The weather during August has been unseasonably pleasant- lower temps and lower humidity- and I have taken full advantage of the comfortable weather by spending more time in the pottery studio. My recent work has been focused on lidded jars and vases... forms that I haven't had a chance to make for a while... and on developing new glazes.
Lidded jars are definitely slower work. Each one is at least two pieces, sometimes three, and everything has to line up right- not just so the lid fits, but so the whole piece looks balanced. Where does the body curve out? How high is the shoulder? How tight should that lid sit? I keep coming back to these questions with every jar I throw.
But there's room to play around too. Handles or no handles, fancy finials or simple flat tops, short and wide or tall and narrow. I threw several different series just to see how the proportions would work out. Some of them feel right, and I'll probably make more. Others... well, we'll see.
When the jars were drying, I kept busy with some quick vases. Smaller pieces, mostly just to test out shapes and see what felt good in my hands. I let a few of them go a little off-center on purpose. Sometimes those wonky pieces tell you more than the perfectly centered ones do. A few of these might turn into a bigger batch next month- they have that kind of immediate, one-of-a-kind feel that people seem to like for their homes.
The other big project was glaze testing. Maria and I ran almost two dozen test pieces using encapsulation stains... these are bright, durable colors that can handle high-fire temperatures. We're trying to expand our color palette beyond what the typical oxides give us. Reds and oranges are especially tough to keep vibrant at Cone 9/10. These new test pieces came out of the electric kiln looking glossy and rich, but the real question is how they'll behave in reduction firing. I've got matching pieces ready for the gas kiln, and I'm curious whether any of them will keep that brightness.
What's interesting is that these test pieces also taught me something unexpected about my base glaze. It's one I've been working on for my Light Blue Ash recipe- high calcium, high alumina, low silica- that usually flows in those nice rivulets. But when I added the inclusion stains, those rivulets disappeared completely. I think the stains might be adding fluxes or silica that change the surface tension. Worth investigating further.
That's what I love about a productive studio month: throwing, testing, problem-solving, learning something new. Some pieces make it to the gallery, others end up in the shard pile. But it all adds up to something. September's already looking just as busy.