What? October Is THIS Week?

(NOTICE: I still use two spaces after the end of a sentence.  If you are offended by this, you should have stopped reading already.)

Remember those masks that I started a couple of weeks ago?  Well, here they are getting glazed.  The nose fell of the one on the left.  I decided that I liked it just fine nose-less.  Looks a little like Voldemort, yes?

I realized last Wednesday that the end of September was right here.  Then I remembered that the first of October usually follows the end of September.  Every year this happens.  At that point, the masks that I need to have finished and at the gallery by Oct 3 were not even bisque fired.  Allen is a wonderful man and didn't even give me the lack-of-planning-on-your-part-does-not-constitute-an-emergency-on-my-part lecture.  Instead, he helped me out by getting a bisque loaded and ready for me to fire on Thursday afternoon.  It was cool enough to unload by Friday evening, and I glazed everything that I had over the weekend.  He also encouraged me to leave glaze-encouraging notes for the other potters working in the studio.  When you've got a collection of people who all work at different days and times, you must communicate regularly by sticky note.

Here's some of the other things that I glazed.  Every mug you see here will be blue.  Sometimes I have to stop and marvel that I know what color these will be when they look so different now.  There's a funny story there.  I'll share that another time.  For the record: (left to right) floating blue, variegated base blue, floating blue topped with somekindabaloo (a mixture of left over things), and falls creek blue shino.  That's 22 mugs right there.

I also made things.  Three platters and parts for a vase.  Then I waited and waited and waited for things to dry enough to finish them.  It hasn't rained in so long that I forgot how much it slows the drying time for clay.  All this was made on Thursday and I finally got handles on everything and the vase put together on Sunday.  One of the platters still hasn't let go of the mold.  I'll check it again tomorrow to see if it is ready to come out.

Since nothing was dry enough to finish, I threw three jars on Friday. They were dry enough to finish on Sunday.  Under normal circumstances I would expect pieces to be leather hard by the next day.  

Uncooperative Clay

This happened yesterday.  I took it as a sign that I tried to make one too many pots.

That pot was on the wheel.  It jumped off and landed upside down on my leg.  I'm not making this up.  It is possible that it was seriously out of balance and I wondered what would happen if I made it spin really fast.  Now I know.

I also made a dozen mugs.  Hannah is out of mugs again at the coffee shop.  Amazing.  I didn't take pictures of the mugs - figured you guys were tired of looking at mugs.  

Slowly But Surely

For once, I had glazed pots to take home instead of pots to glaze when I managed to get back to the studio after my crazy couple of weeks.  

I also made a few things.  Two sets of mugs, a couple of lidded jars, and a couple of tall vase/utensil holder thingies. 

My work is featured in the window at Buffalo Creek Gallery this month.  Very cool looking display if I do say so myself.

More mugs...

That's two more sets if you are counting.

Over the past two weeks I've made 4 different sets of mugs each with a very different shape.  I thought it was interesting to see them all together.

Then I made a couple of pitchers.  These are both relatively small. This white textured one was about 2 pounds of clay.

This brown one was closer to 3 pounds I think.  Maybe it was two and a half. It's a little bigger than the white one.  I did something completely new with altering the shape here.  I think I like it.  You may see more of this in the future.

Then I got moving on making a mask.  This is the first effort.  I was NOT at all excited about this project and had put it off for a while, but sometimes you just have to suck it up and do things that you don't think will be all that fun.  But it wasn't bad, so I made another one.

I'm "cheating" and using a plaster mold that we have.  In the picture above you see the mold and the slab.  Don't ask me how we got that mold.  It has been in the studio ever since I started hanging out up there.  I suspect that it involved someone putting their face in plaster which is absolutely terrifying, so surely it didn't happen that way.  Maybe I should ask.

Now the slab in pressed into the mold textured side down.  Next I trimmed off the extra clay and let it sit in the wet closet over night.

After it dried to leather hard and I took it out of the mold, this is what I had.  If good things happen with these later on, I will update you.  If they are complete disasters, you may never see them again.  Does anyone else see Abe Lincoln?  Holy Cow!  I know Abe didn't show up one day and get Allen to shove his face in a box of plaster.  Yes.  I need to find out the story.