danielbellow.com

The semi-annual el-mondo-grosso studio sale is Sunday from 12-6. All fired work in the studio is for sale at prices that reflect the both the current economic reality and the fact that I’ve got to make room for all these new pots I’m making for the wood kiln firings later this summer.

These pots are endorsed by All-Star youth baseball player Ben Bellow, who says "Dad, these pots are really nice." Ben and the Southern Berkshire Sluggers play again tonight against the team from Lee and Lenox, who got lucky yesterday and beat them 13-8 in the first game of the best of three series. Hopefully, it will STOP RAINING by game time.

Anyway, the studio sale is open to one and all. Hope to see you there. Here’s the classy ad I placed in the Shopper’s Guide this week:

Sunday - I know Sunday was yesterday, but I was busy - was an unseasonably cool day. We started loading at 9 am and it went a little slowly, because there was so much work to get into the kiln and I wanted to get it all in, so some extra thought had to be given to the stacking.

I wasn’t counting, but I would say 400 pots went into the kiln. When we were done, there were half a dozen plates, four cups and a couple of bowls that didn’t make it.

That cone pack down at the bottom of the frame didn’t get quite dry, and after we turned up the gas after candling it for an hour and a half, there was a faint popping noise, that caused me to say "what was that?"

When we went to look at the cones after the kiln had been going full blast for an hour, we saw the remains of the cone pack explosion, shards of clay, a few cones sticking up. I took the fireplace tongs and removed what I could reach, including a cone that was sitting just below that white cup next to the chess knight - it would have melted to the shelf. Impossible to know how far the shards flew - if they landed inside of pots, they’ll be stuck on there forever - when it comes to attached, it doesn’t get any more secure than glazed-on. The fact that the cone pack was on its own little shelf rather than on the main shelf, and that all the pots nearby were cups rather than bowls, may have limited the damage.

Will I dry the cone packs in a warm oven next time, so that they are dry as a bone? You bet your bippy I will.

Midway through the firing, as the evening grew cooler, we began to lose pressure. I did my old trick of setting the hose to trickle over the propane tanks, and the pressure came back. Arlynn and David helped me clean up the studio - I was embarassed by how dirty it was but she said she understood perfectly - you made a lot of work, you didn’t have time to clean up. David went out for Chinese food, and they told me the story of how they had met in a yoga commune in Canada back in the early 1970s.  By midnight, Cone 9 was down and the kiln looked like this.

At 12:15, cone 10 was tipping, but when we came out to look 15 minutes later, cone 11 was flattened at the middle peep. We threw it into glaze reduction for half an hour, and then called it good. I staggered upstairs and fell into bed, a 16 hour day of firing.

Arlynn Nobel is a student in the Masters of Fine Arts program in ceramics at UMass-Dartmouth. She has been making pots for 40 years, and now she is getting the degree to legitimate it. She found me on the salt and soda firing website, kind of a Facebook for potters, and sent me an email praising my work and asking to come join me for the kiln firing so she could learn all about firing gas reduction kilns.

I was flattered, so I said sure. She and her husband David showed up on glaze day, and they worked like Trojans. David took a grinder and a chisel and scraped all the glaze off my kiln shelves - a dirty and difficult job that I had been putting off for some time. And Arlynn helpd me glaze about 400 pieces, including 20 of her own, and load them all in the kiln. I would say she taught me as much as I taught her, but she probably wouldn’t agree.

One of the best things about pottery is the people you meet doing it. David and Arlynn ran a successful restaurant in Thunder Bay, Ontario for many years until he got burned out and quit. Now he is living outside New Bedford helping his wife get her MFA, and he is learning how to fire so he can help her in her new endeavor. Such devotion in a 30-year marriage is a rare and beautiful thing. He’s a really interesting guy, and we found we had a lot in common when it came to literature, music, politics. No matter how the kiln turns out, it was great to fire with Arlynn and David.

Twenty four hours after I shut off the bisque kiln, it was cool enough to unload. On a rainy afternoon, I brought it all back in the studio. Then I waxed all the bottoms, so the glaze doesn’t stick the pots to the shelves. This is the dullest part of the process, involving a gently smoking pan of hot wax. It took several hours. It’s going to be a very full kiln. 250 cups. A whole chess set, board tiles included. Bowls and plates.

This afternoon, I went and traded my friend Dale some plate setters for the tile setters I always wanted. Dale has a whole pottery studio he never uses, including a flat top salt kiln. He’s too busy making marble countertops, cutting lumber. He said he read a history of Alford, the next town over,  where it said a hundred fifty-two hundred years ago, every farmer had a manufacturing operation. One guy had a forge, another made chairs, there were potters and coopers and sawyers and chandlers . That kind of economy doesn’t seem possible in today’s world. And we are all the poorer for it.

