kswan

Thanks @Hulk, you've got a lot of great practices and some I do as well! And yes, I am Kathy, hence she. No biggie, though. I'm kinda shy and don't share too much about myself! I change into my pottery shoes and clothes when I go down to my studio, and take them off before going back up. Having known someone with silicosis got me super paranoid about letting clay dust get into the rest of my house. The laundry is down there too, so it's very convenient to toss all my stuff in the wash. I also do sort of a triage system for my clean up water as well. It seems to make it easier than always filling and dumping out dirty water. One big sponge is only for clay surfaces like the wheel, slab roller, wedging table or bats. The other is for gross things like the floor, where dust blobs and dead bugs mix in with the clay bits. When I spill glaze drops on the floor, I use a paint scraper to get it off and slide it into the dustpan. It's then easier to wipe the remains and not get my cleaning water dirty so fast. Otherwise, I feel like I'm just spreading it all over. I get overwhelmed by seeing large piles of things that need attention. Tons of tools and bats covered in clay that need clean up stresses me out, so I try to mostly clean those as I work, like wiping down my bats around my piece before taking them off the wheel. I'm afraid I have bad work associations with those industrial wringer mops, Hulk! I had a regular sponge mop, but it broke and I haven't gotten around to replacing it. I've got weird tight spaces and actually the big sponge seems to be just right for getting the floor cleaned up. If I'm cleaning up a lot at the end of working, I wear my respirator and turn on the HEPA filter. I set it to turn off after two hours. I'm taking a break from a large glaze session right now to drink more coffee. I've got to run two glaze loads before Friday, cutting it close for sure...

Congratulations on going out with a splash (literally)!

If you had really burnished the greenware clay, it may have been too solid a surface to absorb the underglaze and combine with it. It may have just been sitting on the surface and didn't melt into the clay particles. I've had the bubbles of underglaze and glaze happen too, so as Bill said, use a watered down first layer of underglaze. That will sink down in between the clay particles and then add another layer or two of underglaze to adhere to that one. When those bubbles have happened to me, I break them and sand or Dremel like you're doing, add more underglaze and top with glaze and refire. It usually comes out fine. Just remember that you want to get different surfaces to interlock so they melt together, whether it's clay to underglaze to glaze. Bisque is really porous, soaking up the liquid, but a burnished clay may be too tight to absorb underglaze and it sits on top.

QOTW: What tips do you have to make cleaning up your studio easier or more time efficient? Some areas aren't too bad for me, such as keeping the footprint of my throwing area small, arranging things to close any gaps where clay bits can fall to the floor. I use a damp sponge to sweep little dry bits into a dustpan and then wipe the floor with a clean sponge. Unfortunately, I feel like I am chasing my tail some days, trying to get up all the little bits that fall off surfaces all day as I work. With the layout of my space, I can't condense the tables and shelves any more, so I have to walk from one area to another, which inevitably spreads clay around. One solution I'm doing now is to have a slightly damp towel on the floor to wipe my feet on as I move about. I check my soles time to time, and if they look dusty, I wipe them with a sponge and then try to find the section of floor that's dirty and wipe it too. It just feels like I'm spending half my time doing this. ANybody else feel this way or have solutions? Someone should invent a clay Roomba! I'd buy it in a heartbeat!

Nice! I saw something similar, but also with a wooden form that was placed on the inside of the handles to give them a uniform shape. It was shaped like a capital letter D. Do you pop that into the hole when you need to handle mugs, or is that always there? I'd have lots of bruises right at that height in my studio. The worst thing for me in attaching handles is if the mug body is too dry. My handles always want to come apart when that happens, no matter how long they're under plastic to equalize. I find just water on my scored areas is good enough to make the attachment if the mug body is damp enough.

Thanks, Neil. I was certainly wondering about the metal coils that were condensing the water, whether they were dissolving into the water. I have to clean out some green stuff at the bottom of the water bucket occasionally, but that can't be worse than what's in my slop bucket! I'm going to test it out on some dry scraps that I'll use for bisque molds. If anything egregious happens, I'll just go back to mopping the floor again (and again...)

Does anyone know whether it's okay to use dehumidifier water in throwing or reclaim? I use it mainly for cleaning up the floor and tabletops, but it fills more quickly than I can use it for that.

