Hatchville Pottery

A largely Shino January firing

2012-01-28T12:49:00.000-08:00

Lots of Shino pots in yesterday's kilnload, and most of them in a white/gray carbon-trap recipe that came to me from the Harvard ceramics program in Boston. It traps well and presents different looks depending on how it's oriented to the flame. It also plays well with others, taking the poured Shinos and ash glazes that I layer over it.

Many of the pots in this load were brown Miller stoneware with granite grit wedged in to give it some character. I think you'll see that in some of the images. This firing got a bit out of control, when I couldn't see the top cones and had to go by the bottom, slightly cooler ones. Cone 11 flat at the top, bending a bit at the bottom. My ash Kaki glaze didn't like that much and ran on a couple of pots. It just hates anything over 10. I knew that, but still ...

Anyway, a good firing. I'll post some pots for you to see.

The photos: Top, a nice little Shino teabowl; big vase, layered Shinos; shallow bowl with McAndrew/Fitch black slip under the Shino; shallow Shino bowls with ash pours; standard Shino mugs with finger-swipes.

All loaded ... then wait

2012-01-23T13:01:00.000-08:00

The next couple of days will be busy with various non-pottery things, which means that the newly-loaded kiln will sit quietly until Thursday. No time to fire over the next couple of days. The Shinos in there will have time to mature at 60 degrees.

This will be the third firing since Christmas, which means that the gallery in the back yard is full of pots, with more on the way with this firing. I'm trying to build inventory for the spring and summer shows. The path to the gallery is cold and white right now, after yesterday's ten inches of snow, and it's likely to remain that way. Few pots go out of here this time of year.

It's fine, though. I like working in the studio when it's snowing or raining or simply winter cold outside. NPR or iPhone music on the radio, pots building up on the wareboards, coffee nearby. Could be a lot worse.

And it appears I'll have a student intern from Falmouth High School working here for a couple of months through the Cape Cod Museum of Art intern program. That may mean I have to clean things up around here.

Photo: Top rear shelf, with vases glazed in layered Shinos and ash glazes.

Winter finally arrives ...

2012-01-21T11:20:00.000-08:00

Snow started falling here in Hatchville this morning at about dawn. It's now after 2 p.m., there is a six-inch blanket on the ground and there are no signs of the snow stopping. So winter came to us, after all.

Dee had no massage clients today, so she's here doing bookkeeping and drinking tea. I am working in the studio, occasionally looking out at the snow, glazing pot by pot for next week's firing. Not a bad day.

Great photo of Ray Finch at work

2012-01-20T14:27:00.000-08:00

This was taken today from potter Joe Finch's Facebook page, for those of you who don't see Facebook. A great photo.

Ray Finch: 1914-2012

2012-01-19T11:02:00.000-08:00

Dee and I met Ray Finch at Winchcombe Pottery in Gloucestershire, U.K., about ten years ago. Toff Milway took us over to Winchcombe from his pottery, which is nearby in the Cotswolds. Ray was in his late 80s then, but still making pots. So was his co-worker Eddie Hopkins. Ray was gentle and courtly and seemed pleased to meet one of Dan Finnegan's students from the U.S. Eddie was lively and joking and wanted to be remembered to "Dan the Yank."

Now they're both gone. Eddie died in 2007 of a lung disease contracted from floodwater swallowed while he clung to the side of his house in deep water. Ray died yesterday, after a long life making pots.

Long before we actually met Ray and Eddie, I felt like I knew them both from the many stories Finnegan told while he taught our class in Alexandria, Va. 20 years ago. No one who paid attention in Dan's class (or at the bar afterward) could escape without knowing the personal geography of the old pottery at Winchcombe and its characters. And I know that a version of that story will appear soon in Dan's blog. So I won't risk making mistakes by telling Dan's stories here.

It's enough for me to count Ray as a kind of pottery grandfather. Ray taught Dan, Dan taught me. Before that, Michael Cardew taught Ray and Bernard Leach taught Cardew and so on. I don't claim any special knowledge or talent or skill because I'm at the bottom of that line of succession, but I do like being able to trace some small part of my lineage back that far.

We're a poorer place without master potters Ray Finch and Eddie Hopkins among us.

Going to sea for clay

2012-01-12T13:03:00.000-08:00

Three big guys got into a small boat yesterday to travel from the Cape Cod mainland to an island that lies between Cotuit Bay and Nantucket Sound. I was one of those guys, lured to this deep sea (well ... not all that deep) voyage by the chance to dig native clay from the ocean. Pretty cool.

Some months ago, a clay bed seemingly rose from the water off the island and exposed itself to waterborne passersby. In all likelihood, a storm swept the sand overburden off the clay bed and exposed it. But we've got scientists looking into this. A friend, former editor and former softball player Dana Hornig, told me about the clay a couple of weeks ago. We decided we would travel out to the geological phenomenon and get a closer look.

So yesterday we loaded Dana's dinghy into my pickup and drove to Cotuit, meeting Lindsey Counsell at the town landing. Lindsey is another former softball player and is director of the Three Bays Foundation, a conservation group that tries to take care of the shallow water around Cotuit, on the south side of the Cape.

Three big men loaded down the dinghy, but the seas were calm and distance to the island was roughly 150 feet, so we set out. With Dana rowing, it took only a few minutes to cross the gut and haul the dinghy up on the sand.

What we found was a lumpy and sticky expanse of deep black clay, salt water from the rising tide slowly beginning to run through shallow channels and reclaim the clay bed until the next tide. I dug about 25 pounds of the clay and put it in plastic bags. We strolled about that end of the island, with Dana and Lindsey - both longtime Barnstable men - remarking on the way wind and tide changes sand islands. Then we rowed back.

The clay we brought back now is in my studio. As a throwing clay, it is very, very short. Virtually no plasticity on its own. I've wedged in some EPK to try to give it more stretch and a simple little bowl (fourth photo down) seemed to indicate that something like that might make the clay useful. I'll fire a couple of little buttons of it in my next bisque firing. If they survive, I'll put them in the next glaze firing, protecting the shelves by putting the clay button inside a scrap bowl, and see what happens. Most likely, it will melt. But maybe not. We'll see.

Meantime, I'm continuing to make inventory. Right now, brown stoneware plates are all over the studio. I threw 18 today. And more bottle vases are drying. Should be firing next week.

The photos: Dana Hornig at the oars, with the island behind him; looking over the clay bed toward the mainland; a closer shot of the bed; small clay bowl; plates drying.

Randy Johnston in Boston

2012-01-09T12:17:00.000-08:00

Randy Johnston's woodfired pots at the Pucker Gallery in Boston are satisfyingly rugged and substantial. And, as always, it's good to see them there, where they can be hefted and handled and the broken and crawled woodfired Shino glaze and the rough clay body can be felt under the hand.

I sure do like Johnston's pots. There's very little precious about them. They're all about strength and weight and the happenstance of slip, glaze and wood flame.

The Wisconsin potter's show, "On the Edge of Chaos," is in the gallery on Newbury St. through Jan. 30. (As is Marguerite Robichaux's exhibition of landscape paintings.) It's well worth seeing, even if many of the show's original pots have been sold and replaced by other wonderful pots from the Pucker inventory. (And it's worth remembering that when a new show goes up in the downstairs gallery, the pots that didn't sell go into inventory upstairs. The gallery employees are happy to take you up to look at and handle them.)

We visited Boston Sunday, in part to see "Hugo" in 3D (go see it; a great film), but also to see the Johnston show. We met our friend Janet there and went over the pots together, occasionally in minute detail, particularly the lovely nuka-glazed pots.

Go see the show. Or check out the wonderfully photographed catalog in pdf form at puckergallery.com. And for more pots by Johnston and his wife Jan McKeachie Johnston, go to mckeachiejohnston.com.

The photos: Pretty self-explanatory. I wish I'd brought my camera, but had to make do with the iPhone version. Still, they get the idea across.

Good pots from the New Year's Eve kiln

2012-01-02T09:00:00.000-08:00

I fired New Year's Eve, shutting down the kiln a couple of hours before we had to go out to a party. I overfired a bit, with cone 11 flat at top because I'd placed the cones far enough back to make them invisible to me. Clever on my part. So I went by the bottom cones, where the temps turned out to be about a half-cone cooler. No big deal, really. Minimal running of the ash glazes, which don't much like cone 11.

Lots of teabowls, shallow pasta bowls and a couple dozen mugs. Good to start the year with a decent firing.

Dee was off work, of course, and her sister Marcy was visiting from Albuquerque, so they helped with the unloading and critique.

The photos: Squared bottle, glazed in Bright Shino with ash glaze pours; personal pasta bowls with iron sponged slip and Shino glaze; a variety of thumbhole teabowls; two small bowls glazed in Shino, with copper red and blue ash pours.

Happy New Year! And firing today ...

2011-12-31T10:12:00.001-08:00

Happy 2012, everyone. I decided to do a New Year's Eve firing, which gives me time between gas turn-ups to prepare food for the party tonight at the home of friends. There's a shelf of teabowls and mugs in the kiln, but mostly it's small and medium-size serving bowls. Some with iron slip spattered over Shino, some with the slip under the glaze, some with wood ash. Building inventory, mostly, though there's a statewide competition with a Jan. 6 deadline that I'm hoping some of these pots will work for.

Tonight is a tapas party, so I'm preparing oyster mushrooms fried with tiny Chinese fish and hot red pepper; pimentones padrones, a fried green pepper with sea salt; and spicy shrimp with red chile, garlic and scallions.

Happy what's-left-of-the-holidays, everyone.

Photos: Top, the load before closing the door this morning; the studio, back to its pre-Open Studio mess.

Happy Holidays to All

2011-12-24T07:08:00.000-08:00

The last of the holiday shoppers are coming to the gallery this morning in a very light flurry of snow. Just sent a guy off with five mugs for himself and his wife. Things are now busier for us than they've been before. I guess that's good.

We'll have Christmas Eve dinner tonight with friends in Monument Beach, carols at Church of the Messiah this afternoon, Christmas dinner with Dee's folks at their retirement village and then her sisters come in next week for a visit. Oh, and the Patriots play Miami this afternoon.

Happy Christmas, every one, from Dee and me.

Onward ...

2011-12-22T13:22:00.001-08:00

Planning and staging the annual holiday open studio can wear me out, so I often spend the next few days before Christmas relaxing and finishing up Christmas shopping. This year, with entries due in early January for the State of Clay show in Lexington, Mass., I wanted to fire one more time. So Tuesday I started throwing. Low pasta bowls, big serving bowls, teabowls ... I've got enough as of today to fill the kiln next week some time. Maybe just before New Year's Eve.

The teabowls can go pretty much anywhere in the kiln, and people always buy them. Funny thing, people now rummage through cups in the gallery or on the Coffee Obsession shelf, looking for "that thumb hole thing you do." Years ago, when I was a year or two into making pots, I pulled a temmoku teabowl from the kitchen cabinet at the home of Dennis Davis, my first clay teacher. (We did lots of raku workshops at Dennis's place.) It turned out to be a Warren McKenzie bowl, with a dimple pushed into the side. From then on, any time I needed a coffee or wine cup at Dennis's, I'd search out Warren's cup. And I stole the dimple idea from him, using it occasionally, always giving him credit when someone commented on it. Now, people think it's my own trademark. Funny how those things happen.

Tomorrow I need to finish Christmas shopping ...

And an even colder second day

2011-12-18T16:43:00.000-08:00

We had very light snow flurries last night, then occasional flakes falling most of the day. And by the time we closed down Sunday at 4 p.m., the temperature outside was about 26 F. and in the studio about 40. And, of course, I was the one in the studio by the open door, greeting everyone who arrived.

It was a very good weekend. Sunday was, as usual, less frenetic than Saturday, but this was perhaps the busiest Sunday I can remember for this show. Lots more work went out the door, much more food was consumed and I think by the time we closed the doors everyone was happy with the weekend. And today we got to see three of the other local potters who also had one-day shows yesterday. Anne Halpin, Kim Medeiros and Sarah Caruso showed up this afternoon to have a chile dog and talk about their own shows.

Maybe we'll do it again next year.

Photos: Kim Medeiros braves the heavy winter snows to check out new pots; part of the in-studio display; Jeweler Kim Collins and friends Bob Skilton (center) and Jordan Race spent time in the kitchen, where there was heat and food.

A great (though very cold) open studio day

2011-12-17T14:39:00.000-08:00

I was telling Sue and Fred Rose today that when we did our first kiln-opening and sale eight years ago, maybe five or six people were there to see the new, warm pots come out of the kiln. Sue and Fred were two of those people, because at the time I was firing with their daughter Angela. So they were there to support her, and my wife Dee was there to support me, and two or three people might have wandered in out of the cold.

For the past two years, so many people have come for the kiln-opening part of our Open Studio weekend that we have had to hire a police officer to keep the on-street parking from disturbing the neighbors. It was like that today, with a studio crowd of maybe 30 people, jammed in by the slabroller, around the kiln door, alongside the sinks and tables and looking on from the door into the house. No shortage of willing hands to pass the new pots on to the nearby table. My pot-loving friend Janet handled the kiln-shelf-and-loose-wads detail and took the pots from me as I worked my way down through the stack. It was a very good firing, I think. It's a bit difficult to hand pots out and have them claimed immediately, be wrapped and bagged and out the door. On the other hand, the money's a good thing, too.

Lots of pots left the property today, as did quite a bit of Mike Race's locally-roasted coffee beans, earrings and necklaces and notebooks and handblown and handworked glass. This open studio weekend has become a lot more to handle than it was in the beginning, but it's also become a community event. Most of the people who come here on this weekend are from Falmouth or one of the nearby towns, though our longtime friend Ethel came over from Martha's Vineyard and new friends Linda and Peter came down from Plymouth. It's not a Cape Cod summer event, but mostly friends and neighbors and other local folk eating and drinking and buying around the holidays. Once I get over the organizational jitters (not a pleasant problem to have, actually), this gets to be fun.

Tammy Race made kale soup, Lois Hirshberg made vegetarian chili, Ed Sholkovitz made extremely good scalloped potatoes, Donna Sutherland Steele brought frosted fruit cake, Bill McCarthy and Jim Sharpe brought pizzelles, Janet brought ... what was that, Janet? Some wonderful kind of chocolate ... thing. And I made red chile for the customary chile dogs.

And we'll do it all over again - though without the crowded kiln-opening - Sunday. And snow is expected tonight. Of course.

My thanks in particular to Barry and Terri Good, our neighbors from a few houses down Boxberry Hill Road, who came with an entourage and went away with pots, but particularly helped out by photographing the kiln-opening and putting pictures on their Facebook pages. I never took a shot and am grateful to them for supplying the illustration for this post.

Come tomorrow, everyone.

And a PS: The man who gave me this idea, Washington D.C. potter and Shino master Malcolm Davis, died last week. I didn't know Malcolm well, but when we lived in northern Virginia we used to go to his D.C. townhouse for his holiday open studio. He sold his pots there, but also opened his place to other local craftspeople and artists. That was the plan we followed years ago when we decided to do exactly the same thing. Thank you for the idea, Malcolm.

Yet another reminder ...

2011-12-14T12:57:00.000-08:00

I'm about three-quarters through the glazing of the 100 or thereabouts pots that will go into the kiln for Friday's firing and Saturday's opening. This post is for you folks who have forgotten in the past couple of days that Hatchville Pottery's annual holiday kiln-opening, craft show and chile dog fest is this weekend. I know, you read the last post and you already know about it. Well ... I thought I'd post this ad, anyway. It will go into Friday's Falmouth Enterprise and will be seen by literally dozens of people. Many of whom will come.

Plus, here are a few pots yet unglazed, soon to be dipped.

There will be oysters, by the way, as well as chile dogs. And kale soup. And cookies. And bagels and salmon cream cheese ...

