can work with and use to experiment without having to think about the cost or wastefulness of it.

I plan to write a more detailed description of the process for the website very soon, and perhaps have pictures next time I reclaim a bucket of slurry.

Last night I completed a variety of throws, including two of an unusual height. The pieces were at 9.5 and 10.5 inches when they were removed from the wheel. After trimming one was at 10 inches and the other was just below 9 inches. These are my first throws to be above 8 inches in my home studio.

It was a lot of fun doing these throws, there is no feeling like having your arm down in a spinning ceramic work that reaches up to above your elbow. The final pulls were a bit scary because of the height and the perception of a very fragile accomplishment.