Damp world

[offcntr]

At my first pottery studio, at Viterbo College, we had a damp room. It was a long, narrow cement-block space with ware racks on one side, an air-tight door, and a humidifier set to turn on when the relative humidity dropped below a certain level. We students put our fresh-made pots in there, retrieved them when leather-hard to trim and handle, and then brought them out into the studio to dry for firing.

Nobody has a damp room in Oregon. Nobody needs one. Even in high summer, 90 degree weather, when the sun goes down, the temperature drops, hits the dew point and between ambient humidity and water from my pots, the whole studio becomes a damp room. I can leave stuff uncovered overnight and start to trim and handle pots right after breakfast. The only time I need to wrap pots in plastic is when I threw a little too enthusiastically the day before and need to keep excess work moist through a dry, sunny working day.

Come fall, it's a different story. It's humid all the time. Pots thrown on one day aren't even ready to turn over until late the second day, trimmable, if I'm lucky, on day three or four. And getting them dry enough to fire is even more of a challenge. In summer, I just set up sawhorses on the driveway and carry ware boards out in the sun to dry. Now, even if the day is sunny, the sunlight is too weak, the angle too low, to actually get much drying done.

So I stack ware boards up over the baseboard heater, rotate things through the top shelves of my ware rack, leave the ceiling fan on overnight to try and get some air circulating. Once I have enough pots to fill a bisque, residual heat from the kiln will dry the rest. But getting to that first load takes forever.

When I taught summer camp at Buck's Rock, we didn't need a damp room either--Connecticut summers are as humid as Oregon winters--but we had a drying room. It was a cupboard built around a baseboard heater, slots cut on opposite ends of the shelves to direct the warm updraft zigzag fashion through the pots and out the top. This time of year, when I'm racing to make pots for galleries and holiday sales, I wish I had room to make one here.