Last pots thrown before firing

2011-12-10T15:22:00.000-08:00

Greenware is scattered all over the studio right now, the last pots made for next weekend's kiln-opening and open studio. One more bisqueload to go, a couple of glazes to mix, a ridiculous amount of neatening to be done in the studio. I'll glaze Wednesday and Thursday, then fire Friday while I finish the cleaning-up of the studio and its conversion into a selling space. It happens every year, though I have no real idea how.

Postcards for the show arrived a few days ago, designed by our paper expert Ruth Bleakley. I'll attach the information side of the card to this post.

I threw a dozen faceted and stretched teabowls yesterday, the first pots I've made this week that felt like I made them only for myself. Everything else felt like an obligation for the weekend show. This weekend and next are filled with open studio shows around Falmouth and Bourne. Potter Denny Howard has one this weekend over in Sagamore; sculptor Sue Beardsley gathered a group of artists at her house this weekend; Tessa Morgan had a reception today at Flying Pig Pottery in Woods Hole; potter Anne Newbury has an open studio in Woods Hole tomorrow; potter Anne Halpin is open next weekend on the Woods Hole Road; Kim Medeiros is receiving guests and buyers at her place next weekend. It's a busy time. We hope everyone spreads their art dollars around.

The photos: Greenware and drying ware around and in the sun outside the studio.

New pots for holiday inventory

2011-12-03T12:50:00.001-08:00

I fired about 100 pots yesterday, turning on the gas at about 9 a.m. and cone 10 falling at the top around 2:30. I know, it was a fast firing. And pretty tightly packed, too, but since I bought new lighter-weight shelves the firings have often been about 6 hours. Even when I try to hold it back a little. But if pots and glazes work, so ...

Anyway, here's a look at some of the new pots, with apologies to those of you who are not in love with copper reds. This glaze works well in this kiln and my friend Kathy Hickey, owner of the Daily Brew coffee shop in nearby Cataumet, likes red. And because she pays me cash every time I deliver mugs to her, I fire a certain number of red pots. All of the mugs in the photo above will go to the Daily Brew tomorrow.

The photos: Three fairly rought vases, two of them squared; a selection of Daily Brew mugs; two roughly squared bottle vases; shallow bowls glazed in Harvard Studio carbon-trap and spattered with iron slip.

Save the dates: Dec. 17-18 holiday open house

2011-11-29T14:07:00.000-08:00

There's no guarantee that you'll be welcomed by the two volunteer studio helpers (top photo) when we open the kiln Saturday, Dec. 17. (Basically, I just like this picture of my two good friends Donna Sutherland and Janet Simons from a couple of years ago.) Still, there should be lots of smiling friends in the pottery studio and upstairs with the other makers and their crafts on the weekend of the 17th and 18th for our eighth annual holiday kiln-opening and open house.

This year, Mike Race of Monument Beach joins the crew, selling his fine home-roasted coffee beans. With us again: Ruth Bleakley and her handmade books and paper goods; Kim Collins with stunningly beautiful beaded jewelry; glassblower (and newlywed) Bryan Randa; and fellow potter Lois Hirshberg.

Dec. 17, 10 a.m.-4 p.m., with kiln-opening at 11 a.m. Dec. 18, 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Lots of good food, too. Details to follow as we get closer to the weekend.

Sunday afternoon, low tide on the oyster flats

2011-11-28T08:29:00.000-08:00

We are in the middle of oyster season here on Cape Cod. I take time off from pot-making to fish with my friends Mike and Tammy Race and a few others on Sundays when the tide is low. It was midafternoon yesterday, with a particularly low tide and lots of sand and oysters exposed, and a fair number of people out oystering. I won't say where the oyster beds are, to keep you people in North Carolina, Scotland and southern England from coming over here and poaching on our territory. Suffice to say they are within a day's drive of my house in Falmouth.

We shared three different preparations of oysters on Thanksgiving Day at the Races' - raw, broiled with spinach, and in a French marinade of white wine, olive oil and herbs. This group loves its oysters.

And a warm November day in rubber boots, wandering around the tidal flats harvesting them is not a bad way to spend an hour. It is, as I've said before, one of the reasons we live where we live.

Photos: Top, low sun and bent-over oyster hunters; Mike and Tammy sorting through the catch; Mike and his son Jordan carrying the baskets back to the car; full limits for three shellfish permits.

Randy Johnston, Pucker Gallery

2011-11-24T03:29:00.000-08:00

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. And thanks for your good words on Dee's brother's death.

Life goes on. The kiln in the studio is dry-stacked with pots for a firing next week. Then I'll start making the last few pots for the holiday kiln-opening here Dec. 17. More about that show in a day or two, but it's the last gasp of the year for me before settling into winter and beginning to fill out applications for next summer's shows.

The pottery event I'm most looking forward to right now is the Randy Johnston show at the Pucker Gallery in Boston. I got the catalog a couple of weeks ago and it looks like a terrific show. I do love Randy's pots. For those few who don't know his work - or the work of his wife Jan McKeachie Johnston - the couple lives in the American Midwest, in Wisconsin, and fire with wood. Randy studied with Warren McKenzie in Minnesota and he now makes mature, rugged and beautiful pots.

He joined the Pucker group of potters a couple of years ago. For me, the best part about the shows at the Pucker is that anyone can come in and pick up these beautiful things to get the full experience. Can't afford a few hundred dollars for a teabowl? No problem. Come look and touch and enjoy them, anyway. And the catalog, with excellent photography, is worthy of keeping on a bookshelf.

The show opens Dec. 3 with a reception and closes Jan. 30. Call the Pucker Gallery at 617-267-9473 for a copy of the catalog, or go online to puckergallery.com for a pdf version. The photos here are from the Pucker website.

Jim Dorchester

2011-11-12T12:25:00.000-08:00

Dee's brother Jim Dorchester, 62, died this morning in Lubec, Maine. His girlfriend Marilyn was with him when he died. Thirty-eight years ago, Jim, a carpenter, moved from Martha's Vineyard to an old house in Maine - in a clearing in the woods next to a dirt road and near the clam flats. In many ways, he lived a 19th century life through the end of the 20th century and into the 21st. He drew water by hand from his own well that whole time. He believed in peace and in saving wild land, in music and in raising his own food. He loved the Maine coast and walked miles of it near his home Down East, usually returning from the beach with a backpack full of other people's trash. He was a man of convictions who lived the kind of life he wanted to live.

We didn't see him often, but we will miss him.

Photos: Walking past his garden in Maine, a month ago; Jim and Marilyn that same weekend, inside their home.

A few more Maine images

2011-11-11T07:49:00.001-08:00

Something about the town of Lubec, the Maine landscape, the weather, the family situation called for black-and-white images last weekend. I started in newspapers years ago as a photographer, shooting Tri-X and HP5 film and trying to get a range of tones in my prints and then in the paper. Digital photogaphy allows that, also. And you don't get your hands wet in developer.

Dennis commented on yesterday's blog post, saying he liked the colors, "both of them." I know what he meant, but the challenge is to tell the story in an image with a range of greys between full black and high white. Pottery has similar challenges.

In any case, here are a few images that didn't make it into yesterday's post.

Photos: Lubec fishing boats at their moorings in a north wind, Campobello Island in the background; the Disciples of Christ church in Lubec; Roman Catholic church in Lubec; upstairs at Bayviews bed-and-breakfast inn; the sea at Quoddy Head.

A weekend Down East

2011-11-10T11:21:00.000-08:00

Dee's brother Jim is quite sick these days, and last weekend we went to Lubec, Maine, to visit him and Marilyn and check up on their new place. They've moved into a bed-and-breakfast inn there, and out of their more primitive place in the woods outside of town. It's much more comfortable at the inn, with running water, indoor plumbing, electricity and cable television - everything Jim has (happily) lived without for almost 40 years. But he's sick and needs the comforts of the 20th century.

I wrote about Lubec a month ago, after we returned from our last visit. End-of-the-road town, one bar, one grocery, several struggling churches, a fishing fleet of perhaps 20 boats, a small summer holiday boom, a bridge across the channel to the Canadian island of Campobello. And wind and cold that starts right about now.

There is a cold, hard beauty to the town, where old houses spill down the hillsides of the peninsula almost to the water. The canneries that supported the town are long gone, though the docks and some of the warehouses are still there, rotting quietly as the tide comes and goes.

It was comforting to us that so many people know Jim, or know of him. One woman at the Congregational church Christmas fair (corn chowder, cream cheese and olive sandwich, brownie and coffee for $4.50) said, "Well, we take care of our own in this town." And that appears to be true.

Nearby Lubec is West Quoddy Head State Park, with its red-and-white-striped brick lighthouse, and its long wooded paths along the shore cliffs. Quoddy Head is the easternmost point of land in the United States. One of Jim's great regrets as he has been so weakened is that he can no longer walk the trails there that he walked for decades. We spent part of one sunny afternoon doing just that, so that we could tell him about it when we returned to the inn. It's a beautiful place.

Photos: West Quoddy Head Light, the pews at Lubec Congregational Christian Church, the ocean at Quoddy Head, looking toward Grand Manan island, the forest above the cliffs.

Rough bottles and Hiroshima Kazuo

2011-11-02T20:14:00.001-07:00

Back in September, two people in Harwich bought a pair of rough, Shino-glazed squared bottles from me at the Cranberry Festival craft show. That's all it takes, apparently, to set me off to making more of the same form ... two people spending $50 each for pots that had sat in my gallery for about two years. Where's the sense in that?

Never mind, though. I make a lot of pots and there are some forms that I particularly like and the tall bottle - squared or round - is one of them. There are several in the studio drying now - four- and seven-pound bottles. They're uniformly thrown, but the walls are fairly thick. That's partly because I throw that way and partly because when I run the rib up the sides I want enough clay to take the deforming without collapsing. The bottles are intended to be used as vases, but who knows how people might use them. They'll all be glazed in one Shino or another.

The other news is today's arrival of a gift from an anonymous (sort of) blog reader. Maybe 15 years ago when I wrote for a living in Washington, I covered the a show at the Sackler Museum called "A Basketmaker in Rural Japan." It was an astonishing show of bamboo baskets, fish traps and household implements by traditional basketmaker Hiroshima Kazuo. (The most recent reference I can find for him online shows him at 94 in 2009, sitting happily with guests at his home in Hinokage.) These were pieces of fully functional art made by a man who had been doing it all his adult life. Louise Allison Cort curated the exhibition for the Sackler. A fine film of the basketmaker at work accompanied the show.

The book is remarkable and I recommend it to anyone who loves seeing the products of a functional artist working at the very top of his game. We owned a copy of the book for years, but it got very wet at one point, deteriorated and then was lost. Now, I have a brand new copy and I'm grateful to whoever sent it. It came with a lovely inscription, but was not signed. It did, however, include a printout of a Kamaka Pottery blog post, with two of my comments on it. So I suspect New Zealander Bruce Martin, though how he arranged the whole thing I have no idea. Thank you, Bruce, or whoever sent it. I'm taking it with me to Maine tomorrow to read while we're in Lubec with Dee's brother Jim and his wife Marilyn.

The photos: 13-inch tall bottle, a group of smaller bottles, and a creel by Hiroshima Kazuo.

Loving teabowls ...

2011-10-26T13:26:00.000-07:00

I began making teabowls years ago, only a short time after I first got my hands on clay at the Art League studio in Alexandria, Va. It must have been a book of Japanese work, or a Hamada book, or some such thing. Maybe it was Steve Lally, making them next to me in Saturday morning's open studio. But early on I loved making and drinking from teabowls, and buying other people's teabowls.

I spent perhaps an hour one Saturday morning in about 1992 in Mark Shapiro's booth at the Baltimore ACC show, picking up and putting down faceted orange cups before finally buying one. We still have that pot in our cabinet here on Cape Cod. (And I have a better understanding of those few people at craft shows who come in silently and have to touch everything before buying.)

Dan Finnegan, then my teacher, paid me a great compliment one day in the Alexandria classroom when he offered to trade me one of his cups for one of mine. I felt like I'd made some progress that day.

A couple of years later, by this time teaching beginning pottery in an Alexandria city program, I asked a student who was headed to London to go to the Craftsman Potter's shop there and buy me a Phil Rogers teabowl. I loved Phil's teabowls ... still do, in fact. I'd bought one for $25 at a workshop, but had cracked it. She came back with a lovely ash-glazed cup which cost the equivalent of $75.

Yikes.

"Don't tell my wife," I said, as I cleaned out my wallet. Today Phil's teabowls cost considerably more than that up at the Pucker Gallery in Boston. This one, in the top photo, has survived uncracked.

I continue to make teabowls, lately faceting and torquing them to within an inch of their structural lives. I spend a fair amount of time explaining to browsing buyers what those drinking things without handles are. I should just say "cup" and forget "teabowl." But it's an old habit.

Other photos here: one-pound balls of B-Mix clay soon to be the shallow teabowls and simple mugs you see drying in the bottom two images.

Teabowls and garlic keepers in Wellfleet

2011-10-19T12:06:00.000-07:00

The OysterFest in Wellfleet last weekend happened on two sunny fall days, which were also windy fall days. Much time on Saturday was spent keeping one hand on the tent to keep it from flying off into the ocean or town hall or Main Street, or somewhere. Forty-five pound weights on each corner of the tent weren't quite enough for a couple of the gusts. Wellfleet always seems windy that time of year, what with Cape Cod Bay on one side and the Atlantic Ocean on the other.

It was again a crushing crowd of people, many of them buyers on Saturday, which is usually the better sales day of the two. Once again, certain pots got picked up and put down perhaps a hundred times each. I've got this one crackle-slipped and kaki-glazed mug that I swear is going to be worn out by lookers and never bought. I've still got it in my gallery. The same is true of certain serving bowls that were up near the front of the display. Look at serving bowl, pick up serving bowl, turn over serving bowl and look at the foot ring, put back serving bowl, walk on ...

I spend a lot of time trying to figure out habits like that. Some people seem to be driven to simply touch pots on their way by. That happened a lot with a pair of big vases at the front of the tent.

The more gratifying people are the ones who come in quietly and spend 10 or 15 minutes going from pot to pot, picking them up, holding them in two hands, trying them out. Those folks usually buy. Or they talk about what they're doing. One young woman said to me, after picking up about a dozen mugs, "I just have to touch them all." She eventually bought two mugs.

Two people - a man from New York Saturday, then on Sunday a Japanese woman from Harwich here on the Cape - picked up small teabowls, cradling them in two hands, lifting them toward their mouths. Clearly, I thought, tea ceremony people. And that was indeed true. The man bought a rough, faceted and Shino-glazed bowl that came out of the last firing. The woman spent a long time picking up small white bowls and then talking with me about her preference in teabowls and the customs of tea ceremony. She didn't buy a pot in the end, but will come here to look at more. Those are the kind of people who make selling pots a satisfying experience.

And then there was a small woman with an "OysterFest Volunteer" sticker on her sweather.

"Do you have any garlic keepers?" she asked.

"No, I'm sorry, in all these 150 pots there is not a single garlic keeper."

"Well, there's one at a pottery booth in the other parking lot."

"Why didn't you buy that one?"

"I didn't want to pay what he wanted for it."

"How much did he want?"

"$36."

"Well ... I'll tell you, there's a lot of work that goes into hand-making a garlic keeper."

"I know, but there's less discretionary income among people these days."

"That's right, and it's true of potters, too."

"Do you have fun at what you're doing?"

"Yes, to a certain extent, but I have to sell these pots, also."

"I know, I know ... "

It wasn't a pleasant conversation. And it came on Sunday at about noon, by which time I'd been in my tent three hours, watched people by the dozens walk by and had yet to sell a pot. So I wasn't ready to tsk-tsk the price of some other guy's garlic keeper. I told her she should try WalMart, that perhaps they had figured out how to make a dime profit on $5 Chinese garlic keepers.

"I don't think WalMart carries them," she said, completely missing the irony in that sentence.

Probably a good thing it was the last craft show of the season.