The one pot that blew up was a chess pawn. Too much moisture in its little head. As luck would have it, it was in a far corner of the kiln and didn’t take out anything else. 

I turned the burners up to full at 9:30 this morning. It candled for 16 hours, but a lot of stuff went in practically leather hard. I’m pretty sure I didn’t blow anything up…

The kiln is a black box - you put your stuff in one way and it comes out another. It’s a little like baking a souffle - you can’t open the door to obsess about how it’s going. You just have to mix your ingredients right and hope nothing inexplicable happens. But again, this is just a bisque. It gets unloaded Thursday, waxed Friday, glazed Saturday and fired again on Sunday. We won’t know how it goes until next Tuesday.

As the shelves go up, it becomes clear that not everything is going to fit. This is true at every firing. Then I run out of shelves and posts, and I have to improvise with broken ones, plate setters etc. I think if you’re not improvising, you’re not really a potter.

You can see the cone packs at lower right, in the center and at the top. Made by the Orton Ceramic Foundation, they are formulated from oxides to melt at a specific temperature. There’s a lot to know about cones - they can be an imperfect measure at times, but for purposes of a simple bisque firing, this package of three cones tells you what you need to know: the firing is done when the middle cone - 08, or 1728F - falls. If the one on the left falls, you got it too hot, and the bisque ware won’t absorb the glaze properly. This is a drag, best to avoid it.

Then it’s time to brick up the door. After 30-some firings, there are only a few door bricks left whole. These are used to make the spy holes so I can look in at the cones. I glued my broken bricks together with refractory cement, then glued the bricks into bigger blocks for easier door-making, but this just made matters worse. I need several new boxes of bricks. That, or a metal frame to roll in front of the door. That’s a huge project, and expensive either way. Every firing I say I’ve got to do something about this door, and every firing I muddle through with what I’ve got. Improvisation, muddling through, that’s pottery.

I lit the burner and left a trickle of gas on overnight to dry everything out. If you take it up too fast, the water in the clay vaporizes and shatters the pots. I have found this out the hard way on several occasions. Finding out the hard way is something every potter does.

I got about two-thirds loaded, essentially only putting in what I needed to glaze so as to measure the space available. I’m pretty sure it’ll all fit, although I don’t know about the tiles. I want to fire 128 - two chess boards worth. Really, I need tile setters, Then the temperature dropped 15 degrees and it started to rain. I really want to get this in and light the pilot to dry it out before it’s time to take the boy to Little League.

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My coffee cup is the workhorse of my production line - my most popular item at $20, or $25 if it’s fired in someone else’s kiln like this one I fired with Sam Taylor at Dogbar Pottery. It is always is the first to sell out. I spent a long time getting it just right - it holds 12-14 ounces and balances just right in your hand. I’ve been making it heavier since my brother complained that his coffee got cold too quick while he read his email in the morning. The strap handle goes on quick and easy, but it has to be dried very slowly and carefully, on a board covered with a sheet of plastic, or else it’ll crack, like this one and 49 others did.

The final score was 275 alive, 50 dead. This is not an acceptable attrition rate in any manufacturing operation. It’s hard to say what the problem is - obviously they crack because the disparity in the moisture content in the clay in the handle and the clay in the cup. It’s best to extrude the handles fresh and stick them to the cups when they are just dry enough to handle. They’re dried under plastic to equalize the moisture content. I can’t figure out what I’m doing wrong  - some boards were perfect, others were perfect except for one or two in the middle, others the cracked cups were at the end. Is it in the application or in the drying? Maybe I need to leave more slack between the two ends of the handle? Perhaps someone who knows more than I do about this phenomenon will see this post and tell me what I’m doing wrong.

The dead cups are in a bucket of water - I’m going to slake them down and make them into tiles. No sense wasting porcelain at sixty cents a pound.

I ran out of propane in April, so the studio has been unheated ever since, but fortunately the weather has been relatively warm. My propane supplier, Eric Carlson, is the nicest guy in the world, but I’m afraid I tried his patience by going 90 days past due. He regretfully explained to me he needed cash on the barrelhead, the recession and all, so I scraped up $500 for 270 gallons of propane, His son, Andy Carlson, came and filled the tanks - it’s a little more than halfway, but enough for a bisque and a glaze.

A winter’s worth of greenware awaits the start of the firing season. This week, it will go into the bisque, get fired to 1800 F, come back into the studio to be glazed. I have a grad student from UMass Dartmouth coming to help me glaze and fire this weekend, but there’s a lot of work to be done before then. I’ll be blogging and twittering all week, making a public spectacle of the process.

I’m revamping the website right now in the company of Bob O’Haver, my tech guru. The jewel will be in the lotus soon.