Four kilns with Detail

We have fired four kilns sequentially now and are firing the last load tonight as I speak.
There have been some lovely surprises and a few disappointments for sure.
We'll let you be the judge here.

1st Firing

2nd Firing

Third Firing

Fourth Firing

Elm Trees in Yellow

New Geometric

Landscape

Larger Cattail Motif in Light Green

Descending Leaves

Maple Seed/Tree Design

Crunch Time

With a week left before we leave for the American Craft Council's show in Baltimore, we are facing a mountain of glazing.....

Waxing the bottoms to protect them from absorbing the glaze.

All of the pots in these photos have been bisqued only.

Measuring the winter.... we worked hard!

By the way, if any of you wish to receive an invite to the Baltimore show, just email us your snail mail address and we'll send a postcard out tomorrow! The dates are February 24-27 at the Baltimore Convention Center on Pratt St. We will be in space # 1908.

Pond Lily

Every year I try to do a couple of detailed new botanicals. This year I worked on the Pond Lily, a small yellow flower often growing with Lotuses or water lilies but not nearly as famous.

Special Technique that took years to perfect!

 Pond Lily finishes up January........

Full Production in Zero degree weather

 Whew! It is really cold here. All the more reason that we were grateful to have a kiln firing! Here are some peeks at our winter efforts...

The last landscape pot this winter.

A couple of large 'Petal' Vases

A large bottle by Steve

Two larger than life pieces!

Granny waxing

Steve glazing

end result!

The kiln is throwing tantrums. Steve is having to monitor it too much because of the wide discrepancy between the top and bottom. Despite those problems, we only lost two pieces. The rest were fine.

Winter Workshop

Lots of news from our studio too... We have fired a couple of kiln loads to finish up the Spring Metropolitan Museum of Art order and start on a few others. The Stickley exhibition is now moving from the Newark Museum of Art here in New Jersey to the Dallas Museum of Art and we've received an order from them for their museum shop. Yes! That order and getting ready for our display and sale in Baltimore at the American Crafts Council show in February has us pretty busy.

Winter changes the work environment. The cool breezes and artificial heat are hard on controlling the moisture of the clay as we work on it. Everything has to be well wrapped in plastic as it waits for our attention or it dries up. In fact, it has to be monitored more even while we are working on it.

 Here are some snapshots of what's happening now:

Minis for the MET

Love those Classics!

I completed a couple more of the winter tree scenes I wanted to do and am now focusing on making a couple of fanciful landscapes. I love to do these as they are a throw back to very early work when I just doodled on my pots. I haven't made these for a couple of years and look forward to using some of our new glaze combinations on them.

Steve has been working on some larger pieces for Baltimore. As you can tell, trimming the bottoms is always a bit tricky.