+++

And thanks here to fellow potter Lois Hirshberg, who owns a house in Wellfleet and put me up in a spare bedroom Friday and Saturday nights, sparing me very early rising Saturday and the battle through OysterFest traffic to get home Saturday night and return Sunday morning. Oh, and Lois also bought me the best fried clams I've had in years, from the Arnold's seafood stand at the lower end of the parking lot.

Leave the beach, come to the oysters

2011-10-14T13:41:00.001-07:00

Saturday and Sunday, the little town of Wellfleet, way down-Cape near Eastham and Truro, will be filled with people chasing the wily bivalve. The OysterFest is in town, complete with shucking contests, music, lots of good seafood, decent beer, and many, many people like me selling things we more or less make with our hands.

Come on down.

Weather predictions vary a bit, but most seem to agree it will be windy. We've been warned by the powers that be to bring our tent weights. I go nowhere without them. It appeared for a while this week that we might get rain, but at the moment predictions are for sun. It's a lovely little town, with good restaurants and bars, and on this weekend with about 20,000 people squeezed into a space big enough for about a tenth that number. Never mind, though, it's a fun event and usually a good one for the vendors. The last gasp of "summer," so to speak.

So, do come if you're in the neighborhood.

As to the photo ... well, actually, it was shot in North Carolina last fall, between rain storms, but I'm guessing you could find a dozen or so places on the Atlantic beach near Wellfleet that would look exactly like that.

It's not all travelogue ...

2011-10-11T11:57:00.000-07:00

I know, the last post was all about being a tourist and nothing about pots. So in the lead photo today are three soda-glazed teabowls from a firing two weeks ago at the Harvard ceramics facility in Boston. I fired there a few months ago, but didn't get everything into the load. So Crystal Ribich, the woman in charge of the workshop, got the last half-dozen of my pots in this month.

Nice results, I thought. Better than the first firing, which I think (and Crystal thinks) was a bit too tightly packed to let the atmosphere circulate as it should. These bowls showed much more of the effects of soda injection. These pots and a few hundred more will be with me at the Wellfleet OysterFest this weekend. Come to Wellfleet for the last celebration of the season, for good beer and many, many good oysters. It's a great weekend in the little town way down-Cape.

The past few days have been summer redux here, with temperatures in or near the 80s, bright sunshine and little wind. This is the kind of weather we hope for when the tourists have gone home and left the place to us. We got two good days of clamming in last Saturday and Sunday, paddling out to the clam flats each day. Then on Monday, Mike and Tammy called and Dee and joined them in paddling around Tobey Island in Bourne. Brilliant weather, flat seas, clear water in the rocks at the edge of Buzzards Bay. The cormorants were all over the rocks about 100 yards offshore. Potter Mark Heywood of Whynot Pottery will recognize the place where he clammed with us back in September.

And the habanero peppers are still coming in by the half-dozen from the garden. This handful is probably a year's supply of the hot little seedpods.

A few days far away ...

2011-10-07T12:00:00.000-07:00

Dee and I drove to Down East Maine last week ... almost as far Down East as one can go, 450 miles to the 1,400-or-thereabouts-population town of Lubec.

The fishing town lies just over the bridge from the Canadian island of Campobello, also a maritime community. Dee's brother Jim lives in Lubec and we wanted to visit him and his partner Marilyn. Jim's not been well lately, so we wanted to catch up with him and with the town we last visited about 30 years ago.

Lubec is an end-of-the-road community. That is, it looks like most people got off the highway before the highway reached the town. The place has had a summer renaissance of a sort in the past several years, with a music school, a few good bed-and-breakfast inns (we stayed at The Peacock House and heartily recommend it and its owners Sue and Dennis Baker) and some renovated homes turned into summer cottages, but it still has the look of an old and worn New England memory. Civil war monument, hardscrabble waterfront fish piers and warehouses, one bar, restaurants that close for the year by the end of October, churches with congregations of a dozen on rainy October Sundays. It's not the kind of place where a visitor can find a New York Times. And probably that's a good thing.

Visitors are drawn by the remoteness of it all, the empty beaches and cold water, the seals in the channel between Lubec and the island and the bald eagles above, and some no doubt come for the preserved summer home of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt on Campobello.

We came to see Jim and Marilyn in the old wood-frame house on Crow's Neck Road that Jim bought back in the '70s. He's made himself a life in the woods and on the water for more than 35 years, growing all his own vegetables, digging clams for consumption and for the market, working as a dependable framer and roofer on whatever carpentry job came his way. (Before he moved to Maine, Jim worked on my uncle Roger's carpentry crew on Martha's Vineyard and learned much of what he knows of basic house-building from my father, Paul Engley.)

We spent several hours of two days drinking coffee and talking with Jim and Marilyn. We drove often to Campobello (bring your passport), where we toured the Roosevelt home and drove the wet and empty roads. Dee went to the little Anglican church there on Sunday, while I drove to the vast crescent of black sand beach at Herring Cove and photographed rocks.

It was not a pottery vacation. We passed several potteries along Coastal Route 1, but communing with clay was confined to drinking from some of my old mugs at Jim's.

We took two days to come home, stopping for smoked fish at Capt. Vinny's in Lubec and then with Dee's uncle and aunt, Charles and Mary Dorchester, in Kenduskeag for a night of fish chowder and stories.

It's good to be home and back in the studio.

Photos: Marilyn, Jim and Dee; the Catholic church across from the Peacock House (Mass on Saturday afternoons); several wet rocks from Herring Cove.

A Shino-heavy firing ...

2011-09-29T12:09:00.000-07:00

I squeezed in a firing yesterday, a couple of days before we head to Maine for a brief visit. I need more pots for the Wellfleet OysterFest show Oct. 15-16, and I wanted a few more squared bottles, a bunch of serving bowls and more mugs.

I was careful to keep the temperature to only a bit more than cone 10. Things got away from me a couple of weeks ago and I produced a record amount of ash glaze running off the pots. This firing was heavy on Shinos, which I know won't run. And things worked out pretty well. I'll post some photos. All for now.

Except ... let me give you some sizes for these pots. The shallow bowls at top are about six inches across, more or less; the vase with the finger swipes is about ten inches tall; the larger serving bowls are about nine inches across; and the taller bottles are perhaps eight to nine inches tall.

Damp, damp, damp ...

2011-09-24T07:54:00.000-07:00

I swear, the small low bowls I threw 48 hours ago are still more or less as wet as they were on Thursday. And the brown stoneware and B-Mix mugs are still way more damp than they should be after three days of sitting out in the studio. It's been a warm, wet and humid week here on Cape Cod, after a cool weekend. My plan is to fire next week, probably Wednesday, but the chances of that happening are reduced with every passing hour of rain and/or humidity.

Whine, whine, whine ... I'm trying to get a fresh batch of serving bowls, squared bottles and mugs for the Wellfleet OysterFest show in mid-October and thought I'd have them fired weeks ahead. Think again ...

The top photo is of the big pan of paella we cooked one night last week when Meredith and Mark Heywood were visiting from North Carolina and our friends Henry and Louise were here from the UK. A great gathering of friends, with really good food.

Competing with Fairy Princess Halos ...

2011-09-19T14:19:00.001-07:00

Well ... not really competing. I'm guessing that the young parents with little girls who seemed to swarm around the display of beribboned haloes at the Harwich Cranberry Festival last weekend would be unlikely to also go for a layered Shino teabowl. Just a guess on my part ...

It was a bit dismaying to be on the same aisle as the haloes when I set up Saturday, but I grew to appreciate the diversion of seeing little girls try on the ribbons and then march off through the craft fair with them. And, to be completely fair, these items were personally made (along with stuffed frogs and magic wands) by the women in the booth. I saw them making them as the show went on.

The pottery buyers found me, though, and it was a pretty good show on a cool but pretty Cape Cod weekend. I sold some good pots and made some money, which is a large part of the whole point. I continue to be fascinated by the things people touch when they come into my booth. There were six chowder or chile bowls on one table, and a hundred people over the two days must have picked up the bowls and showed them to a wife or husband or significant other. No one ... that is, not one person ... bought one. On the mug shelf, one Shino mug and one crackle-slip-amber-glaze mug were handled an equal number of times. I still have both. It's remarkable how people in a crowd seem to latch onto one or two things as visually interesting, but not something they want to purchase. I don't get it.

But many other things found new homes, including some very nice layered Shino pots. Who knew you could sell crackled and crawled Shino on Cape Cod? Next up, in mid-October, the last show of the season - the Wellfleet OysterFest.

Photos: One boy, with a bacon-and-egg skull and bones shirt, who did not go for the Fairy Princess Haloes; four funky squared Shino bottles, two of which found buyers; much handled but not purchased mugs; ditto on the chowder bowls.

Exotic consumables on Cape Cod

2011-09-14T08:41:00.000-07:00

This post is mostly for Doug Fitch and Hannah McAndrew of England and Scotland, who were the first potters we took to the UK section of the Stop&Shop, our local supermarket, when they visited in the spring. While there this morning, I thought I'd photograph Meredith and Mark Heywood, North Carolina potters, with PG Tips and Marmite, two of England's most stalwart and delicious exports. Here's to Hannah and Doug, and Mark and Meredith.

Sunny City Square Park in Charlestown

2011-09-12T07:44:00.000-07:00

The Artists Group of Charlestown show in Boston comes at just about the perfect time for New England weather. So it was Saturday, with brilliant blue skies, a few clouds, coolish breezes in the afternoon, lots of young couples with babies and dogs. It was a decent day for sales, with the supply of freshly-fired mugs taking a bit of a beating. Some shows I'll sell not a single mug, Saturday I probably sold 10. Go figure ...

I'm beginning to see the same buyers in Charlestown every year, as people who bought last year come back and tell me how they used their pot and then they buy one or two more. I love that. I just wish I could remember their names. One woman last year bought a very expensive (for my price range) teabowl after considering several. She told me she lived in Japan for many years and particularly likes to use teabowls. This year she bought two more.

And our niece Rhobie's brother-in-law Bill and his wife Erin showed up with their four-month-old boy Reed. (Hope I'm spelling these names right.) They found a crawled and squared Shino bowl for a housewarming gift.

Best of all, Whynot NC potters Meredith and Mark Heywood showed up about noon, after getting off the plane from NC and negotiating a rental car through the tortuous cow-path-oriented streets of Boston that morning. They'll be here in Falmouth Monday and touring the Cape for the next few days.

All in all, a good show, planned well by Dara Pannebaker and the people of the Artists Group of Charlestown. And a couple of post-show hours in the Ironside Grill a block from the park didn't hurt, either.

Photos: This little girl was very serious about her painting, at Susanna Ford's "Paint With Suz" spot across from my tent; checking out earrings at my neighbor Jen's display; back-to-basic-boxes in my display (the ladders are history); and a photo of the potter in his booth, which I know you've all been clamoring for.

Art in the Park 2011, Boston

2011-09-09T07:58:00.000-07:00

I'm off soon to Boston for Saturday's Art in the Park, in Charlestown's City Square Park. The show is sponsored by the Artists Group of Charlestown, a fine group of creative people of which I am a member.

So far the weather promises to be sunny and late-summerish, which should be good for all concerned. City Square Park is a short walk from the Charlestown Navy Yard, home of the U.S.S. Constitution, and is another short walk from the Zakim Bridge and Boston Garden. The neighborhood has been up-and-coming for several years now, with lots of young couples and their golden retrievers and golden babies. Beautiful restored brick row houses, old churches, hilly streets leading up to the Bunker Hill monument, good coffee shop.

Come on up to Boston and visit. The show opens Saturday at 10 a.m. and closes at 5 p.m.

Out of the kiln, dodging shrapnel ...

2011-09-08T13:54:00.001-07:00

Yesterday's firing was a hot, explosive event. Hotter than it ought to have been, and of course any explosions at all are to be avoided. There were three in this one - the top high-temp conepack and two raw-glazed mugs. I've glazed raw before with no incidents, but this time two of the three raw pots blew up and scattered bits and pieces all over. (I'm guessing they were not fully dry after glazing.) As anyone who has ever had this experience knows, shards tend to find their way to all shelves and into virtually any kind of pot. There was a lot of bad behavior by the potter during the opening of the kiln this morning. Fortunately, I had encouraged no one to join me. And I've swept up and discarded the pile of broken pots that landed on the studio's concrete floor.

The other problem was letting the heat get past cone 10. Because the upper conepack was gone, I had to rely on the bottom one and the never perfectly reliable pyrometer. The bottom pack was hard to read, and until the last minute I took the falling 11 cone to be cone 10. So I overfired. Which means little to the Shino glazes, but everything to the ash glazes. The lovely Leach Kaki on many pots became one with the shelves.

I'm only writing this because people should know we all make mistakes. I don't mean to make it sound like I took these explosions and the cone 11 heat and the resulting carnage lightly. I was not a happy man this morning. Still, good pots came from the firing. More will come again. But I don't know if I'm ready to grind all those feet ...

Photos: Shino creamer with crackle slip; three-pound Shino serving bowl; mugs; small vase with carbon-trap Shino.

Moving on ...

2011-09-02T12:24:00.000-07:00

Work goes on in the studio here, a few days after the wedding that didn't happen and the hurricane that partially did. I'm trying to get in a gas firing next week before going to Charlestown for the annual Art in the Park event of the Artists Group of Charlestown, which happens Sept. 10. (Also, by coincidence, the same day that the entire staff of Whynot Pottery from Whynot, NC, arrives in Massachusetts for a bit of time off.)

I spent time today trimming mugs and pulling handles. You can see some of them in the photo, still awaiting the application of what Dan Finnegan calls "dust catchers" where the handle joins the cup. That will happen after the handles stiffen up a bit.

This firing will have mugs and shallow bowls and a few vases and ... anything else I can find on the shelf that needs to be fired.

Only a glancing blow from Irene ...

2011-08-29T08:31:00.000-07:00

Hurricane Irene blew in yesterday with some heavy gusts, minimal rain, surf, trees down and power out in places here on Cape Cod. We only got the eastern edge of the storm, fortunately for us. Others in the Northeast were less lucky, with the storm barreling up the Hudson River Valley and dropping as much as a foot of rain on some very small creeks, turning them into destructive rivers.

Dee's sister Ellen, visiting from Schoharie, N.Y., near Albany, with her husband Russ, heard last night that their village and nearby Middleburg were both evacuated because Schoharie Creek was expected to be well past flood stage. This morning it's apparent that it went about ten feet beyond flood stage, inundating downtown Schoharie, including the building that houses Russ's law office. Farmers in the beautiful bottom land along the creek have lost their season's crops, tractors, trucks, barns, herds of sheep. As exciting as the storm was for us here, it's a disaster for the Schoharie Valley.

Russ has headed back to New York to see what he can do there. Ellen will go later. All of Dee's siblings were here on the Cape for the Sunday wedding in Newport, R.I., of our nephew Jason. That wedding was canceled because of the storm, apparently with no new wedding date. The honeymoon, we hear, is still on.

I'll attach photos of part of yesterday. Always fun to go out and watch a hurricane. From the top: Surf on Buzzard's Bay at Wing's Neck; Dee's sister Marcy and our niece Rhobie in the surf;

Dee (right) and our friend Tammy, both trying to fly; dealing with the wind, with Mike, Tammy, Rhobie and Dee.

Hurricane coming ... maybe

2011-08-26T11:49:00.000-07:00

I grew up on Martha's Vineyard, a few miles across the water from our current hometown of Falmouth on Cape Cod. So I have been through a few hurricanes. I know that they come or they don't come, based on their own whims and the doings of the atmosphere. Irene, currently approaching the coast of North Carolina, seems to be certain to give us some high wind and heavy rain, at least, on Sunday. Or it could hit us head-on and really roar. But you never know.

Our nephew Jason is being married Sunday evening in Newport, RI, which could very well be the place and the time that Irene's eye comes ashore in southern New England. Lucky us. Family is here from Maine, New York and New Mexico for the wedding. No one knows at this point whether we'll even be able to get to Newport, let alone drink toasts to the couple on the lawn. Sooooo ... we're waiting and watching the Weather Channel.

