We didn’t realize how keyed up we were for the Breakfast session until it was over. Today we feel as if we had been run over by a truck. Hard to find energy to get into what we wanted to do today. We went into the studio. Big kiln had fired as it was supposed to. Since the ten has the really big platters in it we gave them a soak at 180 degrees for 12 hours while the big guy was firing, then it kicked in. Was not finished until late this afternoon.
Cindy trimmed the bowls the VIPs threw yesterday. Some of them required a bit of creativity and special handling for her to be able to do a proper job of trimming but they came out looking good. Here are the bowls before trimming:
One in particular before:
and after:
All in all the bowls turned out really nice after their session on the wheel for trimming.We realized we didn’t explain shrinkage to anyone. The green pots will lose about 12% as they dry and are bisqued. Hopefully no one will think they are too small.
The hand built bowls look really good too:
We should have people starting to show up tomorrow to sign their thrown bowls and over the next week or so hope to collect all the signatures. Then it is just a matter of babying them through drying, bisquing and glazing. We decided we will leave the outsides mostly unglazed to show the texture, throw lines, etc, and just glaze the insides of the bowls. They should look really good.
After we finished with the Empty Bowls bowls (is that redundant?) we worked on the final beanpot handle design. Cindy pulled some handles for our big beanpots, the fourth attempt, and we worked at getting the angles and negative space just right. Here is what we wound up with:
We think it will be about a 4 liter pot. We also think it is fairly faithful to the old 150 year old Quebec Beanpot we used as our inspiration. We’ll see once we get it all the way through the process. We have three built for the show. The best way to test a new product is to take it to the buyers. If we sell a bunch then we know we did it right.
Well tomorrow we’ll head into the studio to do all the things we didn’t get done today and all the things we were supposed to do tomorrow as well so it should be a late Friday night. We’ll see. Hot weather so at least everything is drying as it should. Of course with kilns firing it makes it hot in the studio. Now I sound as if I should be farming. Never happy with the weather!
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nite