Happy new year! Back in production mode here at MudStuffing Industries. After such a great holiday season, I geeked out and bought a rad little camera, the GoPro Hero2. I think it’s more for extreme sports enthusiasts, but it also has some cool features that interested me artistically. Whenever I make a large purchase like this, I start feeling guilty and obligated to turn it into some sort of business expense. So I got this idea that I am calling the Clay360 Project (if anyone has a better name, throw it out there). Basically what I plan on doing is giving everyone a 360 degree view of the ceramic process, start to finish, with all the mundane shit thrown in as well. The GoPro camera came with a variety of attachments, rail mounts, tri pod mounts, head mounts, car mounts etc. etc. What I plan on doing is this….

Starting at the very beginning of the process record the: wedging, throwing, trimming, finishing, bisquing, waxing, glazing, wood prep, kiln prep, wadding, loading, bricking, firing, unloading, decaling, re-firing, and photographing of EVERY SINGLE POT or ceramic piece for a firing.

As most of you know, all that stuff is incredibly repetitive, in order to not bore the shit out of you, I’ll only be shooting one frame every 2 seconds. That means for every hour of work, you will see 1 minute of video (30 frames per second). I figure I’ll be posting an average of 2-3 minutes of video of everyday of the project. And probably ending up with 40 minutes to an hour of total footage.

Below is a test of a hours worth of work this week. Throwing 16 mugs, and putting feet and handles on 12 from the day before.

Whatcha think? Would this be interesting? Would love to hear some encouragement (or not), cause it would be a pretty intensive project for me (the me who has trouble with starting projects and not finishing).

I had a few reasons I thought this would be a good project. 1) The more people who understand the intensive work that goes into handmade objects, the more they will value handmade works. There is no better way to convey “work” than to show someone physically doing the work for 30 days straight in order to produce a load of pots. 2) If any of my pottery heros did a project like this, I would be enthralled, and tune in everyday, popcorn at the ready. Being able to see a series of work start to finish would be kinda cool even from an average potter like myself. 3) Money… moneymoneymoney lol! YouTube is now monetizing my videos, so if you feel like click an ad in the video, that would rock! I’m curious to see if there is any money in making pottery videos on YouTube. Even if it’s only enough to buy a six pack of the “really nice beer” I think it’d be worth it.

BTW – Music would make these videos infinitely more entertaining, but if I run ads, I can’t use good music unless I have permission.

If I follow through, this would happen after my next firing. I plan on firing at the end of the month or early February, so I would probably start shooting then.

I love to collaborate and I don’t get to do it enough. Last week I had the opportunity to collaborate with my brother from another mother, Mr. Brian Roth. Brian was a sculpture major in college, and although he’s in the beer industry now,  he has recently done a few bronze commissions. We only had about day/night to work, so we each started with a piece and about half way through, we swapped pieces and started re-working or adding to the piece each had started. I was pretty amazed at what we had accomplished in the short amount of time. Since we were working entirely in wet clay, we obviously couldn’t do the finishing work in one day.

Yesterday and today I worked on cutting the pieces apart and hollowing them out. This used to cause me a lot of anxiety, but it’s actually getting easier and less stressful the more I do. Below are a few pics of one of the pieces (the second piece I still need to figure out how to get a good shot of it).

The pieces are sliced into multiple pieces and each half hollowed out and then scored and slipped back together. However if you stop there, you end up with a visible seam line and possible cracking. So after gluing back together, I let it rest covered for a day and then I cut a groove half way through those seems. A coil is then slipped into place and trimmed and smoothed in.

Grooves are cut where my original seam lines are. (This is after it’s been hollowed and slipped back together).

Coils are slipped and pressed into the grooves.

The coils are them trimmed flush and smoothed in.
I then go back and try to match and textures that were lost during the hole hollowing out process.

I had to set up the gradient background today in my photo booth for some portfolio style shots and decided to photograph a few of the pots that didn’t sell at the Big Crafty last weekend. The show was a great success, and I got a lot of great comments on the new booth set up. I plan on doing a few more local shows this coming year, and the great turnout and response on Sunday gave me some badly needed motivation. Anxious to start throwing pots again!

Here’s some shots of the new booth set up with the track lighting. The track lights are bolted to the top shelf with two wingnuts, so it’s easy to remove. Plus I am only dealing with two cords for the WHOLE booth and getting 13 lights total. The shelves also get bolted to the tables using wingnuts. There will be table covers obviously. My show tables double as my glazing tables.

I’m pretty happy with the new set up. The only thing is, the cream is waaay to yellow, Damn You Colorblind Eyes!!! Aww well, maybe a fresh coat of paint after this christmas, but for the time being this will have to do.

