Perils of International Shipping

A friend in the US, who does a bit of painting, asked me to make a set of small bowls for mixing paints etc. I've recently done a set of cups for his family (with stamps with the initials of each of the family members) and had complete success sending things by mail.

So with the little bowls complete I sent them off, bubble wrapped and stacked in a couple of packing tubes.

Whilst the cups travelled well, it seems the small bowls did not share the same robustness.

Sadly some bit the dust on the way over, arriving in various sized shards, a little like an archelogical dig.

Here are the casualities...


Happily some survived

But despite my little bowls now being on the other side of the planet... I've been put off international shipping for awhile... until I've found a failure proof method of packing!

Collin

Not a lot of action in the studio this weekend. Too many other things on - but hopefully next weekend.

With colds and chicken pox for the past few weeks, I'm just enjoying being out and about.

Here's Collin looking pensive...

Recycling Clay

Since i'm on a roll today I thought I might talk briefly about recycling clay.

When throwing there tends to be a lot of clay that ends up in your wheel trough, trimmings, failed pots etc. It collects up at the end of the day and you can't really throw it away as it will clog the plumbing and generally make a nasty mess.

So it collects. And after awhile you begin to collect quite a lot of it.

Big pottery's have a pugg mill. This is a machine you feed the reclaimed clay into and it pushes through a big tube and forces all the air out. I'm not working with those sort of quantities so I've had to come up with another solution.

I collect up all my reclaimed clay and leave it in a bucket in my work trough. I'm a little bit spoiled as this is an unusually large trough we picked up at a wreckers, and it is perfect for this job! The buckets of clay are topped up with water to help the clay break down.

What you are looking for is a nice, thick slurry and to help this along you have to get your hands in there occasionally and break the big bits up.

Once the clay is in a slurry then you simply dish it out onto your slab and leave over night. If the weather is fine and you have a lot of clay to reclaim then it goes into pillowcases and is left outside for a couple of days.


This way your waste clay isn't wasted but quickly finds a new home as a new pot.

Reclaimed clay also has lots of little imperfections from bits of terracotta or other clay you might work with ending up in the mix. This gives it a lot more warmth and character.

Unusual...

I was looking through the rest of the pictures and came across a couple like this.

I've got no idea how these happened or what the camera did - but I like it.

It's kinda arty, but you still get all the information about the pot... now how to make the camera do it again......

White on White

I thought it was about time to take some "proper" photos.

The ones with the black background were okay, but i was wondering what they would look like on white, so here are the results.


Here's a pot by itself. It looks a little lonely, and i'm wondering whether there's too much white space. But I like that you can see the dance of the rim.


A couple of pairs of pots

And a little bowl. Jem uses these for painting medium. They have a stable bottom to stop them from falling over. I made him one recently with a little lid, to try and reduce the amount of volatiles and headaches.

I had envisaged the white background being super white with no shadows, but that didn't really happen. However I really quite like the grey's of the shadows. I guess it's just going to take some perfecting.

Black and White

I'm toying with setting up an Etsy shop and so have been taking some photos of my cups. My plans came undone when I got to the bit about shipping details. Pots are heavy, so working out shipping is a killer. Will have to make a trip to the post office and do some investigating.

But in the meantime, here's a cuddle mug, for mugs that like a cuddle.

bottoms

Whilst the form of the cup is important, so's the bottom.

You'll notice potters tend to pick up pots and look at their bottoms.

A bottom tells you a lot. It tells you about how a potter handles clay and can give you an insight into their character.

Once upon a time my bottoms were very controlled. I turned feet on all my pots. They were very neat and precise.

But I've relaxed a lot since then and discovered that a loose, straight from the wheel bottom can be just as effective.

You can see in the picture the marks from the cutting wire. Once the pot is leather dry I then also "roll" the bottom of the pot on the bench to smooth down the sides from where it's been trimed and to soften the form, tucking it under.

Then it gets it's stamp, so you know it's one of mine!