The cone of shame!! We've got those in many sizes at our house with all the pets we've had. I've seen people cut a hole in a lid and put the stirrer through the hole to lessen the spray. I haven't tried that myself though.

Actually my problem is less from the drill splattering than from pouring one five-gallon bucket into another with the sieve on it. I probably need to build more upper body strength to lift that bucket! I always seem to make a mess with glaze, but I've gotten better over the years. I clean glaze off the Jiffy mixer by spinning it slowly in my rinse bucket, and then sponge off what is stuck in the crevices. My glazes don't get hard panned, so I have an easier time stirring them when it comes time to dip. Mark, one studio where I took classes had some large homemade wooden stirrers that looked like small oars. They really worked well.

I use the sieve and drill attached Jiffy mixer when I make a new batch, or if I see lumps in my glaze. Those make a huge mess, so I don't use them every time I need to stir glaze. I was at a community studio that used the toilet brushes. Those were great for really scrubbing glaze off the sides and getting it mixed up. I use a slotted spatula made of silicone for stirring before dipping. I had spatulas made with metal that I kept in the bucket to avoid having to rinse off and waste glaze. The metal would rust, and I didn't want that getting into my glaze, so I switched to the silicone. I don't waste any glaze rinsing it off every time I stir.

@Shaina Mahler The main thing to keep in mind is having at least one element in between shelf levels, meaning don't let an edge of a shelf line directly up with the elements. If you have half shelves, you can stagger their heights to even out temperatures between thermocouples.

My reclaim bucket gets really stinky too, but it goes away once it gets dried back to working consistency. I don't bother doing anything about it.

I've used some of these underglazes and though I haven't put them in stacks or on the bottom, they seem to act like the Amacos do. They don't melt too much and feel dry once bisqued, so I would think in your tests that they would come out okay.

Yeah, that's for porcelain or stoneware with an unglazed foot. There's another style of plate setter where it's just three corners that have a pin the plate sits on. After glaze firing, you'd break off the tiny bit of glaze stuck there and then polish it smooth. Those are for lower fired work. The brand Amaco makes some of those. I use smaller, thinner shelves (12" diameter) in 2 stacks of two high so that I get a total of six dinner plates on the whole level. I can fit a bunch of mugs and other things like that around the outside of it.

One thing you'd want to think about is if people or animals could touch the hot kiln while the garage door was open.

If you've ever seen the corrosion that happens inside vent tubes, you would not want your bathroom exhaust to have that happen to it! You need to place your kiln on something nonflammable like concrete, so I would think your garage is the best bet. If you were to have it on vinyl, you need a brick or cinderblock layer covering the whole area under where the kiln is. I use the method of vent attached to plywood in a window. My window pane comes completely off, and I replace it with the vent when I fire. I use rubber pipe insulation around the edges of the plywood to seal gaps and to help hold it in place. When I'm not firing, I can take the vent out of the window and I lay it on the floor near my kilns. I just pop the window back into its hinges and don't have to worry about it. A kiln without a vent can have one added later. There are other people who can tell you about all that, but I know it can be done easily.

Hi, what size is it?

I'm actually excited when someone asks me if I can make something for them! I'm not the main provider for our little household which means I can spend more time futzing than maybe others can. I'm not a full-time pro like many of you here. I am still learning what is too much for me but making something new helps get my creativity going. I get a little bored making the same stuff all the time. Sometimes at art fairs, people pass by my booth and say, "Oh, it's so pretty!" but don't buy anything! So, it feels good to me when someone thinks my work is nice enough that they want to have the pieces they truly want. It's very rewarding when someone sends a photo of their new item in their home, and they say how much they're enjoying it. Mostly people ask me to make a variation on what I already make, as others of you do as well. I've said no to sculptural things I've no experience with, or designs that are basically copying something else. Other times I say yes and then curse myself endlessly. I also give a long time frame because as @Min pointed out, things always go wrong when you make something special. I might make more than the amount needed as well, especially if the extra would sell. I don't charge extra for the drawings and designing, but I usually add on an extra charge for total extra work. I love drawing up sketches of potential pieces, it gets me excited and spurs other ideas for me. I flip back through my sketchbooks to revisit old ideas too. Making pottery feels like a compulsion I'm drawn to, so having a feedback loop of certain things that sell well or custom items people want is extremely gratifying. I'm pretty lucky to be doing this, I think! @Callie Beller Diesel gave a good tip a while back on using the website /app Trello to keep track of custom orders, and that has been fantastic for me.

