Upper Cape Cod Pottery Trail brochures just in!

Some months ago, a group of potters on the western end of Cape Cod decided that we ought to have our own brochure and map to guide those thousands of clay-lovers on this part of the Cape to our studios. After several meetings, planning, discussion, no arguments, brainstorming, etc., the brochure it out. And it's just what we were all hoping for.
A photo of each potter's work accompanies his or her listing, there's a good and usable map, as well as the QR code for the free arts app of the Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce. (Go ahead and download it for your next trip to Cape Cod.) And it looks pretty cool, too. Many thanks to everyone involved, particularly Tessa Morgan of Flying Pig Pottery in Woods Hole, who hooked us up with graphic artist Mary Sellner Orr of Orr Studio, who designed the brochure.

For the past eight months or so I've been making these faceted bowls, cutting the coned clay and then opening up the cone into a bowl. The facets are torqued as I my hand pushes open the clay cone from the inside, the rims go wonky sometimes because of the uneven facets, sometimes the rims break and have to be patched. Ordinarily I wouldn't patch a standard bowl, but these faceted pieces are so misshapen that a patch just looks like one more accidental deformation.
And the bowls take the Shino glazes - and some others - very well. I often overlap two or three of my Shinos on them. And lately I've been adding pours of rutile, copper red, Temmoku, Nuka, even (gasp!) cobalt blue. Makes for lively bowls.
I've sold some of these over the past year, but the test will come in the next few months, as the customer base expands with the arrival of summer visitors to Cape Cod. We'll see.
Here are a few of the bowls from last week's firing. Top to bottom: Malcolm's orange trap Shino with ash celadon overlap; Kim's Genuine Rutile; rutile with Erin's Red; Orange Shino with cobalt, copper red and rutile pours; Orange Shino with cobalt, copper red and ash pours; crackled Orange Shino with rutile pour.

Bigger jars for the top shelf

The next firing is probably a week away, with a bunch of mugs (and other pots) yet to be thrown in the next few days. Should have a group of the collaborative pots Kim Medeiros and I have been working on, as well as some tall jars from my own wheel.
Kim and I have worked in the past couple of weeks on estuary-related pots for a summer 2013 show at the Falmouth Art Center. We were invited to participate together by Suzy Bergmann, the center director. These pots - a wide, shallow platter and a tall jar - will reflect the flow of the water in our Cape estuaries and the life that lives in that flow. We're both pretty excited about both the work and the invitation.
The top photo is of the drying jars in my own studio; next one down is Kim with the estuary platter this morning, after she's finished the decoration. More detailed photos to follow, once these pieces are fired.

New pots from the kiln this morning

This business of making pots can kick you in the ass sometimes. That happened to me this morning, when I realized that something blew up some time during yesterday's glaze firing. I knew it as soon as I opened the kiln door and began to look closely at the pots on the upper shelves. Teeny tiny shards of clay shrapnel embedded in the glaze at the bottom of small cups were the giveaway. Shit.
Looking around the burner ports on the bottom, I could see larger shards of Temmoku-glazed clay that didn't belong there. As firing partner Kim Medeiros and I worked our way down through the stack, I knew something bad was waiting at the bottom. There were ten mugs down there, among other pots, mugs in a color combination that two weeks ago became very popular due to a random Facebook photo I posted. I had several people from the UK to Maryland waiting for one or more of those mugs. They'll have to wait longer. When we got to the bottom shelf, it was clear that every last mug had been hit by a shower of small bits of clay when a small vase blew up. These things happen, though rarely in the glaze firing. Shit ... again.
OK, enough about that. There were good pots in the kiln, in addition to the shrapneled mugs. (Did you know the word "shrapnel" came from the British General Henry Shrapnel, who invented a kind of fragmenting artillery shell in the early 19th century? I didn't ... ) I've been making cut-sided pinched cups lately and there were many of them that survived the clay artillery. And there were many good bowls and pitchers and vases and a couple of terrific pots from the ongoing collaboration between Kim and me. I'll attach a few photos for you, though none will be of the ill-fated mugs.
Here you go. Top: One of our collaborative pots, thrown by me at Kim's studio and then altered and decorated by Kim; a mug, pither and cut-sided cup glazed in Temmoku and then dipped in Michael Coffee's Nuka glaze; a group of small vases; a dozen of the 30 small pinched cups that were in this firing.

