I had intended to post frequently during the retreat, but we stayed so busy with our activities that I kept putting it off. Then suddenly, it was over. The Gallery Lodge in Kasilof, Alaska was a magnificent location for our event, and the accommodations were first class.

Dot was in the throes of building a studio on the grounds, and had much…

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Arrived in Anchorage yesterday and the drive down to Kasilof was spectacular. Dot's Gallery Lodge is far better than I was expecting. We'll use the garage as our studio, but she has a new studio under construction that will be a strong community gathering point for many years. I'm so glad I met her in Fort Lauderdale two years ago. Watch this space for more as we have our Alaska clay experience. The retreat starts tomorrow.…

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In February I heard about a major ceramic studio tour in Phoenix AZ, and decided to make an overnight trip to visit the studios and to take in the ASU Ceramic Research Center Museum, with what is widely recognized as the best collection of ceramic art, from the 1950s through the present, in the United States. I was amazed by the variety and quality…

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I got a chance to try one last winter at MIY Ceramics and Glass in Hollywood, Florida, and knew I wanted one of my own. 

This is set up to make a platter or shallow bowl with a mouth 12" long by 8" wide. The depth is 1 3/8". The mold sections slide in pairs allowing you to set any size from 4" x 4" up to 14" x 14".…

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I have always tried to keep non-ceramic commentary off of the cone6pots network, but since many of you are friends, I am breaking my rule for this one bit of news.

Elaine Lewter, my wife of thirty-one years, passed away peacefully early this morning. She was the mother of our two fine sons, Jesse…

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I have found myself from time to time scoffing at some nice pots that were dipped in two overlapping glazes. The technique is seemingly taught to every beginning pottery student on their first day of glazing instruction. The fact is that some very interesting results can spring from the technique, given glazes that are attractive on their own, and that are suited to layering one over the other.

Yesterday I was very pleased how Glazing 101 technique worked for me with 3…

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Yesterday, my wife and I attended the Art in the Grove festival in Coconut Grove, FL. With 350 artists, there weren't many potters, and with one exception, I was not that impressed with what I saw. I was fortunate enough, though, to meet Timothy Sullivan, and I was simply boggled by the beauty of his pieces. He gas fires to cone 10 and makes use of multiple patterned glazes to give incredibly rich surfaces. He makes extensive use of Tenmoku glazes for blacks, browns, and red browns. He then…

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The following message was broadcast to all members on May 12, 2012. It is reprinted here for members to easily access and refer to, and for those whose email address may have changed, or whose spam filters may have blocked the message. . .

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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…

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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…

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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.

7/17/09 Single firing means skipping the bisque fire and going ahead with glazing of leatherhard to bone dry greenware and then doing a full glaze firing. Read more on the "Single Fire" page under the "Technical" tab at the top of all our pages.… Continue

I lived in San Francisco in the seventies, and was able to see the work of Robert Arneson on several occasions. I believe his talent was immense, as was his sense of humor and his understanding that we humans are but a tiny bit more evolved than the rest of the animal kingdom. His work has been dismissed as "caricature" and that may be true, but he used it in many ways (to bring absolute horrors down to a level where they can be confronted, and less… Continue