Tales from an Apartment Dwelling Potter

While my clay classes at the College are finished for the Semester, I am not certainly not finished with clay!  I am now back to hand building Micaceous Clay Pots... which is why on any given day off from work, my apartment may look like this~

or this~

Mixing & Wedging Clay

 or this!

That is the nice thing about hand coiling pots, or doing clay sculpture work. While it would be great to have a real studio, if you are determined enough & are willing to deal with the mess & clean up involved, you can make it work in a fairly small space... in my case, it's my kitchen.

But luckily, I have another place to learn & work, because as it turns out, just as my classes were finishing up at the Community College, my  Micaceous Clay instructor was offering a clay class at his studio in Tijeras, NM. I've been spending my Saturdays there, and then trying to put into practice what I'm learning in my little "Kitchen Studio" back at home.

Above, my first pot from class. (In the drying stage. Keep in mind, all these pots are all Raw, needing several stages of scraping, sanding, burnishing/polishing & firing before they are finished!)

For my second pot, I chose to make a casserole. They are pretty challenging for me, so I  was pretty excited about this one!

Until I flipped it over for drying & this happened~ Arrrrggh! I've never had a pot crack this humongously before!

Bummer.

But! A perfect opportunity to test out what I like to call "The Apartment Dwellers Clay Recycle System." 

I had another pot to recycle as well. (During the drying stage, it had developed a very small but critical crack near the bottom of the pot.)

After a bit, it looked like this.

In goes the cracked casserole.

I smashed it into pieces & let it soak in water.

Over the next several days, I stirred it & let it soak... pouring off the excess water at the top.

I then transferred it to an old pillow case, and lined a clay box with a trash bag, so that the excess moisture wouldn't make a huge mess all over the floor. After several days of flipping it, it still was not getting dry enough, so I transferred it to another pillow case- this one split open to increase the surface area to air ratio. 

I put it outside in the dry summer air... keeping an eye on it & turning/mixing it as needed. Is this exciting stuff, or what?!

 Soon enough it was back to the right consistency & I wedged it back up as you see above...

Recycled Clay Pot

and gave it new life in the form of a bean pot.

:)

I also made another casserole to replace the one that didn't make it.

Pics before & after the handle is added.

This time it dried fine except for a crack in the lid where the handle was added, but that can be repaired, which I am working on now.

Another bean pot...

(I cut the rim down significantly from what is shown here.)

and another.

:)

This pot I made w/ the help of my instructor last saturday. It's a fluted casserole dish, and I find the form to be quite lovely. I found it so lovely in fact, that I made another one today! Getting over my attachment to every piece, I also recycled another pot today. It was a little on the thick side, & I decided I wasn't really crazy about the shape, sooooo...

After a few hard thunks on concrete, and a little hammering action... back into the bucket it goes.

It'll be interesting to see what this one turns into after the recycle process!

:)

Lessons in Non-Attachment the Clay Way

I've spoke of these lessons before~ you create, you may grow to love what you create, and then, sometimes... you have to let it go. It's all really very zen if you think about it. I started this Micaceous pot back in early Feb~ a "casserole dish for one." (Sometimes a regular size casserole is just a bit more than you really need!)

My Micaceous Class doesn't start 'til May... but what I am beginning to learn about myself is that my passion for clay knows no bounds, and while taking 2 classes & working certainly is enough... I can't seem to help from working on these pots & making the bears on the side. Which leaves precious little time for the other life stuff... but I digress. Back to the pot. Looks like a chocolate cake, doesn't it?

:)

Things were going along just fine, and I was fairly happy w/ the size & shape of it.

But, with clay, as is with life... timing is everything. I cut the lid before it was time... and as it was drying, it warped & cracked... rendering my lid useless.

But, you know me... I rarely give up (though sometimes perhaps I should!) So I figured I'd try making another lid. 

Now, keep in mind, the pot itself was already fairly dry, so trying to find the right size puki to build my lid in was a bit challenging considering I had to try to accommodate/guess about the shrinkage rate.

This was a good start. I figured I could go back & make repairs & fill in the gaps later to get a good lid fit. (Now that is one thing I love about Micaceous clay- the ability to make such repairs, or add handles, or fill cracks when the clay is in a dry state. You really can't get away with that w/ the commercially processed clays.)

Above, getting ready to add the handle, below the new lid & the original warped & cracked one.

Hmmm... well, I figured I could repair this crack, too... though it was in a risky spot~ at the bottom of the pot near where I had added my first coil.

I figured what the heck... I'll fill it (as I was in the process of doing in the pic above) sand it, polish it, burnish it... it'll be fine. But after speaking w/ my instructor, I found that these particular cracks are persnickety about repairs. They will often show up again as hairline cracks where the repairs are done- after they are fired... or worse, when on the stovetop. Soooooo, after all that work and all that time spent, I must say goodbye to this pot (and dang it~ note the much better lid fit!)

It only took a few minutes to return to the mud from which it started. It'll be recycled & mixed in w/ more clay to have life again as a new pot in the not-too-distant future. I do have one more pot this happened to, but I just couldn't quite throw it into the slop bucket yet! I may try firing it just to see what happens. It's all a learning process either way, so we'll see! And while the Clay will teach you these lessons in non- attachment over & over again... sometimes, well, you just cling to a special piece... not wanting to let go. I'm getting much better with this issue in my wheel throwing class-if it's not going the way I like, I have far less problems w/ recycling it, or if a potentially nice pot turns out crappy because of my glaze experimentations, I can generally let that go as well. I think the time involvement (many hours for one pot) is the reason I become so attached to the Mica Clay Pots, but perhaps in time, I'll learn to let that go, too.

:)