I haven't made many pots this week, what with all the prep work for visiting family. But I took a break this afternoon to photograph some things that might not be left when Irene passes through. Last spring, Dee planted a lovely wide row of sunflowers between our property and our neighbor's. They came up beautifully, and provided a nice little border on that side of the yard. Even a brush by Irene will probably do in the sunflowers, so I thought I'd record them. And I just roasted a bunch of tomatoes, with a couple of tomatillos thrown in. The garden is likely to be a wreck after the storm.

All for now. See you on the other side.

Slooowwww Sunday in Harwich

2011-08-15T10:22:00.001-07:00

The reason we do these craft fairs this time of year is to take our pots to the people and hope that they connect with them and decide to trade money for them. So that we can buy more clay, or food, or paper towels ... or whatever.

Or, that's the reason I do the shows. Who knows why other people do them. I was in Harwich Sunday in the hopes that the August Cranberry Fesival show would be more productive than the July Cranberry Festival. (There are, by the way, no cranberries in evidence in the summer; they come in the fall.) Summer mythology among Cape Cod retailers holds that August people have more money than July people, or at least spend it more freely. Yesterday was abundant with evidence to the contrary of that theory, which I will add to my slowly-building store of local craft fair lore.

I sold precisely four pots, which I agree is four pots better than selling none. And one tiny soda-glazed vase sold for half-price to a young buyer (she might have been 10 years old) who came into the tent by herself, picked up lots of pots and then went off to get her mother. When she returned, she went directly to a little shell-stamped ink pot and picked it off the shelf. I took five dollars off the price, just to encourage the next generation to appreciate handmade things, and she went off happy. So, I struck a blow for handcraft if nothing else. And it was very nearly nothing else. That's how you learn what shows work and what shows don't, I guess.

And the possibility always remains that I just don't make appealing pots, or I don't know how to sell the ones I do make. That possibility is always on my mind. But the moaning from other craftspeople yesterday at least implied that buyers weren't buying much of anything, not just my pots.

Anyway, some photos are attached. The shiny teabowls in the photos are refired pots from the recent Harvard soda firing and Castle Hill salt firing.

Keep saying, "We need the rain ... "

2011-08-08T10:18:00.001-07:00

Sunday was the annual Cataumet Arts Center fair, in the little park downhill from the arts center and just a few miles from my studio. It's a friendly little local fair, usually seeing the same folks we saw last year and, for me, selling a few pots and making some decent money. Sunday here on the western end of Cape Cod was also a dismal day of rain and wind. Mostly rain. All day. And few sales.

The day was spent dodging the runoff dripping from the EZ-Up roof, emptying chowder bowls filling up at the front of the tent, saying "Lovely day, eh?" to anyone who came by, selling maybe five pots, changing wet shirts, visiting briefly with Harvard ceramics teacher and potter Crystal Ribich, stomping in the swamp-like conditions around my tent, watching umbrellas pass ...

You know, it was pleasant enough and the tent kept me more or less dry, except when I stood near the dripline. But I was happy to get home.

Pots from the Castle Hill salt kiln

2011-08-06T13:51:00.000-07:00

I braved the ridiculous mid-day traffic on the Outer Cape Thursday to get to Castle Hill Center for the Arts in Truro and pick up newly-fired salt pots. Brian Taylor and his crew had the kiln nearly unloaded by the time I cleared the Eastham-Wellfleet jam-up and got to the idyllic countryside where Castle Hill lies.

This was only the second or third firing of this Donovan Palmquist-designed gas-fueled salt kiln. It's a lovely little construction of brick, maybe 15 cubic feet of stacking space. Brian said they used only 6.5 pounds of salt in the firing, which seemed like a fairly small amount. I used to fire with Bill VanGilder and Dan Finnegan at Bill's place in Maryland and we used considerably more than that in a bigger kiln, though I think at times we probably over-salted. (There was always a debate about that ... ) In any case, these pots were fairly subtle in their surfaces. I'll re-fire a number of them in my own reduction kiln this coming week, along with some re-fires from the Harvard soda firing, and we'll see if that makes a difference. I was pleased with the new liner glazes, a blue celadon and a so-called carbon trap Shino, both from the Harvard glaze book, and I'll try them out this week in my own kiln.

I hope Brian continues to fire the salt kiln and that other Cape potters take advantage of the chance to put pots in. I think the firings can only get better. There's always a learning curve with salt - packing the kiln, how much salt, reduction, all of that makes a difference. As a rule, things only get better and better.

I've put the pig sculpture at the top of the images here, mostly because in the last post all you could see were the ham hocks, and particularly the pork-centric folks in North Carolina were interested to see how cone 10 barbecue comes out here in the saltwater North. I apologize that I don't have the pig-maker's name. She didn't want her own photo taken and I neglected my reporter's duty to at least get her name. Perhaps if Brian reads this post he will e-mail me and I can give the sculptor her due credit.

A rare blogging appearance

2011-08-03T11:04:00.000-07:00

I haven't felt like I have much to tell people lately. I'm making pots and trying to sell pots. A show this weekend in Cataumet, then another next week in Chatham. Tomorrow I go down to Truro to help unload the salt kiln, with about 20 of my pots in it. Furthering my exploration of atmospheric firing, and deciding what kind of kiln to build. These photos came from Brian Taylor, the studio manager at Castle Hill Center for the Arts in Truro. If you look carefully, you'll see a couple of my faceted teabowls and a couple of my other pots. Back stack, front stack, kiln in action in the rain.

Opening the Harvard soda kiln

2011-07-19T09:43:00.000-07:00

We were in Boston yesterday with our friend Sue, opening the soda kiln that fired last Thursday. It was a tight pack. Lotsa pots in there. So some might have been shielded a bit from the soda. But people were pretty happy with the results. It was a learning thing for me and Crystal Ribich, the woman in charge of the workshop, is a good teacher. There was no question she wouldn't answer.

I went a bit overboard on the Bauer's slip, hence the great number of orange pots among my 30 that came from the kiln. Bauer's takes the soda well, when it gets in touch with it. And there were several pots that showed evidence of that. The top of the pack was a bit underfired, reaching only a bit over cone 7, so I will refire some of my pots to cone 10 in my own kiln. Should be interesting to see what results from that. In the past I've had very good luck refiring salt pots, so I expect there will be some happy improvement in already decent pots.

I'll take some of the slipped but unfired pots down to Castle Hill art center in Truro for a salt firing early next week. It should be interesting to see the difference in the slips' and glazes' reaction to salt over soda.

I'll attach some photos. Anyone who has questions about the process, feel free to ask in the comments section.

Photos, top to bottom: A lovely result glazing a teabowl in the studio's Carbon Trap; yes, by God, a turquoise that I like; the opened kiln; a small paddled vase; three teabowls.

Women of fire at Harvard ...

2011-07-14T20:44:00.000-07:00

The soda firing at the Harvard ceramics program went off as it should today, one day late due to an electrical failure that crippled the vent system. I was up there with teacher Crystal Ribich, and fellow workshop participants Lori and Henriette. (I apologize for possibly misspelling names.)

Hot and sweaty work spraying in the 1000 grams of dissolved soda ash somewhere around cone 8. But all went well. The kiln will be opened Monday morning.

Soda firing in Boston this afternoon

2011-07-13T08:07:00.000-07:00

I've been involved in a soda workshop at the Harvard University ceramics facility in Boston for the past couple of weeks. Falmouth potter Sue Wadoski and I drove up yesterday to work the first shift of loading with teacher Crystal Ribich. I'm headed up again in a couple of hours to be involved with the application of soda as cone 7 goes down. Because I'm seriously thinking of building a soda kiln here, it seemed like a good opportunity to get some hands-on experience. Lots of faceted teabowls of mine in there.

Meanwhile, I sold pots at the Harwich Cranberry Festival this past weekend, about an hour to the west of here. Not a great show. Lovely weather, but a rather strange group of vendors. Including one fellow who sold so-called "scrimshaw," but also had a rotating sales gondola in front of his tent, covered with flat white dog bone shapes, with "I (heart) my Shar Pei," "I (heart) my therapy dog," etc.

OK, I'm off to Boston now. Soda pot photos, hopefully, late Friday.

Photos: Crystal Ribich with soda pots; the back stack in the Harvard soda kiln, mostly done; a selection of Dee's flowers in my pots in Harwich.

Why we live here ...

2011-07-06T11:10:00.000-07:00

Those of you who have read this blog for the past couple of years know that we spend time in and on the water in the summer. And you've seen plenty of photos of hardshell clams (we call them quahaugs, their Native American name) on this blog.

So I won't show you any more clams, at least not on this post. But I will show you dawn over the little cove off Buzzards Bay where I usually dig quahaugs with my friends Mike and Tammy. I was there this morning, about 5:45, the sun not quite up over the trees behind me, waiting for my friends to show up with their kayak. I was not the first clammer there, as you can see from the photo. A lone man was already out in fairly unproductive water, scraping his rake across the bottom.

The three of us paddled across to the island you see in the distance, a much more productive area, and we had our limit of a half-peck basket by 7. Then we left the cove to the ospreys, blue herons and loons.

Green Ash Glaze from Blair Meerfeld

2011-07-02T14:32:00.001-07:00

This glaze was a test in this week's firing here. It's a recipe from Phil Rogers' book "Salt Glazing," and I think is a Blair Meerfeld glaze. In any case, it's listed on the same page as Meerfeld's pots. The photo on the page, a salt-glazed ewer, looks a good deal different from my results. Not a big surprise, since that often happens in different kilns on different clays and in different atmospheres. The glaze on the ewer looks like a blue-green Rob's Green. And mine might have been mixed thinner than this one, and is a faceted bowl made with Laguna B-Mix, a white porcelaneous stoneware. Anyway, here's the recipe.

Green Ash Glaze

Whiting ..........20

Wood ash ......20

Kona F-4 Spar ... 20

SGP Ball Clay (I used OM-4) ... 20

Flint ........20

add

Black Copper Oxide ... 4

Cobalt Carb ... 2

Surfaces from Thursday's firing

2011-07-01T20:56:00.000-07:00

I fired the gas kiln yesterday, filled with chowder bowls and tumblers and a few odds and ends that didn't get into the firing two weeks ago. I've got a show coming up in Harwich, down-Cape from us, next weekend and needed to get as much inventory finished as I could.

I have been unhappy with my Shinos for a few firings now, and I decided to throw out all three buckets and mix new batches, hoping that would solve the problems. Looks like it might have, after I opened the kiln this morning. I suspect the problems may have been as simple as letting the Shinos get too thick. The results in the Bright Shino, Red Shino and the Malcolm Davis carbon-trap were much more like they should be.

And I stretched out the firing time, from about six hours to eight and one-half hours. I let the temperature rise much more slowly than I have been. These are all more or less blind stabs in the dark, but the attempts might have hit on a few things that will work for me. Though even though I didn't top cone 10 either top or bottom, I still got a few more glazes running off the pots than I'm used to. Maybe it's the extra hours up near and slightly above cone 9.

One of the things I look for in my glazes is texture and detail. There were some that I like in this firing. See the photos.

Potters on the porch ...

2011-06-23T12:36:00.001-07:00

... and a photographer, filmmaker, builder, reporter/chicken farmer, a massage therapist. We had a little multi-profession dinner Tuesday evening with visiting North Carolina potter Tracey Broome and her husband Gerry and daughter Wesley. Our friends Mike and Tammy Race joined us, and brought dessert. The Broomes were headed back south after a week or so of seafood consumption on the coast of Maine.

They stopped for an overnight here on Cape Cod and we gathered some local scallops and bluefish for the grill, and an assortment of other stuff and sat for a couple of hours trading stories that ranged from Iraq to Carolina to New Mexico to Cape Cod. We met Tracey at Southern Pines, N.C., last fall when the blogging potters show opened there. But we hadn't met Gerry or Wesley. Both nice folks and talented with a camera and good with conversation. Wesley's headed to film school and should be interesting to watch in the next few years.

Tracey left two of her beautiful barns here with us. They join one she sent last year on the top of our old piano.

They were only here overnight, with Wesley staying in the "Sir Douglas Fitch Suite" and the parents in the "Queen Hannah" accommodations. We all headed early to Daily Brew in Cataumet for breakfast with them, before leading them briefly to Mike and Tammy's and then to the Bourne Bridge rotary and pointing them south. They might be home by now. It's remarkable what wonderful people we've met through this blogging thing.

Got burners?

2011-06-21T12:15:00.000-07:00

Our good friends Paula and Pret bought a kiln not long ago, so that Paula could build even more experimental bread ovens. Paula is an amazing baker, and gives bread-making classes around New England. The kiln they bought was in Mattapoisett, not far from here on the mainland, and came with two big burners. The burners, as you can see, now reside in my studio, taking up a lot of floor space.

From the number of bricks they ended up with, I suspect the kiln was in the 25-30 cubic foot range, maybe bigger. The burners look real big to me, since I'm used to the six on my Olympic, which are nothing at all like these. They're set up for natural gas, have blowers and mega pilot lights and thermocouples.

I don't know, frankly, if I need two burners for the size soda kiln I'm thinking about (between 5 and 10 c.f.), but it never hurts to have more than you need. Does anyone who knows about these things see anything in the photos that you'd like to tell me about?

Selling pots as Arts Alive opens the summer

2011-06-20T10:14:00.001-07:00

This small, local June show is always fun and - mostly - always in fair weather. The weather held again this year, with brilliant sun and blue skies. Lots of shoppers on Saturday and I sold a few pots. Sunday, however, being Father's Day, was slooooooowwww into midafternoon. At least for me. I sold next to nothing ... no, wait ... I sold exactly nothing ... until about 3, then a few things in the next few hours, which made the day worthwhile.

As always, there's no judging what kind of pots people are buying - mugs sold, as did vases, small dishes, bowls, plates. Young people (see the photo) bought pots, as did a few older folks. So at least there's hope that 20somethings aren't just into iPods, manga and video games. At least a few of them like handmade stuff.

For me, the winner of the weekend was the Square connection, for easy acceptance of people's credit cards. First time I've used it. As long as you've got a smart phone and an internet connection, this thing is brilliant. If you're doing the knucklebuster at craft fairs or in your own studio, or writing down credit card numbers and then inputting them later at home, this is the thing to get. It's been well-reviewed all over the place, so I won't give all the details. But if you're at all interested in taking credit cards from folks, this is the way to go. Go to squareup.com and take a look at it. It costs you money only when you make a sale, you get the smartphone app and the one-inch-square card swiper free. It's pretty cool, a Google spinoff, and better than HDTV. Worth looking into.

OK, enough salesmanship for Square.

You'll see from the photos that my new, industrial strength display was used for the first time this weekend. Great little collapsible ladders from Lowe's, staging planks from Wood Lumber here in town, planing of the planks courtesy of Jim Akens' wonderful woodshop. It makes for a very clean and easy setup, though it might be too industrial for some people. I like it much better than the folding tables, dirty tablecloths and wooden boxes I've used for the past several years. And it's sturdy enough that chimpanzees could swing from the ladders and shelves and not disturb the pots. Well ... maybe ... but it's sturdy as hell. Easy to break down, too.

We're expecting Tracey and Gerry Broome here tomorrow night, with daughter Wesley. The Chapel Hill potter and her family have been touring Maine and New England and are headed back south. We'll see if we can find some fish to give them tomorrow night.

All for now.

Arts Alive 2011 all weekend ...

2011-06-17T15:49:00.001-07:00

I've set up the bare bones of my tent and display space on the street in Falmouth for Arts Alive this weekend. I'll bring the pots tomorrow morning early and set things up. Rain is expected tonight, though tomorrow and Sunday are (allegedly) supposed to have pleasant June weather. We'll see.

Meanwhile, the firing Wednesday was only so-so. There were some good things in it, but too many ordinary and sub-ordinary things. Way too much crap to go directly to the hammer. Funny how the kiln results usually reflect the attitude of the potter (or at least this particular potter) when he made, glazed and fired the work. After this weekend at the show, I'm going to throw out all of my Shino glazes and a couple of others and start fresh. I've got enough bisque to fire again next week.

