Lowell Hill Pottery

Continuing the Rowantrees Tradition

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October 7, 2014: Day 7

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Storage UnitToday I dismantled my kiln, moved some more raw materials and processed some clay. I didn’t get to work at the pottery for more than three hours, but I used the time well.

The packing boxes should be arriving soon as they got to the supplier sooner than expected. That means I may be packing bisque and stock as soon as this weekend. I’m really itching to get to that part of things, but the truth is there are a lot of little things that need gathering up. Everywhere I look there are small items. Normally they are scattered strategically around the place so that they are always at hand when something needs doing. But when you want to get them collected together, they seem to defy your efforts. They will ultimately lose that battle.

I have changed my mind about some things. At one point, I wanted to take just about everything in the place with me. Now, one by one, they are going to get left behind. In all likelihood that was always to be the case, but ambition gets the better of you before rubber hits road. I always knew I’d be leaving the spray booth behind but I wasn’t so sure about the dust collector. I thought I’d take it with me. Now, however, it will be staying put. Taking it would mean too much to deal with now. Besides, I can get a brand new spray booth with its own dust filtration system for a decent price.

Looking at the picture, I know it doesn’t look like there’s much in that storage unit, but believe me, looks are deceiving. The unit is 15 feet deep and I have packed stuff in as tightly as possible, A lot of rearranging will be needed soon. I will be moving some display shelving in that I built in 2012 and used up until this year. That will give me a little vertical space to the back and take some of the pressure off the wire racks.

That machine you see on the shelf is a ball mill, which is used to grind and mix glazes. It’s a homemade job that Rowantrees used throughout its history. There was a second one, but I’ve only ever used this one. Still trying to decide whether to stay at one or take the other one as well. Still not sure. They cost a fortune to buy new. I shall think on.

Day seven down, 24 to go.

 

October 6, 2014: Day 6

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Flaring Bowl

Another “off” day. Here’s the thing; when you work at a business all day (no matter which one), you can put in all the hours you want lifting and carrying stuff. But when the day is done, you still have the bookkeeping and other associated paperwork tasks to complete. Yesterday I worked at the move until sundown. It was dark by the time I got to the restaurant and pooched my tire in the process (yes, it’s toast and beyond repair).

So by the time I sat down to work on the more clerical duties, it was pretty late. Result: I didn’t get to bed until well after midnight. That doesn’t bode well for the following day. Sure enough, I was snoring in my office chair shortly after lunch today.

So this afternoon I basically gave myself a day off. Not entirely, but mostly. I finished up the pottery that came out of the last kiln (the bowl in the picture came out of that final firing) and got it onto the stock shelves. Then I took the last of the ware boards and a few small items over to the storage unit. I also threw out some trash. Not a particularly inspiring set of tasks accomplished, but I’ll go to be at a decent hour tonight. That will make tomorrow a better day all around.

And it needs to be. I swear the stuff I need to move is breeding. The more I remove, the more there is!

Day 6 down, 25 to go.

October 5, 2014: Day 5

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Oh, the places I have gone and the things I have done. Really, that’s a bit overstated, but why not? It’s after midnight and I’m a but punchy.

I spent a lot of this day in the storage unit putting up shelving (4 shelving units from Home Depot at $100 each reduced to about $360 thanks to a gift card I had in my wallet) and generally rearranging things. Then it was back to the pottery to unload that final firing and load the first bunch of raw glaze materials into the car for a trip back to the storage unit. I meant to get a picture of the thing, but someone forgot the camera. Oh well, tomorrow (today?) will be another day.

After the final trip, I decided to get some Thai takeout for dinner. From that decision came the only bad event of the day. As I turned into the parking lot of the restaurant, I misjudged the turn and drove over a curb with a BANG. No body damage to the car, but the right front tire was toast. I changed the tire and will have the mechanic look at it tomorrow (today?). Hopefully it just needs to be put back on the rim and will be fine. I really don’t want to be buying tires right now. Really I don’t.

Day 5 down, 26 to go.

