Gettin' to the end of the line

This is what my camera provided as "auto white balanced".... green balanced more likely!

After twenty minutes of color correcting, this was my best effort.

This is my favorite image after adding a layer of a black and white filter over the color image.

Hockey season is almost over. I can tell it by the tell-tale signs in the air. The roads are less hazardous, there is more light at the end of the day, and we're starting to see birds that had left town months ago. Still cold out, mind you... but a day or two above freezing does wonders for the heart in February.

Come the middle of March and hockey grinds to a screeching halt. We have 3 more major weekends of games before we're through. We play the dreaded Camillus team this weekend. Then we have a tournament in Clifton Park. Hopefully, the following weekend we will have another tournament in Canandaigua, but that seems less likely now that we've heard that few other teams have signed up. Might end up being a home game or a scrimmage with a boys team.

In the meantime, I am psyched... waiting for the 70-200 f/2.8 VR lens to arrive from my lens rental place. Hopefully the VR aspect will make it less prone to blurring as I try to capture these kids on the ice! I know I need the f/2.8 end of things. Light gathering in any hockey arena is a bugger. Trying to capture FAST movement is nearly impossible. Hopefully this lens will make things a little bit easier.

Midweek Thoughts

This has been a pretty sweet week so far. Lots of working being made in the studio. I think I can safely say, we WON'T be lacking for ice cream bowls come summer. Then again, maybe we'll get inundated with ice cream bowl sales in May.

In any event, the shelves are starting to feel full again, and we just loaded our third bisque firing for the month. Granted, our kiln is small. Ten cubic feet is nothing to sneeze at... unless your hanky happens to be a 100cu ft downdraft car kiln. In which case, sneezing would be accompanied by chortling too.

We make do with what we have. Every now and then I get nostalgic for the gas kilns of my past. Maybe someday, when we have more of our mortgage paid down, we'll pull together enough $$ to make a nice car kiln here.

In the meantime, there's hockey! Three more weekends of hockey hockey hockey! Right now, I think Nancy and I are still recovering from last weekend's games. Two very close games. Really fun. On the way home from Saturday's game, Nancy managed to grab this image out the window as the light was almost gone from the evening sky. Pretty wild.

Shades of Blue

I am not blue. And today, the sky is anything but blue. We have winds tearing at the pines in our yard. Winter's detritus is strewn from pillar to post. Top it all off with a side order of sleet, rain and freezing drizzle. Locally known as Ithacation.... it is definitely Ithacating today. Supposedly these 50mph gusts will let up around noon. Till then, we'll listen to the trees whistle and the house creak and moan.

So what's happening in the studio? A lot, and not a lot. I have been trying to get a lot of the year's grunt work done during the frozen months. We see the bulk of our sales happen during the summer months. I am sure that's true for most potters. Every summer, for the past three years, we have run out of pots during the summer. Not totally out of course, just out of the pots that someone wants. Usually this means being out of soup mugs, ice cream bowls, or mugs/tumblers. It happens seemingly every summer. No matter how hard I try to keep up with orders, we run out.

To try to cut this dilemma off at the knees, we have tried to estimate what we need to have on-hand for the summer onslaught. Looking at the prior year's sales would probably work, most of the time. Now though, with the economy in the toilet, how to we even begin to estimate (GUESS) what will see us through. Hard to know. So with that quandary in mind, I have been putting in double time in the studio lately. We have almost caught up to where I would like to be. Not bad. But still, nowhere near fully stocked. I think we'll get there though.

Places in Time

It is so hard trying to shoot images from a moving minivan... but we managed! Aurora shot from the back seat, Nancy from the passenger seat and now and then we stopped and I shot too! There are some days where the light is just ideal for shooting... you can't pass those times up.

One of the biggest problems I think many photographers face is what to do when you're faced with great light. On one hand you'll shoot anything if the light is magical. But what if you really want to capture some particular subject ... and instead you get so-so light. It's tough. Sometimes I think the light is really all I am shooting for. Something to bounce the light off, something the light can illuminate... not really sure how to express it.

In the bridge image above, all I saw (in color mind you) was the way the dark silhouette of the girders of the bridge framed the light pouring in from behind. Bear in mind, we were doing about 55mph, in a minivan that had seen the better part of the week coated in salt rime. Dirty doesnt begin to describe that windshield. But I shot through it... while driving.

The first image was a give-away. No potter could resist this shot.

A great drive home last night

It's a long way back from Utica/New Hartford to Trumansburg. We came back the slow route, via Route 5&20... met up with Route 89 and came down the lake. The light was falling fast as we came through the upper end of wine country. Great light though.

Hockey on a Saturday (and tomorrow too!)

After over 3 weeks, I finally have sorted through the 700+ images I shot at the Binghamton game back in January. The website is up! http://www.coldspringsstudio.com/BinghamtonGame/index.htm

Over the next few weeks I will be editing a few of these pictures. Mostly for fun, but also to see if anyone wants me to jazz up the pictures of their daughters. We'll see.

