Looks to be a good day to make pots. 67 degrees, and 61 percent humidity. We got this nifty little device at the beginning of the year. It's kind of fun to watch the humidity. We put a dirt floor in our shop to help keep the humidity high.
I really enjoy the slower pace that the higher humidity affords. The window of time to handle and trim pots is much larger. Also as we slip and glaze everything leather hard the higher humidity offers a larger window of time for that as well. The humidity seems to do away with the need for constantly covering and uncovering pots in plastic as well. Which I really appriciate.
The only real drawback is that when you really get going and are making pots full time you can really end up with a backlog of pots that need finishing. Multi-tasking isn't my strongest suite and this does catch up with me on occasion. For now though I'm still not really making pots full time and seem to be bouncing back and forth from the gallery to the studio so it suites me quite well for now.
For the record. if anybody is curious 61 percent humidity is a little high even for me. Might be time to kick on the dehumidifier. At 60 percent humidity if you make mugs and then stick them in a corner somewhere you can easily wait 3-4 days before you can handle them.
Joe
3 comments:
when i moved to texas i was curious why everyone was covering all their pots up so tightly all time. after my first pot making session i found out. when i lived in minnesota i never had to use plastic unless i was going to be away from my work for an extended amount of time. in texas you can go from wet to bone dry on the rim in a couple of hours if you're not careful-i hate it but have adapted. i'm trying to convince my wife that we should move back to the midwest someday but she's not really to keen on the idea.
I loved making pots in England where pots dried ever so slowly. We would roll the racks of finished pots into the kiln shed after a firing to dry the next batch. I do despise the waste of time plastic requires. Good post!
Happy to see that all is going well. I love this blog. I will make some time to come up and see you guys this summer, probably mid july. Let me know whan the next firing is, I'd love to help.
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