October 4, 2014: Day 4

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Labeled Buckets

Clay reclaiming started in earnest today. I have a lot of it to process and it will take some time. Luckily, I can do other things while a batch is mixing. I’m trying to make these batches somewhat softer than the clay I usually use because I have noticed that this particular clay tends to stiffen as it ages. If it sits in one spot and doesn’t move until used, the water content tends to surrender to gravity and work its way to the bottom of the box, leaving the clay at the top too hard to work easily. Remixing the clay is labor intensive and time consuming, which is why I use a pug mill. The pug mill will be in storage at least until I can’t stand being without it any longer, so I decided to start this clay off on the soft side. Let it stiffen if it wants.

I also started packing up the stockroom. I can fit exactly one gross of petal cups into a 1.5 cubic foot box. This I learned today!

Raw materials are almost all packed into containers. The labeling is an ongoing project that I hope to finish tomorrow. I intend to pick up some shelving units at Home Depot tomorrow and get them to the storage unit where I can set them up. Then I can start moving bisque and stock to storage. It will all get messier before it gets better organized, but at least I have a vision of where things should be at the end of it all.

Day 4 down, 27 to go.

October 3, 2014: Day 3

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Well, I guess you can call this progress. As promised, the kiln was unloaded and its contents finished and stocked. Mostly yellow mugs, but some green and one large Duckshead flaring bowl. Unfortunately, that flaring bowl ended up in the seconds pile. I’ll probably take that one home for myself. There was a small glaze blowout on the inside that makes it unsalable. Oh well. Most of the rest was just fine.

I stacked the last kiln and set it to firing. Right about now it should be finishing up with the preheat and getting on with business. It will fire tomorrow and get unloaded on Sunday. Then the kiln will be decommissioned until I find it a new home. **sigh**

After that was done, I set to work packaging up the raw materials. It’s another bucket dance as I put dry powders into shiny new buckets to be transported to storage. Some unopened bags will go into plastic bags, but there aren’t many of those.

And of course, everything has to be properly and legally labeled. I have set about the task of getting that taken care of. I have always been pretty meticulous about my material safety data sheets, and I have a program of my own design that will print out labels in OSHA-compliant format. What labels I don’t already have will be done and applied by Sunday afternoon.

Tomorrow is clay day. I will spend as much time as I can recycling clay and packaging it up for transport to heated storage. Lord, I’m going to have a lot of that by the time I’m finished. that’s a good thing because I won’t need to buy clay in for quite some time. It’s an expense I don’t need in the coming year. For now, though, it’s called sweat equity.

Day three down, 28 to go.

October 2, 2014: Day 2

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Today was a little “off.” I had truck duty at my full-time job, which is unusual for me. After over 26 years as an EMT and then paramedic, I have shifted into mostly administrative work and spend most of my time doing compliance, policy and financial stuff. But today I donned a uniform and prepared for whatever might come.

Nothing came. Now, here’s the thing. It may seem counter-intuitive, but it is far more exhausting to spend a day in an ambulance station waiting for the call that never comes than it is to be running calls back to back all day. The stress factor of waiting around is far greater than diving in and using those skills you spent so many years sharpening.

So it was no surprise to me that by 3:00 p.m. I could not keep my eyes open. And yet, I needed to head out and tackle stuff at the pottery. I changed clothes at the station and dragged my weary body up the hill with no real enthusiasm.

Once I got there things changed a bit. But the work I needed to do was not something I particularly enjoyed; dismantling things. Yup, I gotta face the fact all over again that it’s moving out time. It’s just inertia, really, and it can be overcome.

The kiln I unloaded yesterday was waiting to be finished up and put onto the stock shelves, so I did that first thing. The kiln I fired today was cooling off. That will be opened tomorrow on my way to work. It’s mostly yellow just as the last firing was mostly green. Tomorrow afternoon, I will stack one more kiln and that will be it for production.

The next item on the agenda was to dismantle the glazing equipment. I packed up air hoses, spatulas, “chucks” (items used to hold pottery while glazing it), bowls, pitchers, and various other bits and pieces. The spray gun came home with me and the rest of it went to the storage unit. It all went far smoother than I anticipated, which leaves me wondering what I forgot.

Tomorrow I will at least start packing up the raw glaze materials. Some will go to storage, some will go home. Keeping my head focused on which is which will be a challenge, but the way I’m storing things, they can all be reconfigured as needed.

