Night Platter

Got a chance Saturday to shoot an over the shoulder look at an "up and coming" local talent.

Jessica Fong makes play look easy...

It's so much fun to have studio mates again!

Cutting a Foot Ring by Hand

Studio mate, Jessica Fong, let me shoot a quick demo of her approach to hand cutting a foot ring using a head loop tool and a banding wheel this week.

The result is a very elegant and striking foot.

Hopefully you'll be seeing more and more of this young talent over the next few months.

5 HandMade Minutes Dec 2011

Life has gotten so busy lately that there's only just so much time available every day for pushing any one piece along. The amount of work getting finished has been throttled way back to a pleasantly constant dribble...

I finally thought ahead enough to be able to press record. It's a 5 minute look at a compressed 15 minutes of process.

Volumetric Image Transfer with Forrest Lesch-Middelton

I've been wanting a good look at how Forrest pulls this off. He definitely doesn't disappoint with this video. Fantastic!



Visit his website to checkout his gallery of work. Make sure to swing by Forrest's Etsy on the 17th for his holiday sale.
This is a studio potter to watch...

addendum... Ceramics Monthly printed an in depth look at Forrest's process.

3 and a Half Handmade Minutes

Cold and rainy out in the studio, but gotta keep moving forward or work starts dying on the shelf.

Five HandMade Minutes

The premise is simple...
Share 5 minutes of studio time by pressing record on your camera while you get busy. Then post it up over on This is Handmade.
It's collection video shorts that give the curios a taste of what we all sit through for hours on end...



I Love my job...

You Can What!?

Nobody told me that we could do this!

Image transfer can be as simple as painting a tinted slip onto a piece of foam...

Wrap it around a green piece and ....

I'm Hooked!

There is a back story that goes with this... but until then....

Yesterday's Valuble Lesson

Don't throw shirtless if the videotape is rolling... really.

I won't share that video lesson, but here's the second take (with a shirt on this time). It's a silent 60 second stop motion this time.



The kids and I where collecting stills for a Blurb Book that I can set out at local openings. I'm finding that I have to cobble together a way to effectively communicate how I create my surfaces to gallery patrons, well at least if I want to sell more where I live.

Well.... Happy Father's Day everyone!

Throwing a Lid Off the Hump

An easy in and out this morning...
I had posted a video a few weeks back showing how I'm currently making my lids by throwing off the hump, but I never got around to showing how the lids were trimmed up.
Here's a full clip showing the whole process...



The background music is, "I'm Beginning to See the Light" by Jay McShann. Love his magic fingers.

Throwing a 2 Sectioned Canister- Part 1

Here's a rough draft of a video sharing my approach to throwing larger canisters. Part 1 shows using 2 balls to throw a small 5 lb canister in sections to build up the form to 11 inches tall.



It's funny... it took an hour to shoot a 20 minute process, and then over 4 hours to edit down and compress everything into something that could be viewed in under 5 minutes.

Slip-up 2

I was secretly happy that it rained off and on today... I got to spend a few hours this morning putting the finishing touches on the greenware from this weekend and I got to watch a bit of the streaming videos of demonstrations from the pre-conference at Montgomery Community College while the rain fell here in Northern California. What a treat!

After it was over, I felt empowered to get back to work pursuing my own vision... In the spirit of sharing, here is a demo that shares peeling away paper the stencils on today's canister.

AgateWare Bowls

Still at it with the bowls... 52 more thrown and trimmed. I'm trying to get a good variety of surfaces in. Got a double handful of stenciled slips on the ware boards drying along with a bakers dozen of agateware and even a few plain ones.

Usually I kind of enjoy throwing out in the cold(ish) fall and winter months. Boil up a bucket of water for the throwing slip, put on an extra pair of socks and pull on the long underwear and voila... no problem. This year though, it's just humid enough to really slow down the drying and the greenware is getting a bit backed up.

Hmmmmm.

Here's a spot of video that we shot while throwing the agateware yesterday. This'll be spliced into the stack of videos that we'll show in the background at the Souper Supper Event in February.
Let me know what you think, the feedback is really helping to move this project along.

And What If I Don't

What a title of a post...


It's actually the title of the background music by Herbie Hancock and I like how it pushes and groves this video along all the way to the end. The kids and I were all pumped-up from all of the great feed back the past 2 days... thanks everyone for chiming in, the feedback really helps. We ended up spending some more time figuring a bit more of this process out. Learning to divide up and compress time is a something new for us, but we are having fun trying out a few ideas. It's not hurting that I'm learning you can buy enthusiasm for a project with the prospect of an ice cream.

This is another wack at slip stencil demo.

When I Fall in Love

Another beautiful fall day…
I was out playing in the studio this afternoon, (It can’t be counted as work because I’m enjoying myself way too much), the kids are playing in between the houses, the leave on the trees are rustling up in a lazy approaching storm, the smell of burning fireplaces... Ahhh, fall is really here and I am feeling mighty fine. Halfway through cutting feet on two ware boards of yunomi I remembered I still needed to collect more samples of video with these cameras just to work out the kinks of familiarizing myself the menu options without actually hunting down manuals, (tch! Who needs manuals…? Manuals are for people with attention spans of… well… well… not me apparently). It’s still a bit stop and go, but that’s part of the fun.

For better of worse, I’m getting a handle on working with the Windows Movie Maker program. I’ve got a ways to go still though but luckily it’s not too complex.

Here is today’s segment. I like the feel of this clip. It’s supposed to be part of a short personal essay on the virtues of a foot. Yeah I know... nerdy, but I feel a bit strongly about this. I like where it’s going though… it kind of has the feel of a love note… maybe that’s the direction it’ll go.

I guess Miles can make anything seem like a love note.

The Cup

I had to post this video as soon as I saw it. It's Pete Pinnell talking at length about the lowly cup. It's a fantastic discussion and worth popping up some corn and sitting back to soak it in.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=302550256698394321