Slightly Off Center

I don't often see anything in the Ceramics Monthly suggestions column that's useful. They're either too esoteric or too basic, things I'm never gonna need or things I've long since figured out on my own. This one, though, was perfect.

I'd struggled for years with the best way of glazing big cookie jars and canisters. They're too heavy and awkward for dipping tongs, and if I poured the inside, there was no good way to dip the outside that didn't end up with glaze overlaps that show up as a different color in firing. But some clever potter found an answer.

This is a dent puller. A thing auto body shops use to fix small dents in your fender or side panel. It's a little suction cup that gloms onto your car hard enough to pop out the damage. And it's perfect for suspending a jar or canister for a vertical dip into the glaze bucket.

There are some caveats. You have to pour glaze into the inside first, pour it out, and wipe the rim. You have to keep it perfectly vertical going in to dip the outside, so as not to plop out the air pressure inside the jar. And you need a perfectly smooth surface to latch onto, which means paraffin wax dip, not liquid wax resist. But within those parameters, it works a charm. I moisten the suction cup with a little water before engaging, tug to test the seal before committing to the glaze, and support the jar with my hand on the inside, against the dry inner glaze surface as soon as it's out of the bucket again, in case the suction fails.

My next firing is late July, preparing for a trip to Anacortes in August, so I really should start making pots. Even though it's hot. And I'm also prepping for the show in Roseburg this weekend--have I mentioned I have a show in Roseburg this weekend?

But I have an order for 40 more mugs for Great Harvest Bakery, and this time, they're paying actual cash money (because I still have so much bread credit from the last order).

I was digging through my toolbox and found a wood-block anvil I used to use for coil-building demos in my teaching days. I realized with a little refurbishing, I could use it to make much cleaner impressions from the logo rubber stamp. So I got out my chop saw and belt sander, adjusted the length and fiddled with the curvature, then screwed on a scrap bamboo handle. The result:


A very clean, consistent impression, and much less deformation of the mugs.

A recent Ceramics Monthly suggestions column featured what looked like a neat trick: Dipping pots in glaze using a suction cup.

Specifically, a high-pressure dealie used by auto body shops to pop out dents on car fenders. This sounded ideal for me, specifically for cookie jars. The medium and large size are too big and heavy to dip in the glaze bucket using tongs (the small ones are even right on the edge of too heavy to wrestle out when they're filled with glaze). So I pour glaze into the pot, swirl around, pour out.

Then I need to dip the outside somehow. (The other option, putting it up on some sort of riser in a pan and pouring glaze over it has never given an even, paintable coat.) I can either grab onto the base, dip in mouth first (trapped air keeps from letting more glaze inside), or grab by the rim and dip foot first into the bucket. Either way, I wind up with a 1-2 inch strip that needs to be dipped later (or big finger-marks that need touch-up). There's glaze overlaps and thin spots, and it's just not good.

But this looked like it might work, allowing me to dip the whole jar in mouth-first, holding on by suction to the waxed base. Harbor Freight had two different sizes, 2.5 and 4.5-inch diameters, for $2.99 and $3.99 respectively. At that price, it was worth a shot.

The 4.5-inch cup was too large, but the 2.5-inch seemed a strong contender. (Fortunately, I'd kept the receipt.)

Results were mixed. I had two small and two medium cookie jars. Suction didn't work at all on bare bisque, of course, too porous. With liquid wax resist to seal up the base, it held a little better. Moistening the rubber before using was better yet. I was able to dip all four jars, but two--one each size--let go coming out of the bucket, and I had to grab them and fix glaze scrapes later.

I'm still optimistic. I dipped another pot in hot paraffin, applied the suction cup. It made a really tight seal. I think the liquid wax coat is just too thin to make a proper smooth surface to seal.

Well, that didn't go as planned.

I said yesterday that today, besides handling all the mugs I made, we'd also be blending up yucca leaf pulp for paper-making. Denise had it cooked down and rinsed, and I had, after an afternoon's tinkering, gotten the pulp blender running. (Electric motor brushes were jammed, not making contact with the rotor. Once they were free, it only took me another hour to figure out how to keep them from popping out while I tried to slide the assembly back onto the shaft. Spoiler: it involved bamboo skewers.)