A trip yesterday to Boston with Falmouth potter Sue Wadoski helped add a bit of excitement to my pot-making life. Sue and I are taking a soda-firing course at the Harvard U. Ceramics Center with potter Crystal Ribich. Last night we all went over slips and glazes; over the next couple of weeks I'll make and slip pots for the firing and then we'll glaze in Boston and fire the Harvard soda kiln. All of this came as a coincidence with my recent thoughts - spurred in part by a conversation with Dan Finnegan - of building a small soda kiln with the brick I was given last month. So maybe there's light at the end of the tunnel. Or the end of the firebox ...

The photos: Smallish pitchers for this week's show; ash-glazed vase; part of a wedding gift order (I know, Finnegan, it's that copper red that you love ... ); and two very nice women who came to the studio today, left empty-handed and then returned to buy pots an hour later. I do love that.

Ready ... more or less ... for summer

2011-06-15T15:44:00.000-07:00

The sun is shining today, temperatures are in the low 70s. Summer will be here on Cape Cod soon. For this potter, the first sign of summer is the Arts Alive art festival on the library green here in our home town of Falmouth. This year's show is this weekend. Today's weather would be perfect for the weekend. We'll see ...

Right now I'm firing a kiln of pots - about 25 mugs that I need for inventory, some experimental moribana bowls for a local woman who is an ikebana enthusiast, an order of chowder bowls and lunch plates and a serving platter for a wedding gift, and vases and teabowls and on and on and on.

I started the kiln this afternoon about 1:30 and was working in the studio when I heard a distressing POP! in the kiln. Let's see, says I, cone pack? Indeed. The kiln was at about 500 degrees, so I opened the door and saw bits and pieces of the top shelf low-temp conepack scattered everywhere. Shut down the gas, take out the pots and the top shelf, dump shards out of pots on about three shelves, hope for the best elsewhere, make new cone packs, dry them in the stove, place them, get the whole thing going again. It's 6:50 p.m., we're up near 1900 F right now, after re-starting everything at about 3 p.m. Cone 10 should fall some time around the start of the Bruins-Canucks game tonight. I've become a hockey fan. Who would have guessed?

The other photos on this post are from another project for the upcoming summer. I'm changing the way I display my pots in my EZ-up. I'm going away from table cloths and wooden boxes to a slightly more industrial look, with two stepladders on either side of the tent entrance, holding up three eight-foot boards of pots. My friend Jim Akens - potter Annie Halpin's husband - suggested using spruce staging planks to avoid mid-plank bend. (Jim and Annie hosted Angela Walford and Dan Finnegan at this spring's UK Slipware Potters workshop.) So I've spent the past couple of days with Jim in his remarkably equipped wood and metal shop, planing down the big spruce boards. They're heavy, but they should lighten up as they dry. In the meantime, I think they'll look pretty good. And they look much cooler with the planing that Jim and I did with both his dangerous power tools and his lovely English block plane.

I'll post something next week on how the setup looks at Arts Alive.

All for now.

Photos: Top, this kilnload, with the ill-fated cone packs at top; Jim Akens at the joiner; Jim directing his resident gardener.

Busy in the studio, finally ...

2011-05-27T12:48:00.000-07:00

I've got a few weeks yet until my first summer show - the Arts Alive event in downtown Falmouth. It's always a pleasant weekend, if not necessarily a big money-maker. The arts festival started about seven years ago as a way of gathering a variety of artists on the green library lawn off Main St., showing off local creative folk. It's expanded every year, and now marks the beginning of the summer arts season for those of us who are the "local creative folk."

It's been a busy spring for me, mostly because of the workshop here with Doug Fitch and Hannah McAndrew and then my two-week show in Boston with painter Dara Pannebaker. Finally got back into the studio last week, needing to make mugs and big things, and maybe a few medium things to fit on the 9-inch shelf on the bottom of the kiln. Plus, now that spring is genuinely here on Cape Cod, the front door can be open and the sounds and light of the neighborhood can penetrate into the dusty, disorderly studio.

So, here are a few photos of what's been going on here. And one image of a fine little mug by Joy Tanner, brought back from North Carolina by Cape Cod potter Gail Turner. Gail dropped by with Falmouth potter Shelley Fenily to tell the story of her recent tour of North Carolina potteries, and she brought back this lovely soda-glazed mug. Gail loved North Carolina and the pots she saw there. She should have a blog so that she could tell you so herself.

Photos: Top, first attempts at moribana pots, an order from a Falmouth woman who is deeply into ikebana. She's looking for two, about 14 inches in diameter, which means I'll make ... who knows how many, to get two that we both like. The mug in the photo is by Doug Fitch, for scale. Below that, drying mugs, 8-pound hakeme-brushed vases, teabowls and shallow serving bowls, more biggish vases drying, and that nice little Joy Tanner mug. Thanks, Gail.

900 bricks in search of a kiln

2011-05-15T13:33:00.000-07:00

This past weekend I became the owner of about 900 bricks - soft and hard - that were once a kiln. About 20 years ago, a Falmouth potter and her husband bought a kiln from Chris Gustin when he was teaching at the late Swain School of Design in New Bedford. (The Swain School has been gone for a long time, though its alumni - including my sister-in-law Marcy Dorchester, of Albuquerque - are still making art.) In any case, the potter and her husband parted ways some years ago and the kiln, which was broken down for transport, was never re-built.

I got word Friday from local potter Sarah Caruso that a stack of soft brick was being given away, and my offer to take it away was accepted. After stacking most of the soft brick in the back of my truck, I discovered that, as the owner said, "There are some hard bricks under there, too." An understatement. Turns out the hard bricks, at least 400 of them, had been turned into a dry-laid patio at the side of the house. So, much energy was expended over two days bending down, freeing the bricks from the earth and stacking them in the truck. Sarah was a great help with that, I should add. She's traded me her labor for kiln-space once there is actually a kiln.

Now I'm on the hunt for a plan that will allow me to turn the piles of bricks into a modest wood kiln. Or maybe a soda kiln. Or a salt kiln. ... I think I'm thinking wood, though. Or maybe salt/wood. Oh, I'm also hunting for a place to put the kiln, since we don't have the room here in Hatchville.

There are lots of plans around for kilns and I'm starting to look at some of them. I know some of you have had success with wood. Anyone have any good ideas for me?

The photos: My Tacoma, sagging under the load of about 400 of the hard brick; and the soft brick pile and half the hard brick at the side of the gallery; and signs of spring in the yard.

The show comes down

2011-05-09T13:15:00.000-07:00

"The Potter and the Painter" at the StoveFactory Gallery closed Sunday afternoon at 4 and by the time the yoga students were drifting in for class around 6, all the pots and the shelves were off the walls and packed in the truck. Funny how an exhibition of pots can just disappear in what seems like no time.

I think Dara and I learned a lot in this two weekends of showing our work in the gallery. We had done a ton of publicity for the show, but in the end it was very sparsely attended. I wandered around from shelf to shelf, straightening pots, waaaayyy too much. Still, some people did come to the gallery, and I sold some pots. And Dara sold some paintings. Remarkably, for the relatively low attendance, we both (I think) more than made back our investments in the show, which were considerable. At least the bank account won't have taken a big hit.

My pots were priced higher for this show than they have been for craft fairs. Raising my prices is something people have been telling me to do for a couple of years now. Maybe they're right. The folks who bought some of my best work for $125 to $150 thought carefully about their purchases, but mostly about which pot they wanted. They seemed to have no problem with the price. Teabowls and small vases sold well for $50, slab plates for $75, small side-handle teapots for $125. Reasonable prices, I think, given the quality and the work that goes into them. And well below prices by much more established potters at nearby places like the Pucker and the Lacoste.

The building that houses the StoveFactory Gallery is a late 1800's brick factory building, like many in and around Boston or any similar city. Huge old timbers, industrial elevators and bathrooms, concrete floors, peeling paint. Painters, printmakers, papermakers, furniture craftspeople, design offices are in the building. The kind of people attracted to high ceilings, big windows and low rents. And it is some distance from the business district, hence unlikely to attract casual strollers. A gallery in town would get more drop-in trade. Those who come to the clean, well-lighted StoveFactory Gallery do so intentionally. And that probably explains the fact that with few visitors, we still sold relatively well.

My work has never been seen in a better venue. This is a gallery designed by artists to light the art in the best way possible. The layered Shinos and ash glazes on my pots want light. The buyer needs to be able to look at what's happening there between the carbon-trap Shino and the Bright Shino, to see the channels of the crackled and crawled Shino filled in by the celadon of the ash glaze. When the glazes are working right, there are landscapes created just under the surface that are simply not discernible in low light. What you see may not be to your taste, but with this kind of light you can definitely see it. And I think the same is true of the layered paints in Dara Pannebaker's work.

So I wish more people had seen the show, seen my pots in this lovely, formerly industrial space. But it's enough that we did the show and sold some work and made some connections.

Next time, maybe we'll figure out how to get more people to Charlestown.

The photos: Top, a round vase glazed in layered Shinos, soon headed to Sally Reavis in Seattle; side-handle teapots and landscapes; a wide view of the gallery.

"Potter and Painter" opens in Charlestown

2011-05-02T12:01:00.000-07:00

Dara Pannebaker and I had a very pleasant evening Friday, meeting friends and Charlestown residents at the opening of our joint show at the StoveFactory Gallery on Medford St. in Charlestown. We even got to connect with my wife Dee, who came up from Falmouth with our friend Brenda Horrigan. Those two arrived after much convoluted driving between Cambridge and Charlestown, trying to find the right roads. Country girls ...

And fellow Falmouth potter Anne Halpin came up for the opening, with her sister, who lives in the area. Otherwise, it was lots of Charlestown folks, friends of Dara and friends of the Artists Group of Charlestown, who were sipping wine and beer and snacking on the food prepared by Dara's sisters Cheryl and Wendy. Lovely evening. Even sold a few pots.

The show looks very good in this open and well-lighted space in the old factory building. (And gallery-goers were greeted at the door by a huge poster featuring ... well ... I'll attach a photo and you'll see.) My pots have never been shown in such an elegant setting. Saturday and Sunday, we opened the gallery at 11 and kept it open until 6. We had a steady - if sparse - flow of people coming in. The gallery is off the beaten Charlestown path, so the people who come to see the pots and paintings are not just dropping by on a whim. They come because they intend to come. In spite of the relatively light turnout on the two weekend days, I sold some pots. And we still have three days - this coming Friday, Saturday and Sunday - ahead of us with the gallery open. I'll be back in Charlestown Friday to be there with Dara from 6 to 9, then open at 11 Saturday and Sunday, with a mid-afternoon closing reception Sunday. Please come by if you have the chance.

Photos: From the top down, toward the end of the Friday night reception, the stragglers choosing work to take home; an overall view of the gallery; Shino bowls and Dara's small studies; paintings with vases; the poster (yikes!) at the gallery entrance.

And a PS: I apologize for misspelling Karla Quattrochi's name in the last post. It's Karla with a K, not a C. And now, no doubt, I've misspelled her surname.

Come to "The Potter and the Painter"

2011-04-27T20:31:00.000-07:00

Dara Pannebaker and I open our two-person show Friday evening at the StoveFactory Gallery in Charlestown, an old Boston neighborhood. The opening reception Friday runs from 6 to 9 p.m. All are welcome and in fact encouraged to visit.

I hope I haven't given everyone too much information about this show in the past few blog posts, but little else pottery-wise has been happening around here for a week or more. I'm off to Boston Friday morning to do things like number the pots and wash the gallery floor.

Anyone who is in the neighborhood, please stop by. The gallery is also open Saturday and Sunday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Photos: A few of the 113 pots in the show.

Putting pots on the walls

2011-04-25T03:53:00.000-07:00

I spent most of Saturday in Charlestown, an old Boston neighborhood, at the StoveFactory Gallery, leveling shelves, drilling molly holes and screwing shelf brackets into the wallboard. Dara Pannebaker and I were there to prepare for our show "The Potter and the Painter," which opens Friday night. I brought something over 100 pots for the show, and at this point we're not sure exactly how many paintings Dara has. Many, in any case.

It's an interesting process, deciding which pots go with which pots, and then deciding which paintings go with which groupings of pots. There was much consultation between the two of us and also with Carla and Cindy, two of the other Charlestown artists who were there to help. I suspect the consultation will go on into Friday afternoon.

I forgot a card for my camera, and was forced to shoot a few pictures with my iPhone. Here's a look.

Numbering pots, pricing pots, packing pots ...

2011-04-22T12:42:00.001-07:00

I'm finding there are always more details to be figured out in putting together the show that opens next Friday at StoveFactory Gallery in Boston. Taking off old price tags, figuring out the right prices for pots, numbering each pot for inclusion on the descriptive price list, building and painting shelves, getting out publicity ... it all goes on and on. I'm numbering and packing pots today because I'm off to Charlestown (it's a Boston neighborhood) to meet with Dara and begin screwing the shelves into the walls. And doing it all so that her paintings work together with my pots.

We open a week from tonight, Friday the 29th of April. Come on down.

Photos: The brochure that Dara laid out for us; cleverly, after the show it can be cut down the middle and each side works as a general purpose brochure for each of us. And many of the pots, now numbered, awaiting packing upstairs.

"The Potter and the Painter" opens next week

2011-04-20T12:17:00.001-07:00

Any regular reader of this blog could be excused for thinking nothing has happened here for the past month other than the slipware workshop with UK potters Doug Fitch and Hannah McAndrew. And that is largely true. But just before they arrived, I dry-stacked my gas kiln and then left it alone for a couple of weeks. Then I spent this past Monday glazing and loading and Tuesday afternoon firing.

Not a bad batch of pots. Many hakeme-decorated shallow bowls and teabowls, most of them in an iron kaki glaze.

A few of the pots from this load will go into the show at the StoveFactory Gallery in Boston, which opens Friday, April 29. Come on up and see my work and Dara Pannebaker's beautiful paintings. We'll be starting to set up this weekend, then wrapping up the details late next week.

The photos: Five shallow bowls from yesterday's firing, brushed in white slip and glazed in a Leach Kaki; a group of pots that will be in the show.

Left behind by Hannah McAndrew

2011-04-16T07:06:00.000-07:00

We here at Hatchville Pottery think that our young kitten/cat Cleo took Hannah seriously last week when she said she wanted to take Cleo back to Scotland. She appears to be missing both Doug Fitch and Hannah, after they bonded with her over five days living with us last week. Here, she gets a whiff of Hannah from the tiny slipware jug she left with us.

The basket has become her favorite nesting place since Dan Finnegan left it here Monday. Finnegan handed it to me in the Coffee Obsession parking lot, saying, "Here, I brought this for you." Frankly, I think he was so overwhelmed with luggage and boxes from the three traveling potters (Australian Angela Walford was the third) that he was desperate to get ANYTHING out of his Jeep. Hence the gift.

We thought Dan, a longtime cat man, would be delighted that he gave Cleo a new resting place.

Two-person Boston show in late April

2011-04-14T11:38:00.000-07:00

My friend Dara Pannebaker and I will join our work in "The Potter and the Painter" later this month at the StoveFactory Gallery in Charlestown. It's a lovely little gallery, part of the Artists Group of Charlestown complex in an old factory building in the Boston neighborhood. Dara and I are still assembling the show and planning how to mix my pots with her paintings. In the meantime, here's a look at the e-invitation.

The Brits are on the road

2011-04-11T11:43:00.000-07:00

Visiting potters Doug Fitch and Hannah McAndrew are even now on the road with Dan Finnegan and Australian blogger-potter Angela Walford, somewhere between Cape Cod and Fredericksburg, Va. The people attending next weekend's slipware workshop in Fredericksburg and the following weekend in Shelby, NC, are in for a treat. We knew from looking at their blogs and their online photos that these are two fine potters and decorators. Now we know that they're personable, funny, modest about their considerable abilities, generous ... and all the good things that Hannah probably tries to teach her Cub Scouts in Scotland. Everyone at the Cape Cod workshop liked them a lot. And so will the folks in Virginia and North Carolina.

