Geoff Miller, Author at Lowell Hill Pottery

Well, I think it’s trying to be Spring. I’m not sure about that. Day after cold day of clouds and rain can keep the perspective in limbo, but the last time I checked the calendar, it was late April. Someone needs to bring the date up with the Powers That Be and tell them that the thermostat is long overdue for a cranking.

We had a long and very cold winter here in the hinterlands. You come to expect that when you live in Maine. All the same, it gets old by mid-February. And when March comes along, people start looking forward to the return of warmth and light. I think the colder the Winter, the greater the expectation of Spring’s relief.

It doesn’t work that way, though. We forget that April tends to be pretty chilly – and that it snows at least once in April (we’ve had that this year, so I think it’s over). Actually, I remember once in my teenage years when I was mowing the lawn in May and suddenly found myself in the midst of a snowstorm. It didn’t last very long, but you can imagine the emotional trauma.

The point is, Winter doesn’t let go easily here. We tend to forget that as March turns to April, but as Garrison Keillor once noted, that April, May or early June blizzard comes along to teach us all that lesson we have learned so often. Winter leaves when it’s good and ready.

Personally, I think we have earned a nice long Summer season. I would really like to collect on that even though experience says it may be warm – even hot on occasion – but it’s not likely to be long. Even as the days grow longer, they seem to go by faster. Still, I can hope.

Oh yes…pottery. And gearing up for 2014. There is news along those lines.

The water finally got turned on last week and I have been in the pottery doing some cleanup. There is a lot to do before I can start production again, but things are pretty much where they are at this time of the year. It is cold in the building, of course, and that will need to change. I’m waiting for a couple nice warm days so that I can open the doors and windows and heat the place up. For now, I’m pretty much restricted to cleaning and straightening things up. Good enough.

The tile project continues to move forward slowly. Nothing like this ever moves quickly and I think that’s just fine. I’m in no hurry. But early indications are that there will be tiles this season. Not bad since I first thought I’d have tiles in Summer of 2012.

I am looking forward to working in the glaze lab as well. Goals there include developing an improved clear glaze (I like the one I have but it’s tricky to use in the raw state), finishing development of the new Seagull Gray, tweaking both the Evergreen and the Duckshead glazes and who knows what else?

The Kickstarter project is still in the works. Like any other creative work, it takes time to do well. I can’t thank my friend Evan Jones at RBY Productions for his help in producing my “ask” video. I hope the project will be up and running very soon, but it won’t go up until I think it’s ready. Please keep an eye out for it. I need a new studio space that I can use year round. Right now, I’m focused on producing as many of the premium items as I can so that they will be ready for delivery when the project starts. That’s a whole lot of mugs! And dinnerware! And vases!

But for now, the cold wind and rain are whipping at my windows. It’s dinnertime and I’m hungry. Check back for more news soon!

Some time ago I started working on a tile project. I was inspired by a visit to the Moravian Pottery and Tile Works in Doylestown, PA a few years ago and decided to teach myself a process for making different types of tiles. I blogged about it in December 2010 and January 2011 – four posts in all.

At the time, I was working on tiles with a mosaic look. I am still working on that idea, but it has been modified. The tiles are now taking the form of three-dimensional sculptural pieces. The metamorphosis was sudden, following as it did, a visit to the now closed Higgins Armory Museum in Worcester, MA. There I saw a collection of armor and arms that was quite impressive. But more importantly, I saw heraldic animals and crests that gave me new ideas. I stopped in at the museum’s gift shop and found several books of designs including mythological animals found in architecture the world over. One appealed to me and I started working on it.

I modified this and started a rough cut. It became clear that I would need a combination of addition and subtraction to make this creature come alive. Here is the first rough cut:

Like a quilter, I quickly figured out that there was too much detail for this to work, and I also needed finer tools for the detail I would keep. I ordered a set of dentist’s tools and kept at it. After carving and adding clay, the tile looked like this:

The feet…yeah, I know. The idea was to start big and carve them out. They went on and came off several times before I figured out that the whole creature was pretty goofy, so goofy feet wouldn’t really matter that much. A little while after I drew that conclusion, I also decided that carving the feet wasn’t going to work and I started sculpting them instead. That resulted in:

Snowshoes! Well, this was a learning curve, and at least I was moving forward. With a little more perseverance, I managed a pair of acceptable feet:

Then the process of casing a mold could begin. Plaster is not a medium I have a lot of trouble with, so this was pretty easy. Of course, it did mean destroying the original because I cast with a moist clay original. It has everything to do with the way clay shrinks and My lack of desire to do the appropriate math. But once you have a single mold that works, you can cast as many originals and make as many more molds as you wish. here is the result of my first casting in the new mold:

Note the bits of plaster around the edges. The border was a bit off as well. More castings needed to be made before I got some good, clean tiles. Once I had them, I was free to make more molds!

These five are currently drying over a heating vent and should be ready to go into production in about one week. Then there will be tiles! In time, I will use a press to make these (for now, I’m using a rolling pin). The process of getting a press made that will do this has also been one of discovery, I started with a homemade one-armed bandit that had no mechanical advantage and was impossible to operate without hanging from it like a crazed monkey:

I’m no engineer as this picture illustrates (although I must say I was pretty proud of my work here). From this humble beginning, I looked to make improvements. Books were read, websites were Googled, lots of research was conducted. And finally, I found this great idea:

It’s a 12-ton shop press that I will be modifying into a tile press. There will still be a learning curve. I’ll have to figure out how much pressure to apply to make a tile in a press mold without turning the plaster mold into dust. I probably better make more molds…

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Gearing Up

Tiles