Then we woke up to this.

Note: this photo is not color-accurate. My camera looked at the hellish, tangerine orange sky, said, "That can't be right," and tried to correct it to something more normal, kinda like the first Viking photos from Mars that showed blue sky instead of pink. In any event, between the smoke and the ash sifting down, all outdoor activities were cancelled. (Except for a run down to BiMart Pharmacy--there were only 4 puffs left on my asthma inhaler. I did not ride my bike.)

Kind of a shame, really. I was looking forward to running the beast again. It's a four-gallon recirculating blender, 70% recycled materials from BRING and St. Vincent de Paul, 20% Jerry's, and 10% sweat and improvisation.

I can't say I invented it, more reinterpreted it from a marginal illustration in one of Denise's paper-making books. Scrounged from BRING: a stainless-steel 3/4 hp garbage disposal, heavy-duty grounded electrical cord, and light switch, with box and face-plate. At Vinny's, I found a plastic carafe from a water cooler. Jerry's provided four feet of pool vacuum hose, fir 1x2s and various bits and pieces of plumbing to connect it all together.

What is does: Cooked plant material and a lot of water are put in the carafe, which has had top cut open, bottom cut off to the size of a sink drain. Flip a switch, and the garbage disposal spins up, shredding the contents and spewing them out the hose, which is clipped to the top of the carafe, effectively pumping it through the system again. Keep blending until everything's shredded to a fluffy pulp, and then use the hose to direct it into a fabric-lined basket hanging atop a 5-gallon pail. Wait for the water to drain, bottle up the pulp and you're ready to pull paper.

I've made a bunch of paper-making tools for Denise in the past--all her screens, for example, and a nifty water-expressing press made from plumbing parts and a VW screw jack, also a BRING find--but this is the one I'm proudest of.

I've recently taken a special order that should net me a lot of bread. Literally, a lot of bread. I'm making custom coffee mugs for our local Great Harvest Bakery, and being paid in kind.

I've been buying bread there since they first opened a Eugene branch. They're down in south Eugene, conveniently located between downtown (where Saturday Market happens) and Lane Community College (where KLCC used to broadcast from), so for many years, they were a regular Saturday stop, on my way from my radio show back to Market. After KLCC moved their studio downtown (and later, I retired from radio), it was less convenient, but it's still a short hop by car from my studio at Club Mud (or a long, grueling bike ride from my home up on River Road). But I really like their bread: It's dense, tasty (especially their Honey Wheat) and keeps really well. On an average week, we'll go through two loaves, sometimes more.

So last spring, when Gordo the owner caught me on my weekly bread run and asked if I'd be interested in replacing their customer coffee mugs with handmade stoneware, I readily agreed. We talked about designs, and he gave me a mug to take home and measure.

For a job like this, where I'm making a new form, and aiming for at least some consistency, it helps to prepare. I measured the original mug: height, inner diameter, width of foot. Volume (16 oz. up to the brim; probably 12 comfortably full with room for cream and sugar). I record all this information on an index card, and back-calculate shrinkage--with my stoneware, multiplying finished dimension by 113% gets a pretty good estimate of wet-clay size.

Then I made a tool. The little wooden cross you see here is called a tonbo, or dragonfly. I learned about them years ago from an illustrated book on Japanese folk pottery. It's very handy for quick checks of dimension. The vertical stem, up to the crossbar, is the desired height of the pot; the cross-piece is the diameter at the rim. I made mine from a bamboo skewer and popsicle stick. Back when I threw production for Slippery Bank Pottery, I had dozens of them, one for each form. I don't use them as much anymore, as I'm less concerned with identical pots. If I need to match them for a set, I'll just pick the ones that match best, use the rest in my booth. But these are not my regular shapes, and I can't put them in the booth, because they'll also be marked my my second special tool: a Great Harvest Bakery rubber stamp.

A couple new tools, just for the current project: a fish scaler and a sucker punch!

The scale roller doesn't work as well as I'd hope: scales are too deep, might be better on a bigger fish. On a little mermaid, the imprint is both rough and insufficiently detailed. Oh well, best I can do. The punch works perfectly, though, can make various sizes of sucker depending on how hard it's pushed and how much I rock it about.

