Callie Beller Diesel

@liambesaw @Pres Yep, it's wax resist brushwork on a red clay body, and a white glaze. My NCECA loot included a lot of new brushes.

I made a thing.

Just slip with mason stain.

I made some new stuff for spring.

Good lessons all, Hulk. Some right nice things in there!

So I know this is my kitchen counter, but the light on my workbench turns most photos very yellow. This medicine set will be my own entry to the mug portion of the “Bonspiel: Canadians and Their Love of Winter Sport” show at NCECA this year. After some adventures I had with my kids and ear infections last month, I feel like avoiding illness is a winter sport! If you’re coming this year, check out the show. We’re on the Minneapolis Picks bus tour and shuttle route on Wednesday.

I think a good follow up question to "when do you stop glaze testing" is how often do you introduce new forms, and does that change throughout your career? How many new designs do you come up with in a year, and what's that work cycle like?

@Rae Reich 1kg=2.2 lbs (ish), so 100 kg= about 220-225 lbs. If you google lbs to kg, you should come up with a converter you can use in the browser. Works for F to C as well.

@lilipil Grog is finely ground fired clay, added to a clay body for strength, or to increase thermal shock resistance. Sort of like sand, but different. Or a rum drink, if you’re a pirate Let us know how it goes!

Ah! So your searches will come up with different things than mine. According to wikipedia, plasticene is: Plasticine is approximately 65% bulking agent, (principally gypsum), 10% petroleum jelly, 5% lime and 10% lanolinand stearic acid.[1] It cannot be hardened by firing, melts when exposed to heat, and is flammable at higher temperatures. So, looks like chalk, petroleum jelly, whiting and stearic acid, which is a solid waxy substance at room temperature. It also is used in candle making, cosmetics and creams. Making soap and lotions and cream was a popular hobby in North America about 15 years ago, and stearic acid is pretty easy to source here. I don’t know if there was a similar fad in your area.

Microcrystalline wax has a finer grain and a higher melting point than parafin. It's used in cosmetics. You can get it on Amazon, too. If you're talking about chamotte, I'm assuming you're in Britain somewhere? Kentucky Ball clay is one of those very fine grained clays, and tends to be inexpensive. I would think that any kind of kaolin would also work. The purpose is to provide bulk. Most internet recipes seem to call for powdered limestone, petroleum jelly and some form of oil that contains stearic acid. I think I'd rather avoid the 10w30 personally.

Hi and welcome! Laguna makes this specifically for the entertainment industry and design models. It's not meant to be fired, but the info sheet does cite a 5% +/- 2% shrinkage. http://www.lagunaclay.com/clays/western/em217.php Google comes up with loads of oil based clay recipes, but like Nerd said, they all require heating, and doing 100 kg on your kitchen stove is going to be a time consuming load of hard work.

I like her philosophy too. I *love* the hammer as a pottery tool.

I can't speak for others, but throwing took me a long time to learn. I do remember selling a few (worthy, competent) small items around year 3. They were my best pieces at the time, and not produced in any sort of volume. I agree that year numbers are a bit arbitrary, and intensive study matters. I needed every minute of those 10,000 hours to make things that, even if I can do better now, I'm not ashamed of.

I have to say that people, and then later the forums and other websites were the most helpful things, in that order. I went to every Ceramic workshop from as many people as I could. I had much of my basic technical education before YouTube was a really useful thing for pottery. Edited to add: YouTube was there, it was just a lot more about cat videos.

I have a 12x12 room and I don’t slab build a whole lot, so in my case it’s a hard pass. I have to be pretty deliberate about what I have in that space, and it’s part of the reason I’m such a fan of low tech soloutions for most things. I got no room to get complicated!

If you really want to do a stress test for freeze/thaw, the best time to do it is in the fall when things are beginning to freeze but the days are still nice, or at the first hint of spring when you have warm days but nights are still below freezing. You want a nice temperature vasilation between -3 and +3 C. I’ve killed more terra cotta pots by not covering them up soon enough.....