Day two down, 29 to go.

Moving On

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Today is October first, and although I have been given until November 15 to vacate the old Rowantrees building, I have agreed to try and be cleared out by October 31. Starting tonight, I will be chronicling my daily progress as I finish what work remains to be finished and pack up everything that needs to be moved.

Tonight I finished the last of my glazing and stacked what will be the penultimate kiln firing. There will be one more firing and then everything will be finished. At least, everything I glazed will be finished. I still have a whole lot of bisque ware, but that will be boxed up and put into storage. Once I have relocated, it will take little time to complete that work.

It was a melancholy moment glazing that last pot. It was a ramekin in yellow. I looked at it for a moment and told it that it would be the last piece to be glazed in that building after 80 continuous years. It should feel honored. I felt sad.

Day one down, 30 left to go.

What Disaster Can Tell You

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Broken PotIt makes no difference how much experience I garner, every now and then I will do something monumentally stupid. Several weeks ago, I had a ware board full of ramekins. I placed the board on a shelf with about half of the board extended out over the edge of the shelf. Then I set to work unloading the board.

Starting at the wrong end.

Almost immediately, the ware board with all those beautiful ramekins began tipping like an insane seesaw causing several ramekins to “introduce” them selves to the floor. Sancho Panza put it best when he said, “…whether the stone hits the pitcher or the pitcher hits the stone, it’s going to be bad for the pitcher.”

I lost four ramekins to that little act of idiocy, but it’s interesting what such a disaster can tell you. Not so much about my working methods, but about the product I make.

Many years ago (actually, it was decades ago), I was working in the pottery studio of a private school. I actually worked in the kitchen of that school, but they allowed me to putter about in the pottery studio when I was not at work. It kept body and soul together for the few months I was there. The students were aghast at my habit of cutting pots I had just thrown in half so that I could see how the wall of the pot looked. I can remember the teacher telling them, “You guys should be doing that more often.”

I rarely cut pots in half these days. I don’t really need to as the lesson of an even wall has been well learned. Still, it’s always interesting to look at the profile of a pot when it meets an untimely end. And truth be told, I have actually broken pots on purpose to get the sort of information the little beauty in the picture above revealed.

So what can I tell from what I see? Three things.

First, I can see that the wall is nice and even. No surprise there. You may also notice the slightly thicker rim. That makes the pot less prone to warping during manufacture and chipping during use.

Second, I see that the pot only broke into about four pieces – most of them quite large. That means that the pot is extremely strong. A weaker vessel would shatter into a lot of small pieces.

Third, I see that the glaze perfectly follows the same break pattern as the clay. That means the glaze fit is exceptionally good. I knew that, given the tests I put the glazes through. But it’s good to see it up close.

Most people don’t realize it, but a glaze has to fit the clay it’s applied to perfectly. The critical measurement is what happens when the pots cool in the kiln. Everything expands while heating and contracts while cooling. If the glaze contracts more than the clay does, it will be under a lot of tension. In a case like that, something has to give, and the glaze will form a fine network of stress cracks. Potters call this crazing. Crazing weakens a pot and will inevitably shorten its life. Some glazes are specially formulated to produce the same crackle pattern seen in crazing without causing problems for the pot, but crazing as a gaze flaw is something to be avoided.

If the clay shrinks more than the glaze, then the glaze can pop off, resulting in tiny, razor sharp pieces of glass that can end up in the food or beverage the pot was holding. This problem is called shivering and it is one issue that can keep a potter up at night.

Ideally, a glaze should shrink slightly less than the clay, but not enough to cause shivering. That assures that the pot will be strong and last a good long time in normal use.

And the best way to prove the strength of a pot is to break it on purpose – or, in this case, by accident – and see how many or few pieces it breaks into. The fewer the pieces, the stronger the pot. If the glaze margins align perfectly with the edges of the broken clay, the glaze fit is perfect.

I make high quality pottery. The picture proves it.

The Bucket Dance

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BucketsLike a lot of potters, glazing isn’t my favorite thing to do. I like being behind my wheel throwing pots and getting my hands muddy. But if you are a potter, you probably spend the least of your time throwing and trimming pots.