Yesterday they finished up decorating several pots and Doug threw a couple more to make up for speedier-than-expected drying overnight in the classroom. We cleaned up teacher Stephanie York's room and then a small group of us headed to the British Beer Company in Falmouth Heights, next to the beach, with Martha's Vineyard on the horizon, and ate and drank British beer and cider and enjoyed a fairly noisy hour or so.

Back here after dinner, the four of us sat down in front of the television to watch the Red Sox beat the Yankees. Many, many questions from the tired Brits about this foreign game, and Hannah is still trying to work out the proper time to applaud something that happens on the field. Maybe watching the Nationals out of Washington will help her with that. In the morning, Doug donned his new Red Sox cap and took a couple of swings with a bat at my underhand pitching. The man can hit, driving a hard line drive into the neighbor's yard.

Then a big crowd around the table at Coffee Obsession, with chocolate-espresso pecan pie provided by Janet. Doug and Hannah made lots of friends while they were here on Cape Cod. They'll do the same down South.

McAndrew and Fitch in their first day at Falmouth

2011-04-09T16:50:00.000-07:00

A great day today at Falmouth High School. Doug and Hannah are natural entertainers and pottery educators. I won't write much tonight. Let the photos tell the story. Suffice to say that the workshop participants in Fredericksburg, Va., and Shelby, NC, have a treat in store for them. Oh, and we're flying the Union flag on the sign outside our house, customary when the Queen is in residence. Well ... OK ... it's a tea towel. But it serves the purpose.

Photos: Boys with toys - Doug drying the beginnings of a harvest jug; Doug's puzzle jug was a hit, as was Hannah's decoration of it later in the day; Hannah threw and slipped a couple of plates; at home in Hatchville.

One day to the Slipware East Coast workshop

2011-04-08T13:35:00.000-07:00

I suspect Doug and Hannah will be happy to sit down at their wheels and just make pots tomorrow, after a few days of meeting Americans speaking with strange accents. A potluck dinner last night here was a fairly raucous and noisy affair, with lots of good food and a fair amount of good beer and wine. There were potters and non-potters alike here and everyone got on just fine, though I did see Doug and Hannah sneak out onto the porch to listen to the unusual American birds around sunset.

We visited Kim Medeiros's studio this morning, with her husband Mark (barbecuer of great shrimp) supplying us with a first-class gas burner for Doug to use drying his pots during the workshop. Then we swung by the high school to get the video projection system straightened out with the help of specialist Ryan Webber. There will be films tomorrow.

Then we stopped at Anne Halpin's place for a studio tour and a tour of her husband Jim's machine shop and clock shop. Wonderful stuff.

We blasted on home to get some lunch and let the two potters work on their presentation and get a bit of a rest (they're both napping now). It's possible the jet-lag has caught up with them.

Fish and chips tonight. Oh, and Angela Walford arrives in an hour or so. Busy place ...

Photos: Kim Medeiros, Hannah and Doug on Kim's porch; Doug contemplating flame-throwing with Mark's raku burner; the two bad students waiting in the principal's office at Falmouth High School; working out the video problems with Ryan.

And the tour goes on ...

2011-04-07T13:15:00.000-07:00

More coffee this morning at the World's Best Coffee Shop, with tea for the two visitors. Then shopping for tonight's dinner and a visit to Falmouth High School to see the clay room. Stephanie York, the clay teacher, showed us around and helped us figure out what we need for the weekend. Stephanie will be there for the weekend, as will two of her students. We're looking forward to sharing Hannah and Doug with the younger folks. They should see more working creative people.

As I write this, Dee is looking at pictures of England on Doug's laptop. Sheep, I believe. Dee can't get enough sheep. More tomorrow.

Photos: Doug and Hannah toast Meredith Heywood of Whynot, N.C., the maker of the two small cups holding the Harpoon IPA they're drinking. Or maybe Mark made them. Anyway, one of the Heywoods made these lovely little cups. And below, from yesterday, Doug offering Asian durian fruit to a reluctant Hannah.

Roaming potters' first day in the USA

2011-04-06T18:29:00.000-07:00

This was the day for visiting potters Hannah McAndrew and Doug Fitch to get to know Cape Cod a bit. The day started at Coffee Obsession in Falmouth, with tea and croissants and new friends. Bruce, Mary, Betsy and Janet showed up. Janet is actually a blog-reader, though not a potter, and she greeted Doug and Hannah with hugs and the familiarity of an old friend. And she brought apple tart to share. And shared her durian, which some think is a foul-smelling tropical fruit, but which Janet quite loves.

We went on to visit slipware potter Ron Geering's studio and gallery (Ron is off-Cape in England, but left a key). Lovely work, as always. Then down the road to Tessa Morgan's place, where Doug was enlisted in showing Tessa how he makes big pots. Then lunch, opening of the boxes of pots that arrived a few days ago (minimum breakage, lovely pots), and then down-Cape to visit potter Gail Turner, another avid blog-reader and one of the people who initiated bringing these two to Cape Cod.

Then dinner at Jack's Lounge, a Hyannis pub, with this blogger's softball teammates. Fairly raucous, with Doug trying to figure out baseball, which was playing on a nearby TV. "Oh," said Hannah, "It's just like rounders."

Then back home to blog and bed. More tomorrow.

Photos: The atlas comes out at Coffee Obsession, so that we can figure out the potters' UK geography; Janet and Doug and her apple tart; Doug throws big clay at Flying Pig Pottery; unwrapping the newly arrived pots; with Gail Turner at her Mill Stone Pottery in Dennis.

Fully conscious and on American soil!

2011-04-05T18:11:00.001-07:00

Doug Fitch and Hannah McAndrew arrived safely in Boston this afternoon, after a slightly shaky flight from Heathrow in London. I was there with our friend Tammy Race to meet the two potters. We gave them a drive-by tour of Boston as we exited the tunnel and head south, stopped at the Races' for a beer and conversation, then on to Hatchville for a light dinner and off to bed.

Both are slowly getting used to the idea that they're not in the British Isles any longer. At least not for the next few weeks. And it's been an adjustment to be driven on the "wrong side of the road." Or so they say.

More in the days to come. The two will teach a slipware pottery workshop this weekend at Falmouth High School. You can still sign up for the workshop. Just go to capecodpotters.org and follow the workshop links. Or e-mail hatchvillepottery@comcast.net and I'll lead you through it.

The photo: Dinner in Falmouth, left to right are Hannah, Doug and my wife Dee.

Artists Group of Charlestown Spring Juried Show

2011-03-31T19:59:00.000-07:00

We're headed to Boston tomorrow afternoon for the opening of the AGC's annual spring juried show. Three of my pots are in the show, along with art from people all around the Charlestown and Boston area. The Artists Group of Charlestown is an organization I joined two years ago, after selling at their annual September show in downtown Charlestown. They're a good group of people, wonderful artists, and they work and show in an old factory building that has been converted into studios of all sorts.

The Stove Factory Gallery was renovated last year into a peaceful, bright space for displaying work of all kinds. The show that opens Friday is a precursor for me and my friend Dara Pannebaker for "The Potter and the Painter," a two-person show that we are putting up in the gallery toward the end of April. Dara and I will be using the lovely space to integrate her paintings and my pots. More about that after the British potters' workshop next week.

Photos: Top, the postcard for the spring show; below, one of my three pots that are in the show.

The British are coming to Cape Cod April 9-10!

2011-03-27T15:03:00.001-07:00

There's still plenty of time to sign up for the Doug Fitch/Hannah McAndrew international slipware roadshow workshop here in Falmouth next month. Doug and Hannah, two potters from the United Kingdom, should be starting to think about what kind of woolies they want to bring to Cape Cod, followed by shorts and flip-flops for their workshops in Virginia and North Carolina. We had an inch of snow last week, kids, so consider that fair warning about spring on Cape Cod.

The workshop will be in the pottery studio at the new Falmouth High School, a couple of miles from downtown Falmouth and a couple of miles from Hatchville Pottery. Stephanie York, the teacher there, is our host.

Members of the sponsoring Cape Cod Potters organization will pay $145 for the two-day workshop, non-members will pay $165. Lunch each day is included in your entry fee. One-day attendees can come for $75 and $90.

For more information on the workshop, and for a downloadable entry form, go to capecodpotters.org and follow the links to workshops. There is no closing deadline for coming to this workshop, so don't think you've missed your chance.

Photos above: Hannah and Doug and their friend Alex in a recent picnic shot from Devon, with all dressed appropriately for spring on Cape Cod; a view of Hannah at work that we will all get to see soon; one of Hannah's recent pieces; Doug brushing on glaze; a group of Doug's recent pots.

And PS: For those of you who follow these pottery blogs and might know her, we expect Angela Walford of Adelaide, Australia, to be visiting during the workshops. Angela is a friend of Doug and Hannah and is latching onto their tour to see a bit of the States and hang with friends. Also likely here during part of Sunday will be Fredericksburg, Va., potter and blogger Dan Finnegan. Dan will drive the visiting potters on to another workshop at his place the following weekend.

A few more from Sunday's firing

2011-03-22T12:33:00.000-07:00

I've had a little success with rolling heavy slab trays in the past few weeks. Here are two more from Sunday's firing. Plus a group of small cups saggar-fired in sawdust on the bottom shelf.

Rough pots in this firing

2011-03-21T11:52:00.001-07:00

I fired a new load of pots yesterday, making progress toward both summer inventory and a good selection of work for "The Potter and the Painter," in late April at the Stove Factory Gallery in Charlestown. (First mandatory publicity reference ... ) Many of the pieces in this firing were my usual stoneware clay with ground granite or pond sand wedged in.

For some reason, my work is getting rougher and rougher. I'm trying to get inclusions in the clay that will pop out or melt out. Easy enough to do if you're digging clay from the ground, but I don't have ready access to a natural stoneware clay, and thought I would wedge in some foreign matter. I also will need some rough clay body for Doug Fitch, when he and Hannah McAndrew come to Cape Cod for their workshop April 9-10. (Second mandatory publicity reference ... ) Doug digs his own clay in Devon, but gave up on the idea of shipping it to the US for this workshop, so I'm trying to come up with something rugged enough for him to feel comfortable throwing. Some of this stuff might work for him.

Both the sand and the pulverized granite (sold in feed stores as "chicken grit") roughen up the throwing and the surface of the fired pot. And they beat up the Shino a bit, as well. They make for rough pots, but I like them.

More new pots tomorrow.

The photos: Top, the two pots to the left are from this firing, thrown from unwedged trimming scrap; next, small dishes influenced by the Karatsu work of Takashi Nakazato; next, pair of Shino vases; next, three Shino vases; bottom, ash-glazed vase.

The loading and glazing routine here

2011-03-18T10:02:00.000-07:00

Kathy at Kings Creek Pottery in Schoharie County, NY, asked in a comment yesterday about my kiln-loading routine. So I thought I'd post it on the blog rather than in a comment. Might help someone else out.

My Olympic DD-17 natural gas reduction kiln is pretty small, about 17 cf of stacking space. So I can make that many pots in a few days, drying and biscuit-firing permitting. Each stack usually amounts to about 100 pots, depending on their size.

I have fired three times now on new silicon carbide shelves, which I like a lot because of their light weight and the fact that they shed glaze drips pretty easily. Not the great amount of grinding and kiln wash that was necessary the first seven or eight years on the cordierite shelves.

I learned one of my loading tricks several years ago from Toff Milway, a terrific salt glaze potter at Conderton in the Cotswolds of England. (toffmilway.co.uk) We were visiting Toff and he told me that he dry-stacks every load of pots. That is, he takes his unglazed pots and loads them onto the shelves, building up the stack until he's satisfied with the full load. What that does for me is show me first that I've got enough pots to fill the kiln and second it helps me understand how my shelves have to be stacked and what pots can fit where. This is all a little vague as I read it, but it works for me.

Once I've done that, and cleared the big table in my studio of debris, I unstack the kiln, pulling down the front shelves (usually still with pots on them ... I know, it's dicey) and placing them on the table in the order that they come down. I have about enough space to place the front shelves on the table, leaving the back shelves still in place.

Then I take all the pots out of the bottom two shelves, glaze them and put them back in, starting with the pots in the rear and working forward. I usually put shorter pots on the outside, climbing upward in size to the pots at the center of the two lower shelves, trying not to put pots into any kind of flame shadow. That holds true all around the bottom shelves, since those are at the same level (about 9 inches in height). The bottom two shelves always take the longest to glaze. I always feel like I've made real progress when I can begin glazing the upper shelves.

At that point, I've managed to free up a bit of space on the table, so I usually bring down the back shelves and set them out in order. I'll glaze the pots on the back shelves right to the top of the stack, then begin again on the lower shelves. I try to stagger the shelves front to back to allow for full penetration of fire through the stack.

Using cordierite shelves, to which my stoneware pots often stuck during a firing, I adopted refractory wadding from wood-firing and now I still wad all my pots. I hated the chipping footrings that often resulted from firing on those shelves, even if they were kiln-washed. Wadding adds a step, but I've fired woodkilns so much that I'm used to it. The fired wads do get underfoot after an unloading, though.

That's how I do it, Kathy. It seems to work pretty well for me, but as you know, everyone does things a bit differently.

The photos above are pots that will be in a joint show called "The Potter and the Painter," with Dara Pannebaker, at the Stove Factory Gallery in Charlestown, MA, part of Boston, in late April.

Help for Mashiko ... and getting on with firing

2011-03-17T13:22:00.000-07:00

The people of Japan will be digging out and rebuilding from last week's earthquake for a long time, and that doesn't even consider mourning for the thousands of people lost in the tsunami that followed the quake. Those of us who have been reading Euan Craig's continuing blog posts (in the blog links to the right) have a good idea of how one Australian potter and his family are dealing with this terrible event.

Euan lives near Mashiko, the town Shoji Hamada made famous, and his wife works there. Euan's kilns and many of the other kilns in the town were badly damaged or destroyed by the earthquake. So were the museums and many of the homes of Mashiko, a village of many potters. The Leach Pottery in St. Ives, England, has started a fund to help rebuild Mashiko. You can find details at http://www.leachpottery.com/What-s-On/News-Feed.aspx

For many of us, some of our roots in the craft are in that town. It would be good to help.

Meanwhile, I've begun glazing for my next firing. This one with more pots in saggars, a couple of teapots, three big slab trays, a number of small vases and small dishes to fill the spaces between the bigger pots.

Might fire this weekend.

The photos: At top, if I'm reading Euan's blog correctly, is Ken Matsuzaki's kiln, then the front shelves for my firing, and a table of pots destined for a show at the Stove Factory Gallery in Boston at the end of April.

Euan Craig writes from Japan about the quake

2011-03-12T07:48:00.000-08:00

For a very personal, very immediate story about what it was like to experience yesterday's giant earthquake in Japan, read potter Euan Craig's current post on his blog. http://euancraig.blogspot.com/2011/03/we-are-safe.html will take you there.

Here's a bit of the top of his story, which is headlined "We are safe": "Yesterday afternoon I was in the studio putting handles on some vessels, when the floor shifted under my feet as if I were riding a train. The house began to rattle and shake, pots began to fall from the shelves and the vibration became a roar. I opened the door and rushed outside, turning back to look at the house as I went. It was swaying, like bamboo in the wind. I turned to see the kiln chimney swing left and right, somehow not collapsing but widening cracks appearing up its length. When the roof tiles came sliding off the roof I began to run; the children were at school."

The story moves from there to making sure his and others' children are safe in their schools, and to the damage to his village, to nearby Mashiko and to his own pottery. It's a dramatic and personal account of what most of us know as a much wider tragedy. Read the blog post.

The photos are taken from earlier posts on his blog.