To elaborate on the post above, this particular part of the forum is concerned with business models, tips, tricks, business related tools, and recent or past experiences that pertain to running a pottery business. All discussions of full time, part time, hobby or professional, online or in person commercial operations is welcome. Running a pottery business presents a unique set of challenges, and since there don't appear to be any textbooks on the subject, as a community it's important to share information. We encourage people at all levels of involvement in clay to share their experiences and ask questions. As of this writing, we don't allow people to solicit for, buy, sell, trade or exchange any clay studio related items, wether on behalf of yourself or another party. This includes any clay or other raw or prepared materials, new or used studio equipment, bricks, kilns, wheels, or parts for any of those things. Currently we recommend people seek out resources such as The Potter's Attic on Facebook for these types of transactions. Those wishing to advertise services of all kinds and new equipment should most definitely take advantage of the classified link above.

Speed control is definitely a thing. I have a Brent C which was the largest capacity wheel from that company that didn't need to be rewired to cross the border at the time. I had a friend in college who got the CXC, and it never did work quite as it should after being brought up to code. The C is strong enough and variable enough for my purposes: 75 lbs is still a pretty big pot if I wanted to really max it out. I tried out a number of wheels while I could at school, and I found that kick and treadle wheels were hard on the body: you're not supposed to have back problems at 22. The pedals on the shimpos at the time weren't nearly as sensitive. I'm sure there are better things on the market now, but I bought this sucker 15 years ago and I have no reason to replace it.

Unfortunately, that may be the best thing for you to do. My google-fu came up with a bunch of makeup palettes and a bad 90’s movie. If you’ve got that many glazes, it might be easiest to put multiple glazes on one large flat tile, maybe doing them in batches of 10. This will give you the best results for the clay you’re using in any case.

I favour drill bits too, but you have to use them when the clay is really quite firm. If it’s too wet it makes a big mess.

It took me till the last year of high school to decide that I was going to be a physiotherapist, because that was the thing that I thought could stand enough, and also seemed to have enough of a degree behind it to make my folks happy. But I needed to go back to school to get extra science classes to do it. So I took a 4th year of high school despite the fact that I already had more than enough credits to graduate with. Not relishing the idea of a steady diet of science classes for a year, I decided to take art as stress relief as well, because I’d already worked my way through Drama and as much Band as I wanted. The art classes were “structured” so that grades 10-12 were all in the same room at the same time. The first day, we were shown where all the truly amazing variety of a supplies were, told that x number of projects were due by xx date, and shown the binder of projects we could choose from. The stereo was in the corner (no playing Korn or Lorena Mackennet), and told that certain older students were resources for specific areas, because they were good with those materials. The teacher Mrs Watrin was available for all kinds of assistance, and brought in local artists occasionally to give demos and talks. I hadn’t taken art as an option before because I was no good at drawing, and I thought that’s all Art was (heh). There was a potters wheel in the art room, and lots of clay, and the glazes were mixed by the resource students from recipes in a binder. I tried making a few sculptures that were pretty fun. I found a recipe for “thixotropic clay” that behaved a bit like that cornstarch goop that solidifies when it’s held still and is liquid while in motion, and I loved the science behind it. I tried the potters wheel, and even though I sucked, I felt like I found something that made sense to me. We did raku firings, and that was pretty much it. There was no going back after that. I wound up dropping the last physics courses and taking the last 2 art options instead so I could make more clay things, and applied to ACAD instead of the U of A. I still needed the degree for the parents.

I let it freeze a couple of times in the years before an indoor studio, but it's a lot of work to have to rewedge everything in the spring. It's time spent not making.

I did spend a number of years working in unheated garages, during which time I either moved into the laundry room for the winter, or just didn't make for half the year because it was too cold. We lived in rentals at that point, so I couldn't really make any modifications. When we finally purchased our home, Wayne, my husband stripped all the carpet out of one of the basement bedrooms and scraped the floor down so that I could have an indoor studio for my birthday. (True love!)