The fact is, nothing I make is finished without its outer coating of colored glass. So glazing is a necessity and needs to be done with great care. Gazes are fussy creatures. Each wants to be applied in its own way and its own proper thickness. Each wants it’s own special spot in the kiln where the temperature and heat work are just so.

Really fussy customers, glazes.

It starts with the chemistry. If you have read my blog for any length of time, you know something about those tribulations. Trying to figure out what that bucket full of liquid mud will look like when it’s fired is a mixture of educated guess, scientific calculation, trial and error and pure luck. And your first guess is usually dead wrong. The second usually is as well.

So when you have a glaze that works for you, you keep to it. I have eight of them.

So now that I am moving out of the old studio, I am feverishly mixing large quantities of them. You see, I have this idea of continuing to produce at least some of my smaller items. I have my kitchen studio with its own wheel and can make small items if I can find a kiln to fire them in. That search will be job one soon. But I won’t have the ability to mix new batches of glaze once everything is in storage.

That means five gallon buckets. Eight of them full of glaze. Never mind the space considerations, I need a lot of the stuff to carry this plan out.

So now begins what I call the bucket dance. There are big buckets and little buckets. Little buckets contain the glazes and each glaze has its own bucket with its name on it. Big buckets contain wash water, and again, each glaze has its own. That way, I can recycle glaze that I wash off of my tools and equipment. I end up with a big bucket full of watery glaze that can then be used to make more glaze. Less waste, lower cost and far more environmentally friendly.

But now the glaze needs to go into the big buckets and the wash water in the little buckets. So it takes two little buckets, one ball mill and one big bucket to make the transition. But of course, nothing is that simple. You see, the ball mill can’t hold all the glaze in a little bucket. So it takes three ball mill jars to grind and mix all the glaze in two little buckets so that they can be poured into one big bucket. When the process is finished, I should have one big bucket and one little bucket with the name of a glaze on it.

A few days ago, I did this with the turquoise glaze. I have one big bucket full of glaze and one little bucket with nothing in it that says “White” on the outside. No, I don’t know how I managed that, but not to worry. They didn’t get mixed in together. I’m just grabbing clean empty buckets to make this happen.

I have been boxing up all of the throwing supplies and tools. A couple days ago I brought a pallet in and started stacking things up on it. I now have all the tools, bats and pads packed away.

Progress comes in some odd shapes and sizes. But progress is progress. One step at a time.

Moving On

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BoxesLast year I wrote about needing to move out of the space I have been using and said I had to be out by the end of the year. Then I updated that to state that I had been reprieved and could stay for the foreseeable future.

In June of this year I was told that the property was being put up for sale but that nothing would be happening for at least a year. No panic. That would give me plenty of time to make some plans and let people know what is happening.

In July, I was told that things might be going a bit faster than expected, and next April would probably be the deadline to consider. Well, that’s not far off from a year from now, so still, no panic.

In early August, I got a letter via certified mail informing me that I would need to be out of the building by September 15,

Time to panic. But still, I didn’t. I just started making plans. What else do you do?

A few days later, I got a phone call telling me that I had until November 15.

The emotional roller coaster ride is over for me. If someone told me that I could stay at the Rowantrees building for another year at this point, I would still be moving out. There comes a time when you just have to step out and figure your way from here.

So what is my way going forward?

Shortly after getting the first notice, I stopped throwing new pots. From wheel to glaze firing, it can take several weeks to finish a pot, so there isn’t much point in starting new ones. As of this writing, my wheel and all of my throwing tools are packed up and ready to go into storage.

Right now I am glazing for all I’m worth. I have a lot of bisque ware just waiting to be turned into finished product and I’ll get as much of it done as I can.

As I finish each part of the process, the tools and equipment used for that part are getting packed up and ready to move to storage. The finished inventory will be the last to move.

Don’t misunderstand me. I am NOT going out of business. Everything I have will be reflected on the website and will be available for purchase. For all intents and purposes, the coming cold season will be just like the last four. After everything is in storage, I will turn my attention to the Kickstarter campaign. I will need to raise $175,000 to build the new studio space,

Believe me, you will hear from me when the time comes!