First finished collaborative pot

Kimberly Sheerin Medeiros and I have been collaborating on pots for the past few months. Kim is a master carver and decorator and I just throw and glaze pots. So I've been giving her leather-hard jars, large and small, and she's been working on them in her studio at The Barn Pottery in Pocasset. She fired yesterday and today the first finished pot of this joint effort came out of the kiln. That's my partner Kim with the pot in the top photo. It's a lovely vase with a combination of overlapped glazes on the uncarved parts and iron oxide wash on the carvings.
The first of many, we hope. And we're both particularly excited to see what will come of this collaboration when our wood kiln is built, with luck some time late this spring.
My role, by the way, aside from throwing the raw material for her decoration, is to take her carved and slipped cups and mugs and glaze them with overlapped Shino and other glazes. That's still to come, with luck in a bit more than two weeks. I have her pots here now, but we're headed off to palm trees and sunshine for about ten days. I'll get back to work in the second week of March.
The photos: Kim in her studio with our first pot; another carved jar, used this time to roll impressions into roughly square slab plates. Much more to come.

A lovely little Nic bowl today, via Royal Mail

British collector James Hazlewood and I have been trading e-mails and Facebook messages for some weeks now about the pots he has acquired and about my pots. He's said some nice things about my work, which is flattering coming from someone who is enthusiastic and knowledgeable about pottery.
Several weeks ago, he asked if I would like copies of pottery videos that he has. I said I would and offered to trade him a pot for the videos. The deal was struck.
Today, the profile of the young Queen Elizabeth II was on the corner of a box that arrived on our doorstep via Royal and U.S. mails. Inside, about a dozen (I haven't counted them yet) pottery DVDs and a sweet little Nic Collins woodfired bowl, a lovely thing. I've admired Nic's work for some time. Look him up if you don't know what he does. Wonderful, rough woodfired pots. He's a great friend of our friend Doug Fitch and Goldmark has a very good small film of him and his work on their website (goldmarkart.com).
Many thanks, James. Something good will soon be coming your way.

New bowls from the kiln; pots in a new book

I did a glaze firing Tuesday, delayed by a day because a cone pack exploded at the top and I - fortunately - spotted the clay grenade fragments relatively early on in the firing. So I shut it down, let it cool, then went in and cleaned out the debris. This was a clean-up firing, using up as many of my bisqued bowls as I could, along with bowls from friends Sue Wadoski, Sarah Caruso and a platter from Kim Medeiros.
It was a good firing, with more faceted and stretched Shino bowls from me, continuing my exploration of that process. The Sheffield T3 clay body reacts very well to the three or four Shinos in my studio. I am abandoning B-Mix, at least temporarily, to concentrate on the more reactive T3 for a white stoneware body. But now I have to get a shipment from Sheffield, or travel to western Mass. in the pickup to fetch a load.
In other news, British writer and potter Linda Bloomfield's new book, "Contemporary Tableware" (Bloomsbury and the American Ceramic Society), has been published, with some of my teabowls in it. She kindly sent me an email today telling me about the book and including a link to one of the first reviews. Here's the link.
http://www.thedesigntrust.co.uk/book-review-contemporary-tableware-by-linda-bloomfield/
The photos: Top, a two-page spread from "Contemporary Tableware"; hakeme small plate with Dan Finnegan's amber ash glaze; faceted Shino bowl; faceted Shino bowl; small faceted Shino bowl with blue glass runs.