Fortnight, actually. The last two weeks were a helluva thing.

Glazing and firing, of course. That's the time I find myself putting in ten and twelve hour days, stumbling home exhausted, rolling out the next morning and repeating the process. I take pictures when I think of it, always intending to post updates, but when it comes down to it, I'd rather flop on the bed with a book and read myself to sleep. In this case, it was complicated by the fact that I was also completing posters and flyers for Clay Fest, as well as print and online advertising, on a computer that was somewhere way below reliable. More on that tomorrow, maybe...

Meanwhile, a brief reprise of the last couple of weeks. 

I started glazing a week before the Sunday I planned to load the kiln. The potter firing ahead of me was over two weeks late in loading (he'd signed up for Labor Day), so still had every shelf in the kiln room full of his stuff. I worked around it as best as I could, stacking shelves in the hallway by the grinder, carrying them back into my studio (less than ideal; I'm far from the kiln, and would have to bring it all back). He finally loaded up on Tuesday night, which is why I wound up putting in 12-hour days Wednesday and Thursday. 

(He was also scheduled to fire right after me, but cancelled a day or so before my load-in. So I could have taken an extra day or two glazing, except I'd arranged for two of our potters to shadow my firing, helping me load and learning how to fire the big gas kiln. So I was kinda committed to loading on the day we'd agreed on a month earlier.)

Got everything glazed by Friday afternoon, as it happened, so we could do Saturday Market as usual. Denise usually helps me load kilns, but as Linda and Brian were helping instead, she got to take the afternoon off, going to open studio with her book arts group.

I forget how reliant I am on her help. She knows when to bring me something to load, when to wait while I figure out what I need. She's always half a step ahead picking out kiln posts, and she never picks up a pot by the painted side. (Lookin' at you, Brian). But still, we ended up finishing up only a little later than usual, Linda was there that evening to watch me light the burners, and Brian actually showed up at quarter-to-six the next morning to observe body reduction. They both were around much of the day, and the kiln behaved beautifully, dropping cone 10, top and bottom together, at around ten minutes 'til six.

I'm really liking the kiln these days--the last three firings have been really consistent, in time, gas used, and minimal amounts of oxidation. I made up a three-page crib-sheet, including notes on how I prep and load the kiln and a copy of my log for this firing, and emailed it to them both.

All right, some pictures.

The squeeze bottle next to the fawn creamer is my new favorite tool. My frequent neighbor at Market, Cherie Todd, does pots decorated with dozens of dots of glaze; when I was complaining about how hard it is to get consistent spots on a fawn with a brush, she gave me a spare glaze-trailing bottle to try. It works brilliantly, on fawns, woodpeckers, barn owls. Anybody who needs white dots over an oxide or stain wash now goes to the head of my glazing list.

I took a couple of interesting special orders this time; Denise's cousin Diana wanted some stealth wine cups, stemless and opaque so she can take the forbidden fruit to neighborhood picnics. She has feeders on her balcony, so her cups feature frequent visitors: hummingbird, flicker, chickadee and dark-eyed junco. I also got a request for smaller teapot: three cups, instead of my usual four (or occasional six. Denise drinks a lot of tea). I did two, as is my wont, and not only did both turn out beautifully, I actually sold both last Saturday.

But the best part of the glazing week happened Tuesday. Fellow potter MIchiyo and her husband Andrew brought visiting family in for a studio tour. Andrew's family is from Australia, so as I was glazing pie plates, I demo'd a koala in their honor. Which led Andrew to ask if I'd ever done a platypus. I said I'd never had a request for one. Oh, you do requests, do you? Sure, some of my best patterns come from special orders. Which is how I came to paint this little darling later in the week.

It's a plate-ypus.

I'll see myself out...

I used to have the worst trouble getting handles to line up. On anything that had paired handles--casserole, crock, cookie jar--or even a few that didn't, like batter bowls, I just couldn't get the handles lined up across from each other. I'd eye-ball and mark and attach and pull and two times out of four, the handles were closer together from one direction than the other. Drove me nuts.

