Yesterday officially marked the day when one personally hand thrown pot made it to national TV and was touched by a current Latin singer heart throb David Bisbal. Maybe I should hold the pot and sell it on ebay ! MY POTS ARE FAMOUS! At least that is how a felt for a few seconds. My glorious 5 minutes of fame happened back stage while I threw the pot amongst the middle of all the dancers, and crew, and production, and police running around backstage in preparation for the show. I started at 7:10 and milked it to about 7:25, when I just realized there is only so many times I can move my hands up and down without doing anything that someone might eventually realize I am just trying to show off.

There were tons of people staring mesmerized asking the same questions “have you done the ghost scene”, “can I be patrick”, “whats the biggest pot you have thrown, “that doesn’t look so hard”…. Just your typical questions as people scurried around doing last minute touch ups of the vignettes, and the first wave of musicians where waiting for the show to begin and the dancers ran around the concrete hallways getting ready, the escorts each dressed in black with a white armband and a clear ear piece waited for their appointed star to arrive. Police where milling around there since morning bored and yawning and big burly body guards stood outside of the dressing rooms for each of the stars that lined the concrete circular hallway that wrapped around the right side of the stage beneath all the bleachers. Funny I never considered that above us all the time were people taking their seats and snapping photos of the stage and trying to see if the see anyone famous in the pit at the bottom of the arena were all the families of the famous people where taking there seats.

It all started 2 weeks ago when we got a funny call from Univision asking if we rent equipment. A few phone calls and emails later I was told that this singer David Bisbal was going to perform his new song “La Princessa” and their vignette prop designer wanted to have la princessa be and artist a-la Ghost style. Of course the little cynic in me rolled her eyes at the reference that we get constantly when people come in to the studio. However the idea of bringing pottery back into the lime light was really appealing. The set designers came in to our studio picked the pieces he liked off the walls Alan’s, Mike’s, Mindy’s, Janice’s work… At lot of pieces were taken and packed up with one of our pottery wheels and carted it off to the Miami arena earlier this week.

I was present for 3 hours to rehearse the 20 second scene. I setup the form on the wheel and a beautiful little teeny cute model sat there and played with the pot while David did his thing and in the last 30 seconds of his solo he sashayed up to her and wrapped his arm around hers on the wheel and tried really really hard not to get his manicure messed up. All in all I think in total there was 20 seconds of actual footage of the ceramic pieces and the wheel.

It is awe inspiring to see an event of this magnitude unfold before my eyes. Being a TV viewer I have never been back stage on anything and could never begin to fathom the scope of scale of an event like this. I imagine it similar to what a doctor must experience the first time they actually operate on someone and get to see and touch the inner workings of a living breathing body. In my virgin view point, I though that it would be oh so glamorous. And it was anything but, it is an industry, and army of people and ants running back an forth as support crews for each of the 20 segments that were aired last night. They live the night on this precarious tight balancing rope. Each segment has a crew waiting eagerly behind the stage for their turn up to bat. There are the set designers, the grips, the muscle, the production staff for the segment, the escorts, and of course the talent. And plenty of press. Each star has a crew of escorts and entourage ensuring they say hi to the right press people, wave and look pretty for the 5 minutes they are queued behind the stage before they launched on to the stage to read 10 lines off the teleprompter, and then quickly ushered to a press booth where they are grilled by the network about the 30 second experienced, ushered back behind the stage for another photo op with the rest of the press and then back through the bowels of the arena into their little holding cells to catch their breath or await their limo to be pulled up outside.

I really almost felt pity for them as I viciously snapped my own photos of the back of Gloria Estefans head in the frenzy of activity. I am sure that between the blinding stage lights and flashing cameras pointed at her bored smiling face, she would never be able to pick me our of a line-up. I imagine though that at one point she and all the stars like her used to love doing that kind of stuff. Watching it unfold now it seems there is little to no liberty and humanity in the whole event. It is big marketing machine produced by an army of people people dressed in black with little earbuds talking to the heel of their palm, planning for months and then scurrying about for days in the arena fine tuning all the timing to orchestrate a magnificent show for maximum $$$. And it was magnificent, the bright stage the lights, the displays, and fireworks, even a Tesla Coil crackling and hissing. The front was beautiful where the cameras live but behind the stage, it was concrete and black, and gray, and sparsely lit and messy with trash cans and bathrooms with sticky floors and no toilet paper. The people were real and not done up so clean and precise in designer name clothes, trying to sell a product, and a lifestyle. It was real life in the back stage, more like everything we experience everyday, and the front, the stage is what we see on the cover of magazines. It is interesting to see it all without the makeup and the lights, without all the glamour, in its shear chaos it is like everyday life. And these people put on the cover of magazines for us to wish we were them, they get pushed around and escorted as if they don’t even exist as if they are a product to be shown and sold, but never touched or appreciated.