New pots from the kiln

I fired a load of pots Tuesday, opened the kiln Wednesday morning. Lots of simple bowls for the Cape Cod Potters' Soup Bowls for Hunger event in April, a small batch of handled chowder bowls, a dozen or thereabouts teabowls, some vases and odds and ends. Sarah Caruso put ten cups in the firing, using my glazes and her clay body. First time she's fired to cone 10 in years, she says. I think she was intrigued by some of the results. And there was a single tiny vase by Kim Medeiros, just so I could say she was part of the firing. Her pots have brought good luck the past couple of months.
I had unexpected results from the rutile glaze that I tried for the first time. It's Kim's recipe; she gets a milky blue/white on her pots, a color I thought I would try out. But for some reason the glaze fired to a deep purple for me, only showing that blue/white when it was poured over or otherwise overlapped another glaze. Too much reduction? A different grade of rutile? I don't know.
I did like it splashed over my usual Shinos. It supplied a bit of color where the Shinos tend toward black-and-white or a caramel brown or tan.
Anyway, more studying to be done, I guess. And I think I'm going to fire again next week, to clear out some of my bisque before we get to some remodeling of the studio area.
The photos, top to bottom: Tall jar of mine, small vase of Kim Medeiros; then six small faceted Shino teabowls, some with rutile or ash celadon pours.

Slowly focusing kiln design ideas

Dan Finnegan flew from Boston last week, leaving Kim Medeiros and me here on Cape Cod, contemplating the kiln design discussion we had with him over 48 hours. (Oh, and we had a pretty damn good vegetarian potluck dinner party here with a number of local potters, many of them already FOFs ... Friends of Finnegan.)
Kim and I were left with some immediate homework: First, find wood. I mean, it seems like a given, but finding appropriate fuel for the kiln is a fairly crucial first step. Fortunately, I've lived here long enough to know the kind of people who know those kinds of people. That means we've got a line of a couple of sawmills not far from the Cape who create lots and lots of pine offcuts. OK, that's a start.
We also need the shelves around which the kiln will be built. Our initial decision is to use 14x28-inch shelves, configured to basically create a square and, vertically, a cube. We know we can buy the shelves new, but we're on the lookout for used silicon carbide. Anyone know of any? We'll travel to pick up, within reason. Lemme know.
The same goes for brick. I have about 800 used soft and hard brick, but we think most of the hard brick will go into the chimney. Again, we'll probably buy new, but are not averse to saving money. Lemme know.
After talking kiln with Dan for about two days, what we came up with - perhaps not remarkably - will look a lot like a single-chamber version of his two-chamber kiln outside Fredericksburg. A photo of that kiln is attached, as is one of Dan in consult mode. Dan led us through options for capacity, arch, firebox, etc. and something like this really seems to do what we want it to. Big enough to fire with others, not so big that one or the other of us couldn't do a single big firing if need be.
So, we're on the trail of all the details that need to be done before the planned June start date. Anyone who has advice, feel free.

Pottery friends in 2012

Studio pottery can be a lonely job. Or, at least, a solitary job.
Most of us work in our own spaces, removed from the rest of the community unless a buyer comes by or another potter needs a break from her work or we choose to go into town to the coffee shop or the grocery store. That's certainly the case with me. And I mostly like it that way.
But we can't get along without friends - for conversation, bitching about craft shows, problem-solving, borrowing of essential glaze ingredients (I still owe Denny Howard a few pounds of OM4), planning of regional clay shows, any number of things. We support each other, whether we realize it or not.
So here are some images of a few of my potter friends here on Cape Cod. These are not all of them, just some that I have photos of. I'm leaving out Ron Geering, Ron Dean, Diane Heart, Anne Halpin, Ann Newbury, Lois Hirshberg, Jim Irvine, Sue Wadoski, Sarah Caruso and others.
The photos: Denny Howard of Howard Pottery in Sagamore, demonstrating for a friend; Tessa Morgan of Flying Pig Pottery in Woods Hole, glazing; Kim Medeiros, my woodfiring partner, decorating (please note the Frida Kahlo earrings); Gail Turner of Millstone Pottery in Brewster, stoking in Truro; Shelley Fenily of Falmouth, left, with her partner Natalie Mariano; Brian Taylor of Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill, loading the art center's train kiln this past fall.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

