back in the saddle

Sorry for the long absence. I've spent the winter working on our house, doing some bits of construction work for friends, and taking some time to relax. The temperatures now are starting to get up into the low 30's during the day and the snow seems to be slowly melting away. Which can only mean one thing, spring is on the way. That, and we need to start making some pots.
It looks like we will have two openings this spring in galleries in the area, as well as taking part in the first annual "Clay in May" festival. The clay in May festival will consist of studio tours of all the potters in the Mineral Point area. We are pretty excited about taking part in the inaugural year of this event.
I've spent the last couple weeks working on glazes.


Testing , testing, testing


We are reworking several of our ash glazes, incorporating our local red clay. The clay has a very high rate of shrinkage, along with some calcium and magnesium. Not so good for making pots with, but a perfect fit for our darker ash glazes. We're also working on a matte glaze for Christy to decorate over. Matte glazes are not something I've ever worked on before so it's been a bit of a learning curve. We're starting to get everything figured out though and hopefully we'll have some glazes we are happy with after this next test firing (test firing number three this spring).
I've also spent some time between testing glazes to make some pots. Trying some new shapes out.


I've never really done much with altered pots before as I like to be able to make pots fairly efficiently in an effort to not charge too much for our "functional" pots. I've always felt like the more you charge for a functional pot the less functional it becomes, as people are less likely to use the $70 dinner plate for fear of breaking it. I had fun making these pots though and they really didn't seem to take to long to make. We'll see.......
Joe