Slab trays today for April show

2011-03-08T10:48:00.000-08:00

I've got a joint show coming up in late April at the Stove Factory Gallery in Charlestown. I'm sharing space with my friend Dara Pannebaker, who is a fine painter and one of the organizers of the Artists Group of Charlestown. I joined the AGC two years ago after selling at their September craft fair. A fine group of artists, not only talented but very nice folks. So ... though I live about 90 minutes away, I am, indeed, a Charlestown Artist.

I'm putting together work for the show, and expect to fire once or twice more between now and then. Last week's firing produced a very nice Shino- and ash-glazed slab tray (pictured at top), so I thought I'd make a few more and see how they do. I rolled them out yesterday, handled them and slashed and pressed some decorations. Now they're drying. On to other things while they dry.

Phil Rogers at the Pucker in Boston

2011-03-06T09:07:00.001-08:00

We spent last weekend in Boston, about 90 minutes north of here. A weekend of dance, museums, galleries, good food and a Thai dinner with our niece Kate. But we started the weekend on Saturday at the Pucker Gallery on Newbury St., the best place in New England (and one of the best in the nation) to see good pots.

The week before, the gallery opened the semi-annual show of work by Welsh potter Phil Rogers. I've admired Phil's way of making pots ever since my friend Lorraine Colson and I took a workshop with him at a Maryland college almost 20 years ago. Phil works in the Leach/Hamada tradition, and is not only a terrific potter but is also a historian of the craft.

But his pots continue to move me. In recent years, he has used more Shino glazes and has gotten wonderful work out of the wood kiln at his studio in Wales. (Phil's no longer working in Rhayader, and is looking for another place to make and fire pots.)

This show in Boston has many more wood-fired pieces in it than I remember from the last one. His shapes have loosened up a bit - particularly the small vases and teabowls - and he's using in some cases a gritty clay body with almost Shigaraki-like melt-outs of feldspar.

This is a beautiful show, well worth traveling to Boston to see. If you're there on a weekend, you can park reasonably under the Boston Common and take the short walk up Newbury St. to the Pucker.

At the Pucker website - puckergallery.com - there is a downloadable pdf file of the show's catalog. I've taken a few images from philrogerspottery.com to illustrate what's in the show. The photo of Phil was taken when he did a workshop a few years ago for the Cape Cod Potters at Plymouth Plantation.

Saggar-fired, from Thursday kiln

2011-02-26T07:02:00.000-08:00

Over the years, I've fired a few pots in sawdust-filled saggars inside the gas kiln. John Leach's saggar work was the original inspiration for doing this, and he remains the master of it. But I like what I get from this kind of firing. Covered stoneware saggars take up a lot of room on a shelf, producing a few small pots in a space that can usually hold a dozen or more. And I don't know what the market will be for these, but I enjoy the experiment.

And it seems to me that the best pots fired this way are simple forms. Anyway, we'll see where this goes. I'll do more.

Yesterday's firing ...

2011-02-25T12:22:00.000-08:00

Not a bad firing yesterday, given that three small re-fire cups blew up and spread shrapnel everywhere. It's astonishing how far into the stack clay fragments can penetrate. I've had maybe one cone pack blow up on me in this kiln, but never a pot. Even a re-fire. Won't do that again ...

Aside from the artillery, though, it was a good firing. Lots of small vases, four side-handle teapots, a slab tray that may end up in the April show I'm doing in Boston, some black saggar-fired pots. Not a bad firing, all told.

It was a record for a short firing, also. No doubt the result of using the new silicon carbide shelves. The burners were turned on at 9 and shut down at 1:30. I might stretch out the firing a bit next time, but the glazes looked pretty much like they always do.

Here are a few photos: From top, slab tray with overlapping Shino and ash glazes; small vases with Shino, Oribe, Leach white ash and kaki glazes; waste clay vase with overlapping Shino glazes; side handle teapots.

On teabowls, cups or "handleless mugs"

2011-02-24T12:45:00.000-08:00

My good friend Dan Finnegan, the Virginia potter, yesterday posted a thoughtful little essay - complete with drawings and photos - on the design and pleasures of the mug. Specifically, on the curves that go into the form of the mugs he makes in the woods near the soybean fields outside Fredericksburg. He took issue with a blog post by that other thoughtful potter, John Bauman, who had extolled cylindrical mugs. Bauman responded with something like, "Your mother wears Army boots." Reasoned discourse, I call it.

OK, I'll let them fight that one between them. Both make terrific pots. But I was prompted to do this post because of the preview of coming attractions that appeared at the end of Finnegan's mug post: "Next Up - Tea Bowls: Overhyped Juice Cups."

I take this to be Dan's way of instigating yet another debate. Having been his student many years ago, and having been his friend many years since, I well know his feeling about teabowls. He disdains the form. Further, he ridicules it.

I have to say that I've never quite understood this stance, though I assume it comes from his English training. Across the water, no clay item related to drink comes without a handle. Sometimes mugs or tankards come with two. Or even three. Perhaps it's about grasping for your fifth pint of ale in the pub and being able to latch onto a handle no matter where you reach. I don't know ... maybe they just like handles.

But I was taken with the teabowl form early on in my pot-making life. Ever since then, I've made hundreds of teabowls - faceted, torqued, ragged-rimmed, dimpled, sgraffitoed ... you name it. As I write, the gas kiln in the studio has about two dozen teabowls cooling. Should be down to about 1100 degrees by now.

I like the form in part because I can make a dozen or two dozen in a short time, I can get a rhythm going in the morning and watch the forms change slightly as the pots are cut off the wheelhead and dropped onto the wareboard. Later that day, or perhaps the next morning, a footring is trimmed into the bottom and the pots are set aside to dry. I can get a lot of teabowls into the kiln and there are enough that I often test glazes on them. Right now there are a couple cooling in the kiln with a new Oribe recipe that I'm trying.

And, not an insignificant thing, I can sell teabowls. People buy mugs from me, but they also buy teabowls. But they rarely call them by that name. Usually, it's just "mug," or sometimes "handleless mug." I usually explain that I call them teabowls, but they are free to call them whatever they like.

When I have coffee in the morning at Coffee Obsession in Falmouth, I usually bring one of my own mugs, which have more capacity than my teabowls. Which means I get more coffee for my dollar. But sometimes I'll bring a teabowl, being careful to let the coffee cool just a bit so that the outside of the bowl is not too hot. (Yes, I understand that's one of the prime purposes of a handle, to let you drink very hot liquid while comfortably holding the vessel. So, it's a small sacrifice.)

My friend Janet, who sometimes comments on this blog, often sits at the same table with a teabowl and a Thermos of coffee, pouring when the coffee gets low in the cup. She likes teabowls. (She has a broad mind and also likes mugs; she's been known to show up in the morning carrying a very nice Dan Finnegan mug.)

My wife Dee uses the teabowls in our kitchen cabinets for water, iced tea, beer, port. Our wine-drinking friends were dismayed not long ago when we bought wine glasses; they liked drinking out of clay teabowls.

This is all about everyday living, not thinking at all about the tea ceremony. I have sold work that the buyers think is right for that formal and refined exercise, and I'm glad to have that new outlet. It also makes me think more carefully about the pots I have made and will make.

But teabowls for daily use - aka "overhyped juice cups" - will continue to come out of this kiln.

Photos above, top down: Ash-glazed teabowl by Phil Rogers, faceted teabowl by Mark Shapiro, squared teabowl by Jeff Oestreich, cut-rim and Shino teabowl by yours truly.

Making teapots, mixing glazes ...

2011-02-21T09:34:00.000-08:00

Given that it's snowing here on Cape Cod, the temperatures have gotten down into the single digits, and no one seems to be coming to my gallery (big surprise), I thought that I ought to make a few teapots while I had the time. Now ... I don't much like making teapots, mostly because I do it so seldom that it's like learning each step all over again. And you have to let the pot body dry enough to be stable and able to drill the tea filter holes before putting on the spout. But it can't be too dry, otherwise the spouts and handles will not adhere properly. And you need to carefully gauge the hole for the lid, so that if you're making eight teapots you don't have eight different widths, consequently having to make eight different widths of lid ... and on and on and on and on.

And I hate making lids ... don't ask. I know, if I did this kind of thing all the time, it wouldn't be new to me each time. And maybe, like a trainable pot-making chimp, I would learn the routine and stop whining. I was on Skype with potter Angela Walford in Australia, the day I assembled the teapots, and I told her I much prefer cups - center 'em, throw 'em, trim a foot, out the door.

I still feel that way. How all you wonderful potters make these fabulous and beautiful teapots and enjoy it ... and then SELL THEM ... is completely beyond me.

OK, enough whining. I did trim footrings on all these side-handle pots, which makes them lift up and gives them some airiness. That's something I've just started to do on teapots. And after much frustration trimming the cutoff waste on lids, I decided I would make these little tiny chucks to hold the lids stable while I trimmed. Damned if it didn't work. See, I'm trainable ...

Now, back to sieving the seven glazes I mixed yesterday and hydrated today. Firing Wednesday or Thursday.

Revisiting "Bridge of Fire"

2011-02-19T07:56:00.000-08:00

I had been making pots for only a few years when I saw the documentary film "Bridge of Fire." It was the story of collaboration between the American potter Malcolm Wright of Vermont and the 13th generation Japanese potter Takashi Nakazato of Karatsu.

When they were young men, Wright worked with Nakazato in the studio of Tarouemon Nakazato, Takashi's father and a Japanese Living Treasure. They lost track of one another over the following 20 years, but came together in the early '90s to make pots in each other's studios, fire in each other's kilns and have their work together documented brilliantly by filmmakers Dorothy Olson and Alan Dater. The film is available from Marlboro Productions in Vermont. Go to http://www.marlboroproductions.com/movies/bridgeoffire.html to find it.

I watched that film over and over again in the early '90s, watching the way the two men made pots - Takashi pounding down into ten pounds of clay to secure to the wheelhead what would become the base of a large jar; Wright extruding clay, then cutting apart and re-assembling the extrusions; both men serving their families dinner in the pots that came from the woodfired kilns.

In 1997 I went for two weeks with my friend Lorraine Colson to Anderson Ranch in Colorado, for a workshop with Takashi and Doug Casebeer. Takashi, whose English was good but not often used, taught by demonstrating. He made and fired many, many pots in those two weeks. All the time with a seriousness of purpose but a very easy laugh and a light heart.

I hadn't looked at the film in more than 10 years until yesterday. I sat down late in the afternoon and rediscovered why I loved it so much so long ago. The film is as fresh as it was in 1992, and as relevant. And having spent more than a decade making pots professionally, I saw many more things in the making process that I am sure I missed when I first saw the film. I'm going to have to watch it a few more times.

The images above were not made by me, but were taken from a variety of websites, including the large jar by Nakazato, from the Anderson Ranch site. Top, Takashi, with his pot below his photo. Third image down, Malcolm, with a wood-fired pot of his below that.

Nausika Richardson 1942-2011

2011-02-18T10:46:00.000-08:00

Nausika Richardson, a wonderful majolica potter from Dixon, N.M., has died. I met Nausika nearly 30 years ago, when I was a news photographer for the Santa Fe New Mexican and she was a 38-year-old potter living in the tiny village of Dixon, in the Rio Embudo Valley north of Santa Fe. Nausika was one of the founders of the annual Dixon Studio Tour, held in November, and I was in her studio with a reporter to photograph her and her work for a pre-Tour story.

It was long before I wanted to make pots, but not before I wanted to own them. I bought a plate and a serving bowl that day, which we still use in our kitchen here on Cape Cod.

Nausika was a lovely and gracious woman. I've often thought we would drive up to Dixon to visit her the next time we were in New Mexico. Won't happen now. The image I've posted of her is the best I could find online. She was 68 when she died.

Here's a link to the Dixon Studio Tour, with some of her pots.

http://www.dixonarts.org/listofartists/artistpages/Richardson/home.htm

Seven things you probably don't know ...

2011-02-13T08:48:00.000-08:00

I'm not entirely sure that I understand this concept, but I'm sure Meredith Heywood, prominent Seagrove, N.C., potter, will explain this to me in a comment. Meredith has asked several of us to post on our blogs seven things that people who usually read our blogs are unlikely to know about us. So, here goes ...

1) I am descended on one side of my family from a Portuguese barber. My great-grandfather, Antone S. Andrews (top photo, at left, in his barber shop), came to this country from the Azores islands in the late 19th century. He settled on the Massachusetts island of Martha's Vineyard with his Azorean wife, whom he met in this country. His barber shop was on Main Street in Vineyard Haven, which many years later became my hometown when Antone's granddaughter, Lucille, gave birth to me.

2) The first time I saw my mother cry was when we were returning to Martha's Vineyard from a rare trip to Boston and we missed the last ferry to the island. We were forced to stay overnight on the mainland, in the Hilltop House inn in Falmouth (now home of the Woods Hole Research Center). There my youngest brother, Tom, fell into the toilet. I'm the tall one without the hood in the photo above, taken the next morning. Tom, the baby of the family, is in my shadow, but appears to be wearing dry pants. The other two are brother Roger and sister Jeanne.

3) Dee and I have a son, Marcus, also a native of Martha's Vineyard, who lives with his wife Anastasia Pantelias in Seattle. From the time we lived on the Vineyard and later in New Mexico, Marcus was an outdoors kid. Now he and Anastasia are backcountry skiers and climbers most of the year. Both are involved in search-and-rescue. When he is not running computer systems, Marcus sometimes jumps out of helicopters (once they're on the ground) in pursuit of lost and distressed skiers, hikers, BASE-jumpers and others in trouble in the mountains. That's Marcus in the bottom photo.

4) When I was 13, I caddied at Mink Meadows Golf Club for E.Y. "Yip" Harburg, the man who wrote "Somewhere Over the Rainbow." He was a poor tipper.

5) Dee and I were married in 1970 on the Vineyard, then drove across the country in a 1956 baby blue Ford station wagon, in which we slept on a 3/4-width mattress. We drove north of Lake Superior in Canada, down into Minnesota, across the west (rodeo in Rapid City!) and into San Francisco. We settled in Oakland for several months, ran out of money, then fled home via the southern route to Massachusetts. I am still looking for a photo of that car.

6) I once beat a New Mexico U.S. congressman in a sled-dog race in the Jemez Mountains outside Los Alamos. The fact that he was coming off open-heart surgery had no bearing on the outcome of the race.

7) As features editor of The New Mexican newspaper in Santa Fe, I was a member of the New Mexico State Champion Trivial Pursuit team in 1985. Somewhere, I still have the gold-plated game token we won.

This week's kiln

2011-02-10T13:33:00.000-08:00

A rather thinly populated kiln this week. A bunch of tallish, slab vases on the top rear shelf, which left lots of air at the top. And not many tall pots anywhere, even in the normally thickly populated bottom shelf, which left similar amounts of air all through the stack. Pretty good firing, though, in spite of some bloating on some very thick red stoneware slabs and some thermoucouple shutdowns along the way. Gotta spend some time with a paperclip, reaming out the thermocouple burner, I think.

But there were some good pots in the kiln. Top to bottom: Slab vases with multiple additions and stamps, poured Shinos and ash glazes; tall slab vase with poured Shinos and ash glaze; three-footed slab plate with Shinos; three medium juice pitchers; multiple-Shinoed bowl.

UK Potters tour is coming together

2011-02-08T19:51:00.000-08:00

Doug Fitch and Hannah McAndrew touch down on U.S. soil April 5 at Logan Airport in Boston, a few days before the first of three workshops on Cape Cod, in Virginia and in North Carolina. I am apparently the welcoming committee and will be there to greet them and bring them to Cape Cod. Hannah tells me she's been reading about the Pilgrim Fathers, so perhaps we should stop in Plymouth on the way to the Cape and introduce her to a Pilgrim or two. Or perhaps a Pilgrim Mother ...

I'm only posting this now to keep people alert to the workshop here on the Cape or - if it's more convenient - at one of the other two sites. And Hannah was kind enough to send a couple of high-res photos for our graphics people, so I thought I'd post one.