Dee and I wish you all a Merry Christmas, Happy New Year and happy holidays of all kinds. Through this blog and through the Hatchville Pottery Facebook page, we have friends on almost every continent. (Any potters active in Antarctica?) That kind of connection is a real blessing. We know the joy and pain of many of those friends, and we know the great pots many of them are producing. I love that.
Many people around me and friends my age are retired or thinking about retirement, and I am often asked, "So, is this pottery a retirement thing that you do?" To which I do not usually have a civil answer.
For the past decade or more, pottery has been the next thing I do, not the retirement thing I do.
I think I keep getting better, making better pots, more interesting pots, more complex pots. Why would I not want to keep doing that? And replace it with what?
This year, I started serving on the board of directors of The Studio Potter, a good and serious-minded hard-copy pottery magazine struggling to find subscribers in a digital world. I'm very new and at times very much trying to catch up with the others on the board. But I've made new friends and connections I'd never have made without the magazine. And maybe I can help.
And this year I talked my a-little-bit-reluctant friend Kim Medeiros of The Barn Pottery in Pocasset into a weekend woodfiring at the Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill. She got great pots from the train kiln there by the ocean, pots that I personally thought were the best that came from that firing. And she fell in love with wood. Friend Dan Finnegan of Fredericksburg, Va., is coming here in a couple of weeks to talk about guiding the two of us through the building of our own wood kiln in the spring.
Our holiday kiln-opening and open studio was busier than ever; Kim, Lois Hirshberg and I sold more pots than ever before. Kim and I sold many pots right out of the warm kiln. Much jewelry, blown glass, coffee and paper goods went out the door, as well.
With luck, this winter we'll add studio and gallery space to the front of my current studio here in Hatchville. Our friend Mike Race, known by some of you, will do the building. More room for good pots.
Things keep changing and growing around here. Hoping it stays that way for many years.
Happy Holidays, everyone.

The photos: Our gallery, in a snowstorm a year or two ago, the photo used in a recent e-mail greeting from The Studio Potter magazine; one of my bowls from the Truro wood kiln; and one of Kim's pots from the Truro kiln, a pot that now lives comfortably here on a kitchen shelf with Ray Finch, Dan Finnegan, Doug Fitch and Hannah McAndrew.

Deep breath after the weekend open studio

We've done this holiday kiln-opening and open studio for the past nine years and I'm always anxiety-ridden in the week leading up to it and always happy when Saturday arrives and everything works and the new pots are good, the cop handles the traffic, we don't get two feet of snow and people buy pots. And that held true this past weekend.
The raucous laughter coming from the room over my studio was reassuring early Saturday morning, when Kim Collins, Bryan Randa and Ruth Bleakley were back together again, organizing their wares and catching up with each other. I went upstairs to tell them it was like having the kids come home for the holidays and livening up the house again. Then Lois Hirshberg arrived and Kim Medeiros and then Mike Race with his coffee and pretty soon everything was as it should be. And then the people came and we opened the kiln and my pots and Kim's were good and people bought them and bought from everyone and food came from seemingly everywhere and I was cold in the studio selling pots while everyone else was in the house selling and eating and drinking. But what the hell.
For about an hour after we emptied the kiln there was a line of people waiting to buy my pots and I ran out of my pile of wrapping paper and bags. I don't think those things have ever happened before.
Once again, our neighbors Jim and Bill were close to the new pots coming warm from the kiln and once again they walked off with one of the best. They always do that.
This weekend has become much more than a sale, though. In the week before the firing, more people ask me about what they should bring to eat than asked about how my glazing was going. There was chowder, green chile meatballs, empanadas, thousands of cookies, chocolate truffles (still some in hiding in the kitchen, actually), small and delicious mince meat tarts that somehow never made it onto the communal food table, salmon, chile dogs, vegetarian chili, coffee, vodka, a tomato tart, bacon and mushroom quiche ... much more. And much that I didn't get to eat. There were kids, dogs, old folks with canes, couples, families, relatives ...
Now that it's over, I can say it's a pretty cool thing that happens here every year. Even Angela Rose, a local potter who started this with me, showed up and talked promisingly of making more pots and getting involved again.
Now, some photos, with pots that just came out Saturday: Top, all the craftspeople, except coffee roaster Mike Race, who must have been in the kitchen brewing; left to right above the bearded guy are Bryan Randa, Lois Hirshberg, Ruth Bleakley, Kim Collins and my firing partner Kim Medeiros; white Shino broken-rimmed teabowl; one side of an eight-pound jar with overlapped Shino and Temmoku glazes; another side of the same jar; two small wide teabowls whose upper walls are added slabs.

