I was just notified that I won a "Special Merit" Award from Mayco.  The only caveat is that you had to use only their glazes & of course they own the piece now. They will photograph it for real & use it in their marketing.  I apologize that this is only earthenware, but it was fun to enter & of course fun to win.  I used their Copper Aventurine with Black Cobblestone over it.…

For me the highlight of the festival was seeing the magnificent salt glazed work of Tony Winchester.  He had unique functional and more decorative pieces with themes of horses, dragonflies, and fish.  I looked at his etsy shop just now, but have to say that his latest works are up a notch or more in quality over what I saw online.  He had great sensitivity to combining the characteristic orange peel salt texture and flashes with smooth conventional glazes and trailed slip or semi-vitreous…

Hi - I am a high school ceramics teacher at Goochland High School in Goochland, VA - supposedly the fourth wealthiest county in the nation per capita - I teach at a wonderful school and have a dedicated ceramics studio with four potters wheels, a kick wheel, two extruders and a bailey slab roller.  My student population bursts at the seams and I am always looking for ways to inspire them and also to make my workload easier.  I have been inspired by Steven Hill after first seeing his ad in…

My dad's been trying to get me to be an "artist" since I was a kid.  I was always making crafty things and sketching.  He encouraged me to go to an art school.  Besides the fact that the thought of going to college scared the crap out of me, I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do.  I couldn't see myself as an artist.  The literature in the high school guidance office talked of Graphic Arts and that didn't appeal to me.  My four years of art classes in high school was mostly limited to…

I am a hobbyist potter, I do nice work, and from time to time, I’m surprised to see just how good I have gotten over the years.

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I have been trying to get iron red out of my kiln ever since I replaced it. Kept trying to slow cool from 1800 F down to 1500 F- This is proving to me that the "sweet spot" is lower in temp than I've been going. In an attempt to save a load of tableware through its slow cool cycle after my sitter tripped and stopped the kiln, I ramped it back up from 1227 up to 1800 and then slow cooled, 150 per hour to 1500. Somewhere in…

This blogging business is new to me,

and I just realized that by trying to maintain a single ongoing blog here on ning, that any comments would get separated from the current topic. It seems that the answer is to do a new post whenever you add to your writings, rather than updating an old or ongoing piece. By separating the posts, comments will be attached to one day's observations rather than, say, a whole year's journal.

The big news with me is that I have signed up to take…

Since my last post I've written a lot about single firing and have purchased a PID controller to convert my manual kiln to programmable control.