I put my underglaze rinse water in my clay rinse bucket. After the particles settle, you can pour off the water. It usually takes me a couple months before my bucket needs to be emptied. Then I let it dry out a while and scrape it into the trash. I get a second bucket going for the clay rinse while that one's drying.

Some things I've made because somebody would ask me, "Do you make _____?" and I think, "How hard could that be?" to which I later reply, "What was I thinking?" I also largely make functional pieces. I like to think about whether what I make is suited for ceramics. For example, I wouldn't make a ceramic wine goblet because I think a huge amount of appreciating wine comes from looking at it. I also wouldn't make something for a cooktop because metal pots are so much better IMO. Probably a lot of people come to ideas as serendipitous offshoots of something else they are working on. I work with slabs often now because of a back injury and couldn't sit at my wheel. I had made an altered bottomless wheel thrown vase, and wanted to replicate the shape with slab, and that is now the main form of vases that I make. I love drawing in my sketchbook. Everything new goes there first before I try it out. It helps me visualize colors, patterns, angles and dimensions.

I started making pottery about 20 years ago, and I am one of the slowest and most inefficient people on the planet! But I do things this way because it's part of my personality, and it would stress me out to do it differently. @Callie Beller DieselActually, I love using bats for mugs, because I don't trim them and rib them smooth before taking the bat off the wheel. If I lifted it off with my hands, it would smudge it all and mess up my foot. But 100% agree about precleaning your bat! I wipe the whole thing off with my sponge and then I use one of the green Mudtools rib to scrape the rest into my reclaim bucket. One thing I'd tell someone just starting out is that you don't have to send every piece you made through to glaze firing. Especially at the greenware stage, it's easy to scrap a piece and reuse it. You can spend a lot of time futzing around with something trying to fix it, or just start over and make something again in the same amount of time. Another thing for beginners to know about is good posture!! I have a block under my left foot when my right foot is on the pedal to keep my feet on the same level. My wheel is raised on blocks, and my chair adjusts up and down. Some people stand at their wheels. I have a mirror in front of my wheel, so I don't have to scrunch over to see the profile. I take breaks and move around. I guess talking about back pain wouldn't make for a good Instagram post though!!

I use a little drill bit to make my shaker holes. I attach the top separately, so I can brush off the little crumbs that would be on the inside. I don't glaze the inside either, since I use stoneware which is not really porous. I cut round toothpicks in half and plug the holes with them to glaze. That way there's no glaze to have to remove from the holes. I twist them out before the glaze has dried all the way, so it doesn't flake off during removal. I rinse off the toothpicks and reuse them, storing them in a tiny cup. @Min That's brilliant! I have been sticking a chamois through my colander holes and twisting it around which is pretty time consuming to do all the holes that way.

You could try a decal or china paints. They are both done on top of fired glaze.

I consider myself an artist first before being a potter. I got into clay much later than I did other art classes. You'll like the underglaze painting, I think. As Neil said, the colors don't always come out as you might expect, so do some tests to begin with. The glaze on top can change the underglaze color too. I make tiny tiles that I coat with underglaze, then apply half with my satin glaze and half with my clear to see how they look. I use a glue dot to stick it onto the top of my underglaze jar so I have it as easy reference when I'm painting. If you make tiles to hang on the wall, you can make a 45 degree angled slot in the back that doesn't go all the way through. Then you can use that slot to hang it on a hook or a nail. You don't have to use all that clay up to make things, either. You can use it to make slump or hump molds and trimming chucks and things like that. Be sure to use a permanent marker on the clay bag to identify it when you purchase more than one type. It's easy to mix them up otherwise.

I've done this before. Make sure all flaked underglaze is gone or it could peel up and come off after glaze firing. Fresh underglaze will take glaze differently than bisqued underglaze. You may have to apply a second coat of glaze in the freshly underglazed area. If you bisque fire again, that solves that problem and the glaze will apply evenly.