Kiln-opening and open studio this weekend

The kiln is loaded and the burners are firing. It's around 700 degrees in there right now and it will fire until later this afternoon. Then we'll open at 11 Saturday morning, with what is likely to be a studio full of visitors eager to see the pots that Kim Medeiros and I have inside.
When Falmouth potter Angela Rose and I started this holiday kiln-opening/open studio weekend about nine years ago, I think we had three or four people around us when we opened the kiln door. And I think all of them were relatives. Times have changed. This will be the third year that we have had to hire a Falmouth policeman to manage the kiln-opening traffic. That uniform carries more car-parking authority than the fleece vest or denim jacket worn by whatever unfortunate friend volunteered to help park cars. There will be a lot of people here.
This idea sprang from the holiday home pottery show of the late Shino master Malcolm Davis. When we lived in the Washington, D.C., area, and I was a beginning potter, we would go over to the Adams-Morgan neighborhood townhome of Davis and marvel at his Shino pots. We even bought some once in a while. But what struck us as a good idea was the fact that he always had four or five other craftspeople in other media also selling in his home.

So when Angela and I decided to do a December show, we wanted to include other craftspeople. Since that first show, we've had jewelers, potters, painters, one glassblower, a paper artist, a coffee roaster, a photographer ... maybe some I can't remember. Jeweler Kim Collins has, I think, been with us from the beginning. Glassblower Bryan Randa has been with us for several years, as has paper magician Ruth Bleakley. This will be raku potter Lois Hirshberg's third year and functional potter Kim Medeiros's first. Mike Race will sell his freshly-roasted coffee beans for the second year. 

And everyone will bring food. This is a good place to have lunch on Saturday, even if you don't feel like buying pots. (Though that's encouraged.) For the past five years we've served chile dogs made with genuine New Mexico red chile. That started when a friend arrived with five hot dogs (five????) and five buns. I happened to have made chile that morning, so we combined the two and Ed's strange potluck contribution was consumed almost immediately (well ... there were only five) and started a tradition. Now, chile dogs have to be on the menu. And there will be much, much more ...

Come on down if you're on the Cape. We open at 10 Saturday morning and open the kiln at 11. Sunday we open at 11. Both days we close the doors at 4.

Happy holidays, all.

The photographs of a few of my pots available this weekend: Top, two side-handle teapots, appropriately decorated; small lobed vase fired in the Truro wood kiln; mugs from the Truro wood kiln;  fat vase, from the same kiln.

Your formal invitation

Sometimes people around Cape Cod ask me what they have to do to get an invitation to our annual open studio/kiln-opening. What, you've been staying away for the past eight years because I didn't call you?
OK, for those of you who read the blog, here it is. For the rest of you who read the local Falmouth Enterprise, it will be in the paper. For those of you on Facebook, it's there, too. No one is excluded. Come one, come all ... a free handmade eggnog cup to the first 25 people who show up Saturday morning (and half of them this year were made by Kim Medeiros, so you'll be getting a bargain). Kiln-opening at 11 Saturday morning, chile dogs for as long as they last at 1.
And we'll all be here Sunday from 11 to 4 for those who can't make it Saturday. Pots by Hollis, Kim, Lois Hirshberg; glass by Bryan Randa; cards and notebooks and other stuff by Ruth Bleakley (who also did our poster); fresh-roasted coffee by Mike Race; jewelry by Kim Collins.
Photos: Our Ruth Bleakley-designed email card and poster; potter Kim Medeiros of The Barn Pottery and her daughter (and a pretty good thrower already) Phoebe after unloading this week's firing here.