Doug should have a photo or two coming in the next day or so.

Meantime, if you are interested in the April 9-10 slipware workshop here in Falmouth, sponsored by the Cape Cod Potters, let me know at hatchvillepottery@comcast.net. Two days of entertaining and brilliant pot-making, each day with a free lunch, in the clay studio at Falmouth High School. It will cost $145 for CCPotters members and $165 for others, $75 for a single day. Falmouth High School art students attend free.

Further teabowl information from Thailand

2011-02-03T07:11:00.001-08:00

I received this today from John Toomey in Thailand, about the two teabowls he bought from me last year. John gave the teabowls their names:

Hollis: You are too modest. Your readers should know that my tea teacher in Yokohama, Japan, highly praised both of these bowls when I sent her the pictures and that my guests for New Year's Tea for Year of the Rabbit (including Korean, Japanese, Thai, and Chinese tea masters) found both your "Snowy Rabbit" Tea Bowl and your "Evening Cherry Blossoms" (aka "Octopus") Tea Bowl stunning in combination with the very rarely used utensils of formal palace drawing room tea of the 14th century. I can hardly wait to see how they will blend with rustic wabi-cha utensils when the formal period is over after today's Chinese Lunar New Year and we get back to Zen-style tea. Your bowls, I think, will fit the requirement of the 15th century master Murata Shuko that utensils have the quality of "chill" and "withered", expressing the inner essence of true beauty that we still idealize in rustic wabi-cha today. (You can find all this on the internet.)

Of course, there is every reason for people to use the bowls as they wish, the more often the better--for snacks, dips, soups, floating flowers and candles, coffee, incense burners, whatever they like. Just hold them in you hands and experience peace and comfort like only fine down-to-earth pottery can give.

John Toomey Sofu (Ura Senke Tea name)

Hatchville teabowls in Thailand

2011-02-01T13:23:00.000-08:00

This past fall, John Toomey stopped here with a friend and bought two Shino teabowls. John is a tea master in Thailand and he told me he would take them with him back to Asia, to use when he hosts tea ceremonies in his teahouse.

True to his word, John did just that. And yesterday he sent a selection of photos of the bowls being used in Thailand. You can see some of them here.

I call these bowls "teabowls," though in fact most people who buy from me have no actual idea of what a teabowl might be, or how a bowl might be used in tea ceremony. And I am far from an expert, having participated in only a couple of tea ceremonies - one Japanese in Washington, D.C., and one Chinese at Anderson Ranch in Colorado. But I like to make the forms and I tell people their use is only limited by their imagination. Eat oatmeal out of it, or hummus, or coffee. Doesn't matter to me. Just enjoy the pot.

But it was flattering for someone like John, who does know about tea ceremony, to find my pots here on the Cape and take them back to Thailand for tea. And it was very nice of him to send me the photos. Thank you, John.

First edition of the new website ...

2011-01-18T14:52:00.000-08:00

These mugs are the lead image on my new website, at http://web.me.com/hatchvillepottery/Site/Home.html

I've been working on it for the past week, using iWeb on my iMac and a brief but very helpful conference last week with a young woman named Mindy at the Hingham (MA) Apple store. Nothing like a 30-year-old to explain the world to you.

Please take a look. I know that crowd-sourcing a critique of something like this can be dangerous, but what the hell ...

A few things I know already that need to be fixed:

- The background of the site needs to be consistent from page to page. Right now, the home page background is gray and the other pages black. I am pretty sure I'll stay with black, but I need to figure out how to change the home page background. (Mindy apparently didn't tell me absolutely everything in the 10 minutes we were together.)

- I know there are editing tweaks to be made in the copy, but if you see anything scandalous, please let me know.

- I realize that the photos in Gallery 4, the "recent pots" one, have a generally yellowish cast to them, as opposed to the other three galleries. That's a white balance problem in my Nikon SLR, which has never been as good as my earlier point-and-shoot. I need to figure that out, and I'll probably have to re-shoot those photos, but at least I still have those pots.

- I'm planning another page, of images made around the studio and the galleries.

- I'm still not sure if I'll publish this through Apple, but I pushed the "publish site" button and there it is. So you might as well look at it. It needs to find a happy home, minus all the web.me.com stuff, and it needs to be set up so that you can find it through Google. None of that is done at this point.

So ... do you find anything confusing? Unhelpful? Too helpful? Please let me know.

British slipware potters workshop on Cape Cod

2011-01-13T12:58:00.000-08:00

British potters Hannah McAndrew and Doug Fitch (whose blogs are available in the roll of blogs on the right of this page) bring their 21st century take on traditionally decorated slipware pottery to the U.S. in April.

On the weekend of April 8-10, the Cape Cod Potters will sponsor the first in a series of three East Coast workshops by the two friends. The event will be in the Falmouth High School clay studio, on the weekend of April 8-10. It will cost $145 (members) and $165 (non-members) for the full weekend, including lunch each day. (Scholarships are always available for these workshops, and art students and faculty at the Falmouth school can attend for free.) McAndrew and Fitch continue on to another two-day workshop in Fredericksburg, Va., and then a single day in Shelby, N.C., before returning home.

The two potters are well-known in the United Kingdom and have become familiar to U.S. potters through their blogs. Both were part of "Clay and Blogs: Telling a Story," an international exhibition of potters' work last fall in Southern Pines, N.C. McAndrew lives in southern Scotland and Fitch in Devon, England.

McAndrew and Fitch work with earthenware clay, making functional pots that are decorated with liquid slip in patterns, manipulated surfaces, or images and words. The style dates back centuries, but each potter has brought his or her own contemporary touch to the work.

We'll post more information about the workshop as it develops. In the meantime, e-mail Hollis Engley at hatchvillepottery@comcast.net for reservations, directions and more information for the Cape Cod workshop, or call him at 508-563-1948. For the Virginia workshop, e-mail Dan Finnegan at danfinneganpottery@cox.net. For the North Carolina event, e-mail Ron Philbeck at ronpots2@yahoo.com. Also, look for postings on the workshops in the March and April issues of Ceramics Monthly and the spring issue of Clay Times.

Photos above include, top to bottom: Hannah McAndrew's mugs, Hannah herself, a big Doug Fitch jug, Doug himself with a freshly-thrown cider jar.

Works in progress ...

2011-01-09T09:52:00.000-08:00

One of the things I have to do every year for the holiday open studio event is clear off the little-used slab roller. It becomes the bagel-coffee-cream cheese-eggnog table. So once I cleared it a few weeks ago, I took advantage of the situation and began rolling out slabs, making roughly round and footed serving dishes, flat square plates, handled serving platters, and rolling slabs into slender and multiply-stamped vertical vases.

I'm waiting on one more bisque firing before these pots go into the gas kiln, but I thought I'd share them in their current form, given that I hadn't posted since New Year's. I'll get back on the wheel probably this coming week. More mugs. Always more mugs ...

I'm also putting together what amounts to a grant proposal, so I'm shooting pots for that. The image here of the finished teabowls is for that project.

Later, all ...

Time, like a river ...

2010-12-31T12:52:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year, everyone. Onward into the next one ...

Last oyster harvest of the year

2010-12-26T07:38:00.000-08:00

OK, so I've probably posted enough oyster-related items this year. Here's the last of 2010, because the oyster season in the town where we fish ends this week. As I write this, the snow is starting to come down lightly here in Falmouth, the beginning of what is predicted to be a fairly heavy 48-hour storm. So Mike, Tammy, Josh and I - the usual four early-morning oyster fishermen - gathered at 6:45 and traveled to the flats early to avoid the impending snow.

Tide was low enough to make the oystering comfortable and there were still plenty of oysters in shallow water, in spite of a couple of months of heavy harvesting.

There were only a few of us out there; early morning the day after Christmas is not a time most people want to be wading in winter water, bending down and scrabbling in the cold for their food. It was barely dawn and nearly freezing when we arrived, as you can see from the top photo, still in an almost pre-dawn state of blueness, one car's headlights twinkling across the harbor. The water is in the low 40s or high 30s and gives prolonged discomfort it it seeps into a glove or a boot.

Once we fill one half-peck basket, Mike takes it ashore and sorts the catch, positioning shellfish in such a way that as many are packed into a basket as is possible. The other three laborers gather and bring ashore enough oysters to densely pack the two baskets (one allowed for each town fishing license), Josh helps out with packing and then two people run rake handles through the basket handles and portage the catch to the car. This morning, the porters are Mike and Tammy, walking across the grassy sand with the catch.

Much of what we picked up this morning will be shared on New Year's Eve. The rest will not be wasted.

The snow's coming down more heavily now. Must be winter.

Merry Christmas, everyone

2010-12-24T08:19:00.000-08:00

I've been in the studio this morning, joining slabs of clay into vases and making slab plates. But I now have to go and finish helping Santa for a little while. The shop is still open and I sold a few pots yesterday, including a couple of nice teabowls to a new friend, the potter John Dorsey, who's read the blog and dropped by on the way to see his father. But mostly it's quiet around here, after an eggnog party at potter Anne Halpin's place last evening. The sun is out, the snow's still on the ground and we'll go out to a Christmas Eve party tonight and then to Church of the Messiah in Woods Hole at midnight.

Merry Christmas, friends. Bring on 2011!

Photos: The gallery last year, decorated by us and by nature. And a lovely little rocky stream in North Creek, NY, in the Adirondacks. No particular reason to use the stream photo, except that it's right near Dee's sister Ellen's family ski camp and it says "winter" to me.

Some different pots from the holiday firing ...

2010-12-21T11:44:00.000-08:00

I ran out of Miller 750 red clay a couple of weeks ago and wasn't able to get any from my supplier in time for this past firing. Instead, I picked up 150 pounds of 950, which turns out to be a heavily-grogged sculpture clay. (I know, I should have realized that ... ) Miserable to throw, like throwing sandpaper. I threw a few things, but gave up on that and decided to use the slab roller to make some vases, after seeing some Randy Johnston slab pots in his show at the Pucker Gallery last winter.

The slabs were rolled out, cut into squarish shapes, then folded onto themselves and pinched closed. Then slab bases were added and folded up onto the rough cylinder. I added dustcatcher "ears" to a couple of them, stamped shell stamps across the rims and here and there on the pinched joint, and that was that. The stoneware took well to the Shino glazes and to an Oribe I poured over Shino on the bigger one. Sold one just after it came out of the kiln. I would be eager to see them fired in a wood kiln, though I like them pretty well as they came from my gas kiln.

And then winter came ...

2010-12-20T09:44:00.000-08:00

A couple of hours after we'd closed the doors on the annual Holiday Open Studio, I looked outside and saw snow beginning to pile up on the deck. Just in time.

Our power disappeared for a couple of hours in the night and we overslept a bit, but that just delayed an easy Monday morning sitdown at the local coffee shop. Our friend Bruce was sitting by himself there, and we joined him, then Janet showed up and we spent some time over coffee with them. This is one of the good things about living in this small town, we generally know where we can find friends.

The snow continues into the afternoon, though predictions were for two inches in the morning. I think we're up to four or five inches by this time, with snow still coming down. I'm doing computer chores like printing address labels and putting together music mixes for Dee's brother Jim in Maine to play on his new CD-player. Jim's undergoing medical treatment for the next month or so and loves music, but lives a bit off the grid, so these portable music-players are kind of new to him.

I'm thinking about the next pots and the next firing, though I probably won't make any for a week or so. I've got some rough sculptural stoneware that made nice slab vases in the weekend firing, so I may make more of that kind of thing. There are always new ideas ...

Thanks to all who made the weekend a success socially and financially. A lot of planning goes into it, some of which I don't do all that well, but it's always worth it in the end. And I don't mean just income. Mostly, what's good about it is the friends and the community.

Happy holidays, all.

---

Photos: The backyard gallery shed at noon today; the front door of the studio.

Lots of food and pot-buyers today ...

2010-12-18T19:31:00.000-08:00

Lots of pots went out the doors today, the first day of our weekend Holiday Open Studio. And lots of glass, paper, jewelry and other work by the guest artists in the upstairs gallery.

We've been doing this group kiln-opening/craft show here at our place for the past six or seven years and it's slowly grown to the point that we hired a policeman to direct traffic this year. Lots of folks crowded into the studio at 11 o'clock for the kiln-opening, helping to move the still-warm new pots from the kiln to the table. It seems to have become a bit of a tradition to come out that Saturday for bagels and coffee and eggnog (some with Brenda's bourbon addition), hang with friends for a while, make some new friends, buy work from the makers and eat chile dogs at noon. This is a very Falmouth-oriented event, since it's so close to Christmas there tend not to be a lot of out-of-towners. Everyone knows somebody connected with the show.

Our friend Ed Sholkovitz has become the chile dog king, taking my New Mexican red and his steamed dogs and combining them into a fine non-vegetarian mid-day repast. Then Mike and Tammy Race showed up with shrimp 'n' grits and oysters on the half shell, Janet produced chile-spiced chocolate cookies and ... some kind of chocolate toffee candy ... and there were muffins and other baked goods on the dining room table. Not a bad way to spend a Saturday.

And a good firing, in spite of the fact that I realized about an hour in that I'd forgotten to put cones behind the peeps. Yikes. Opened the damper and let it cool for an hour or so, then carefully installed the cones, all of which seemed to work as they should.

Oh, and did I mention we sent a lot of pots off to new homes? I love that.

More tomorrow. Lots of stuff left. Come on down.

---

Photos: Top, the crowded studio at kiln-opening time, with glassblower Bryan Randa shamelessly mugging for the camera. Center, part of the studio pot display. Bottom, the upstairs gallery.

Come to the holiday open house

2010-12-15T12:34:00.001-08:00

The hands above belong to Laura Burns, a friend of this blog and a teacher in Queens, New York. Laura came over this past summer from Martha's Vineyard to pick up some pots after reading the blog for some months. I photographed her with one of the teabowls she bought and then used it on the postcard made for this weekend's Holiday Open Studio.

I just finished loading the kiln with glazed pots and have started cleaning up the studio for the opening. A dirty job. And it will be interesting if anyone at the kiln-opening Saturday morning notices that the place is a lot cleaner than it was earlier in the week. Well, at least I will know.

We open for business Saturday morning at 10, then open the newly-fired kiln at 11. That usually brings what passes for a crowd in Hatchville in December. And lots of cars parked on the side of the road, which annoys one particular neighbor. So this year I've hired a police officer to tend to the proper parking of cars during that one- or two-hour period. The neighbor would have called a cop anyway, so this way she can walk out of her house and just talk to him.

This year, five other craftspeople and artists will join us, setting up their tables in the new upstairs gallery space. Bookmaker and paper artist Ruth Bleakley, glassblower Bryan Randa, painter Jean Swann, potter Lois Hirshberg and jeweler Kim Collins will share space upstairs and laugh the weekend away. And sell stuff, too.

You can join us, too. Saturday 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Sunday 11 to 4. Chile dogs will be served to anyone interested around 1, after the kiln's been emptied.

Come on down.

Some out-of-control Shinos ...

2010-12-11T11:28:00.001-08:00

I should be mixing glazes for the upcoming firing, which will be opened Saturday, Dec. 18, at our holiday open studio event. But, naaaaahhhh ... I was sorting through pots from the last firing yesterday, getting things out to the gallery and out of my way in the studio. And I found these two small bowls on which the Bright Shino poured over the carbon-trap Shino had crawled into a white web. How do I miss these things when I'm unloading?

Anyway, one more instance of overlapping Shino acting unpredictably.

The way these Shinos fire often reminds me of landscapes from above, and often of the distant landforms of planets other than our own. I spend a fair amount of time looking at astronomical images on the RefDesk.com website, possibly because so much of the extraterrestrial world looks like tight close-ups of Shino pots. Or maybe not ... I don't know.

So, the top two images are of these new small bowls. Next one down is the side of a vase from the last firing and the bottom is a crackle-slipped and fat vase from two firings ago.