The Big Crafty, here we come!!!

Due to restrictions, I’ve only got 2 mugs with the new decals on them. Most of the kiln has orders and bisque in there and there was only room for these two babies. I’ve got to get another wood firing in before the end of the month, plus it looks like I will be gone to Portland, OR smack in the middle of November, so I am rushing to get stuff bisqued and glazed so I can hopefully fire in a week, or at the least have it loaded and ready to fire when I get back. Why does it always seem that right when experiements seem to be paying off I have less time to put them into action?

Anyways, I am really digging the subtle pops of color on these pots. The designs are silk screened (using a photo emulsion) on to transfer paper. For the overglaze I’ve got two things working pretty well. One is a “multi-pen” from spectrum. I have no more information than that… it comes in a bottle with a need for freehand drawing. Fires to 1525 F (but I am pushing it higher just fine), and says it can be uses on glass ceramic and metal. I am modifying the contents using a silk screen medium, an acrylic slow-dri retardant, and a little acrylic gloss medium to may it slightly runnier.

Because I was unsure that the above overglaze would be available for ever, I dragged out those experiments from almost two years ago and mixed up 50/50 mason stain to Frit 3124. It this also works well (if not better and fucking waaaay cheaper than those multi-pen things. Mixed with water to a very thick consistency, screened, then adding the same modifiers as above.

In the images below the ivory/yellow designs are using the “multi-pen” medium. The blue designs is a bright blue mason stain (25%) + Zircopax (25%) + Frit 3124 (50%). Probably not food safe, so we’ll be using on the outside of pots only.

I just need to get working on my color palette now, so that my silk screened decals complement the earthy tones of the underlying glazes. Pink on Brown would be awesome!

We don’t get the same detail as a toner decal with the silk screen.

Really loving the cream on cream tones with this…

And the cream on brown ain’t so bad either.

Super stoked about the results from the last firing. I had maybe ten pots with experiements on them that didn’t turn out and hard headed to the shard pile. But aside from those the rest came out great. The firing was a bit tougher this time, took over 14 hours to get to temp. I had so many variables change this time, I am unsure what was the cause. 1) I tried to use every last bit of wood I had and right at about 2100 degrees there was some soft wood in there that I think wasn’t burning that great, maybe poplar? I’m really not sure, it wasn’t pine, and it wasn’t oak. But the correlation between that wood and the stall in temp was noticeable. 2) The previous firing I didn’t get a whole of of reduction, resulting in slightly paler pots. So this time I focused on keeping in redux. This could definitely keep the temp from rising, since the wood is burning inefficiently. 3) I stacked the kiln looser this time (see previous post) and when I unloaded, I could tell the heat was distributed un-evenly through the kiln. Some pots were barely a cone 9, others were easily a cone 11. So maybe heat was only going through certain areas of the kiln.

The warmer reduction cones in this load were really nice, and some are pretty dark. Which will be excellent constrast with some of the lighter colored decals I have been screening… Oh shit! I didn’t just say lighter colored decals did I?!?

More photos will follow later this week when I get these baby’s embellished.

Kiln is loaded. I noticed a little resistance last firing, trying to get to 2300 degrees and I had it pretty well packed, so this time I tried to space things out a little more. All except that bottom stack, I wonder if that is a little dense, but whatever. We’ll make it. I’ll be firing in the morning. :-)

I guess it’s official, we’ll be at The Big Crafty this December, voted Best Craft Show in Asheville, and it really is, not to mention the whole Phillips clan has a severe crafty crush on this event as well. I’ve been using the same show shelves since I started and the last few years I’ve kept saying I am going to revamp my set up. This year I finally did. I’ve got some new shelves build. I just need to finish up the lighting. I’ll take a final shot, once all is said and done. But the pics below will give you an idea. These shelves will be bolted to the tops of my tables.

I also finally got my wood prepped today as well. Just need to stack and it and start wadding and loading.

Been throwing more than my fair share of 12×12 lately. I now have a bunch of pots glazed, and more need glazing. However the one task I’ve been procrastinating is wood prep. I’ve been pretty good the last few firings and wood prep has been done long before the firing. This is huge for me, since a few days of wood prep + kiln loading + firing = exhaustion. If I can get that wood out of the way first thing, I am way less tired. But, it looks like I am back to my old ways (maybe it’s the rain lately) and I’ve put off wood prep and need to get it done as soon as possible, or it won’t be dry in time for the firing.

One of my distractions was this little sculpture. I made a small head from sculpy clay when I was at my mom’s, and it sorta got me in the spirit to do another sculpture. Silly stuff.