Then one year, Local Clay, our Eugene potter's group, sponsored a workshop by Ellen Currans. She's a long-time Oregon potter, founding member of the OPA, and made a lot of two-handled platters, servers, baking dishes. And she had a lovely, simple system for positioning the handles.

She'd make a paper template the same diameter as the pot, usually by taping the sheet to her potter's wheel and pencilling in the circle, then cutting away the excess. She'd then fold it in half, mark where fold met edge, then flatten it out and refold a couple of inches off the original fold, mark there. Putting the template over the top of the platter or dish made it easy to determine where to place the handles so they'd be exactly opposite one another. Since she was a production potter too, she had dozens of templates in all different sizes, so she always had on to match the next pot. She even made nifty little handles out of scotch tape, to make it easier to lift off the template when done.

I've adopted the system wholesale, taken it a step further: I have templates on the computer that I can size and print onto card stock with the relevant diameters pre-printed. And since I have box tape in the studio, I do the handles as well.

Here's a few of my handle templates, and a small covered crock about to get marked and handled. Honestly, I'm still amazed I never figured this trick out for myself.

Bat pins!

Was getting ready to (finally) make mugs this morning when I took a close look at the head of my wheel and saw something surprising: the bat pins were nearly worn away.

I didn't even know this was possible. Bat pins are supposed to be forever, sturdy little bolt heads that hold your throwing bats in place. If anything is supposed to wear out, it's the holes in the bats themselves, particularly the masonite ones. They're always getting loose and wobbly; I've started sticking a sheet of old t-shirt fabric on the wheel head to keep the bats from sliding back and forth.

Well, it turns out the bats weren't entirely at fault. Or maybe they were--the back-and-forth friction, along with the abrasive qualities of the clay, seem to have worn a good sixteenth-inch or more off the pins all the way around, on one pin, all the way to the hollow center of the head. I had to take off the wing nuts, lever out the pins with a vise-grips, and take a set, along with a representative throwing bat, down to the nearest hardware store. (I could have gone to the ceramics supply instead, but only if I wanted to pay four times the price.)

I should have taken a flashlight. Socket-headed machine screws were in the back-most layer of a three-deep sliding hardware thingy. (You know the kind, like sliding closet doors covered with tiny, badly labeled drawers full of every screw and fastener except the one you need right now.)

I finally found what I needed, 3/4 inch pins with a 1/4 inch head. Cost me 86¢ for two. And the best part--almost making up for a lost morning's throwing--is that my bats don't wobble anymore.

This is not poop.

It's clay scrap, just pulled out of the recycling bat and ready to pug-mill. Except I don't have time just now, so it's gonna get bagged and set aside until next week, maybe.

I produce a lot of this stuff: wet slop from the throwing bucket, dry scraps from trimming, the occasional broken, cracked or trimmed through piece of greenware. It all goes into four-gallon plastic buckets in front of my wheel where it slakes down to the consistency of, well, poop. Wet cow poop, fresh from spring pasture.

It has some of the smell of poop, too, anaerobic bacteria digesting oil and skin flakes from my hands and traces of organics from the clay. I sometimes wish I'd contacted Mike Rowe back when he was still doing Dirty Jobs. He'd have loved this stuff.

I love it too; I get two or three hundred pounds of recycled clay every time I empty the buckets. After enough time.

Traditional pottery recycling bats are plaster tubs. They're heavy, fragile, but do an excellent job of removing excess water from clay slurry. If you're not in a hurry, though, you can go lighter and easier.

This is my recycling bat: A frame of 2x6" pine, with a mesh bottom: plastic window screen over 1/4 inch galvanized hardware cloth, supported with 1x2" furring strips around (and across) the bottom. The whole thing is mounted on casters, so I can wheel it in and out from under the ware rack.

When it's time to recycle clay, I wheel it out, line it with a thrift-store bed sheet, folded double, and ladle in all the slop. Once it's heaping full, I fold the sheet edges over the top to keep out dirt and bugs and roll it away. Four to six weeks later, (twelve, this time. It was a wet winter) it's ready to come out of the bat and run through the pug mill.

Then back on the wheel. It's the circle of (a potter's) life.