Footed Mug

I just wanted to share this footed mug that came out of the kiln a short while ago. As beautiful as it is in Lime, I think the sepia-tone really gives it a completely different aura.

More on footed mugs next week.

More Winter Sunset pics

These are some that Aurora shot yesterday with her camera.

Winter Sun

Day off from school today so Aurora and I went to the Corning Glass Museum today. I love going to museums with her. She sees everything so differently than most kids. Suffice to say, it is a real treat.

On the way home, we were driving with the sun at our backs. As the sun began to set we had a chance to catch some of it before the sun slipped behind the hills. Here are a few images from today.

How

About a year ago, we found this magnetic piece/word laying in our driveway.

So we put it on the minivan.

It is tiny. Not even an inch across.

And yet folks see it. We have only one bumper sticker.... Polar Bears Against Palin...
so perhaps there is enough grey background to see this small white magnetic word on the back of our van.

Either way, it amuses.

Lost generation - from PixSylated.com

_____________________________________________
I saw this on PixSylated.

From the PixSylated blog: ‘The Lost Generation’ was created by Jonathan Reed (a twenty-something film studies major at Georgia State University). It won second place in the AARP U@50 video competition last year – in which filmmakers under 30 were to describe their life at 50 (the age when you’re eligable for membership in AARP).

I usually follow PixSylated for their cutting edge look at photography and media. Lots of wondefully cool and off-beat stuff on their site.

Pitchers

This has been a long cold wintery week. I love winter, but lately my time has been spent in the studio instead of out in the snow, playing. The upshot of this is that I am staring at a mountain of bisqueware. I LOVE seeing a pile of pots waiting for glaze. I feel rich. I feel proud. I feel energized!

From this last bisque I managed to get a couple sweet oval pitchers through this week's glaze firing. Here are a few pictures. More coming next week. Also putting more pitchers on Etsy this weekend!

Hockey hockey and more hockey

This weekend was all about hockey. Two games over two days. I know, for some folks, that's nothing. For us... whew. It was all I could do to make sure we made it to both games remembering all the gear, jerseys and hot chocolate. Sunday's game had us playing Binghamton again, at the Arena. Our girls played so hard last month when we played there, that I figured this time I would join them on the bench and take some pictures of all the action. WHAT A HOOT! It was amazing being right there next to them. So much movement and excitement!

Here are a few pictures of Aurora from last weekend.

Putting more pots on Etsy

I am about halfway through processing images for Etsy. It always takes a while to get everything organized, measured, photoshopped, etc. Finally close to being done. Today I put up some images of a really sweet carved pitcher (black and white image went up on the blog earlier this week!) and some oval trays.

More to come.

Teabowls: what are they and who cares?

The teabowls we make are based loosely on the Japanese "chawan" form. Rather than try to delve in my meager knowledge of tea ceremony and the making/using of chawan, I will defer to a source of greater authority.

From wikipedia:

A chawan is a bowl used for preparing and drinking matcha (powdered green tea) in Japanese tea ceremonies. In Japan, "chawan" also is the standard term for bowls for rice. If it is necessary to distinguish between them, bowls for rice are called gohan chawan (usually pronounced gohan-jawan), while the ones for use in chanoyu are called matcha chawan (matcha-jawan). The handle-less cups used for drinking regular course steeped tea are generally referred to as yunomi (lit., cups for hot water), while the small porcelain cups used for fine-quality steeped green tea are often distinguished as senchawan. When the word chawan stands alone, it is normally prefixed with the honorific o-.

There are many types of chawan used in the tea ceremony, and the choice of their use depends upon many considerations.

In tea ceremony, chawan are classified according to their place of origin or manufacture, colour, shape, materials and other characteristics. More than one classification may apply to a given bowl.

Most chawan are bowl-shaped, but shapes vary widely. There are names for each general shape, within which there may be many variations. Common shapes include cylindrical, flat and round. Cylindrical bowls are called tsutsu-jawan, while shallow bowls are called hira-jawan.

Chawan are also classified according to the type of tea that will be served in them: bowls for "thin tea" are referred to as usuchawan, and those for and "thick tea", koichawan.

Miwa Kyuwa (Kyusetsu X) 1895-1981

Kei Fujiwara 1899-1983

Matsuzaki Ken 1950-

Hamada Shinsaku 1929-

Considering the formalities and tradition of Japanese tea ceremony, it is nearly impossible for a westerner to fully appreciate the making of chawan/teabowls. Alas, when I started making pots, and saw my first teabowls in Ceramics Monthly, I was hooked. Most of the potters I have worked with or worked for, made teabowls. None of them would be mistaken for Japanese chawan, but they also would not be mistaken for a soup bowl or a mug. The irony is that in America, people use them for EVERYTHING.... soup, tea, hot chocolate, coffee.... you name it.

So, the teabowls we make can only loosely be defined as influenced by Japanese chawan. I try to make them with the intent that they will be held, carried, sipped from....all in hand. Suffice to say, when you pick one up, it sits in just such a way in your hands that it begs to be sipped from.

Those are my thoughts today on teabowls. Probably have a slightly different take on another day.



For some more ideas about chawan/teabowls and more images:
http://www.touchingstone.com/TeaBowls_IncenseBurners.htm

More photos of pots from the past week

I am finally done shooting images for the week. (I hope maybe longer.)
Now I can focus on throwing and trimming to my heart's content. I am looking forward to mixing up some new glaze tests this weekend... in hopes of snaring that elusive new espresso glaze!

In the meantime, I shall suffice myself with some espresso-colored images.

New pots this weekend

We had some great stuff come out of the kiln this weekend. Still shooting images, so bear with me. I am hoping to add a bunch of new stuff to our Etsy page sometime this week. So, here is a brief preview of pots to come.

Surprise in the Mail

I love being surprised. Well, I like it when it's a good surprise.

Today's mail had a frozen box waiting for me on the steps. Inside was this awesome tumbler!
Joy Tanner makes some of the coolest pots coming out of a soda kiln. The more I hold this cup, the happier I am.

Tomorrow... ideas on color development in the soda kiln.

Teabowls

I have been in a mood for teabowls lately. Considering how few I make each year, this is sort of odd. Each one seems to have more rippling and folding or twisting than the one before it. The decorating is mostly slip trailing and facetting. The facetting is usually done with a spring on a cheese cutter, but this week I am finding my plain old wire to be more interesting. Here are a few images.

Trading a gem

I got an email this morning from Joy Tanner accepting an offer for a trade. Her choice: this teabowl. Okay, we make non-Japanese teabowls... what else can one call them? They sure arent cups, or bowls... in any event... this glaze had given us fits just prior to Christmas. It was coming out wicked thin regardless of how long I let it stand in the bucket. Weird. So did some thinking and decided to add some flocculant in the form of calcium chloride. Some folks like epsom salts, but I found in grad school that the magnesia can really mess up some colors that are super sensitive to MgO. Which means CaCl2 is my deflocculator of choice. Plus on mornings like yesterday where we had over an inch of ice to walk on.... it is the BEST ice melter out there!!

Adding a teaspoon full of CaCl2 to a small (1/4cup) amount of glaze, and made it gel. Then I slowly added the gel to the batch and watched as it thickened before my eyes. I love this stuff!

Fired up the batch of Forest Green and got nothing but gems from that firing.

Fast forward a few weeks and I caught myself reading a posting from someone (probably John Hesselberth) on Clayart talking about how solubles from Neph Sy and some frits, mess with the state of flocculation in a glaze over time. Result, glazes can thin quite a bit MONTHS after mixing up. Wow. I knew it empirically but seeing someone else confirm this gave me a different look at this ongoing problem. I think I may need to keep track of how long this takes based on the glaze batch size. Wild fun stuff! Combine this with my new grasp of rheology thanks to John Tilton's blog... and I am in for a fun Spring as we play with new glazes!!!!

Thank you Joy! Now it feels like Christmas. Pottery in the mail! Is there anything better?

Pitchers are up on Etsy

I love how easy it is to use Etsy.
Easy to put things up, easy to edit and hopefully easy to sell!

Nancy and I have been talking about what we need to learn in order to put a shopping cart on our website. Lo and behold, the very same day, on Clayart, we had a discussion about the same exact thing. Sounds like it takes virtually nothing to create BUY NOW buttons through PayPal.... so that's what I will be working on in my copious spare time over the next few weeks.

Wish me luck!

January

Suffice it to say, January is here. Mornings have been wicked cold. Today it wasn't quite 8F. Ugh.

Once I was out in the studio, where the kiln had just fired off, everything was MUCH warmer. I think the studio this morning was just shy of 80F. Not too shabby.

Here are a few shots of the falling light yesterday afternoon. One of those days where you just can't stop watching the sun as it sets.

What's with everyone looking for Kool-Aid to drink?

Over the past few months I have watched with incredulity as more and more folks have signed up to drink whatever flavor of Kool-Aid was offered that week. With no disrespect to those unfortunate souls who followed Jim Jones in 1978 (to their ends I hasten to add)... but what the heck is with the insanity in this country? What gives with the insane push to dumb down America? I know that we lost a great deal by having King George II, for the last eight years, but this devaluation of education has just rubbed me raw for years. It would seem that we are collectively killing off the English language, devestating our educational system and making intelligent discourse a crime! This may sound like harsh criticism from someone who ususally writes about the nuances of mud or playing in the snow... but I am not sure I can take it any more.

For folks who subscribe to the H.E.R.B. principle..... (not sure what HERB is... go check out their website!)

http://edkrebs.com/herb/petoons39/index.htm

I guess the idea of seeing an end to theocracies is too much to ask for.... but I'm still asking!