I relished the whole experience. Seeing the inner workings of it all was sheer joy. My little engineering brain went into overdrive observing, listening, watching and learning. It was all about the engineering design. It was the man behind the curtain. It was all electrical, mechanical, staging, lighting, computing, and people engineering . In seeing this tight running ship pull off 20 musical segments between awards and commercials all tightly orchestrated in time by 100’s of people I realized that the idea of expanding out the pottery studio and planning the space next door doesn’t seem like the big monster that I thought it to be. It is all about perspective and changing the way you view things, and yesterday the part of the bubble of the world I was standing on and observing from was yanked and now it is bigger and things don’t seem so hard as I have made them out to be.

Seems like just yesterday that the studio opened. It has been 3 years. Setting up the first space was easy. There were 3 simple steps:

1. Find the space.
2. Buy a bunch of stuff
3. Fit it in the space

I honestly didn’t give it much thought, but for the most part it worked pretty well for the first year. We were small and not very busy so I couldn’t really see the inefficiencies that were there.

Because of my job as an electrical engineer, about 1.5 years ago I took a class on Kaizen manufacturing. And Six Sigma manufacturing. What you may ask do these crazy things have to do with pottery? Well it is easy. Basically you break down what you do into a process for example and try to organize everything so you reduce waste in movement and spent time.

It is funny to see the studio in this light, and I started to break it down into steps:

1. Receive the clay and materials
2. Move the clay
3. Wedge the clay
4. Throw/hand build the clay
5. Store the peices
6. finish the pieces
7. Fire the pieces
8. Glaze the pieces
9. Fire the pieces

In between all those wonderful events, there is a lot of hand washing, and towel grabbing, and tool finding, and cleaning, and straightening up.

It is funny how things happen. 1.5 years ago I took that Kaizen class for my real job, and Steve joined the studio. Steve came from a business background where he owned his own fabric stores and distribution. He has brought a lot of processes to the studio because he would always throw little snippets about what if you do this or that, or in my business everything was on dollies. So I decided shortly after that to put all of his knowledge, my process training, and the knowledge of what it was like to live in the space for the last 3 years. And re-arrange everything!

I begged all my members to remove their tools and stuff temporarily in order to “make the space better” which in turn caused them to clean out their spaces. I got a double bang for the buck on this! It is amazing how much stuff people accumulate that they forgot they had. Not to mention we found so many missing tools. And don’t ask me how or where, but for some reason we found over 40 wooden stirring spoons all over the place. I think one my members kept loosing hers and going to the dollar store to buy more .

We gutted the shelves and took them apart, and rearrange the shelving and added dollies under just about ever table that had and under part.

This alone gave us tons more of room and a more work able space. It seems now that after another 1.5 years of living in this space we have outgrown it. I am proud to say that we have a few more permanent members and now we are adding more space to the studio by renting the adjacent bay.

And now the process starts over again, and as I sit an write this, I can’t help but ponder about the new space. We have to start over again, but this time I have to take into account every single large piece of furniture, shelving, potters wheels, slab rollers, wedging tables, extruders, machines, tool cubbies, re-organize them to create a flow that circles around our kiln room/delivery area so as to minimize movement while maximizing space.

It is daunting and fun. I made a list of all the equipment that needs a home, and using graph paper (thanks again to steve) block cut outs for each piece of equipment and moving it around and around until I find a flow/storage/space proportion that works.

I will post it once I am happy with it!

So to recap on how to setup a successful space is whether you have equipment or haven’t purchased it yet:
1. Start from you kiln room and where you get your clay. If possible make this the same space
2. Picture a big circle with the kiln at the top position and work outwards from the kiln room.
3. Start with clay storage->wedging tables -> wheels/or workspace -> keep the slab roller close to your work table
4. Then start coming back in towards your kiln again ->cleanup area and tool storage ->shelving for WIP (work in progress)-> glaze area -> back to your kiln.

Not all spaces are built the same but if you spend some time working on how you process your pieces, any space can be extremely functional.

I am excited to announce that the studio will undergo some growing pains and expansion. Although it isn’t 100% official yet because the ink hasn’t dried, we are going to be occupying the space next to the studio.

The new space will offer added features to the studio. A new permanent gallery space to display the ceramics arts of the members of the studio, a permanent space for the Glass fusing part of the studio, a dedicated space for glazing where all the glazes are easily accessible, and even a section for anyone who wants to paint pottery!

I am so excited about this new space I am stressed at the thoughts of all the little details and relieved at the ability to have more room to stretch out.

On March 1 we get the new space and we should have a grand opening some time in April.

Please excuse our dust, and if you are able and willing come and help us create some!

In this article I will discuss what is reclaiming clay is and what are the best ways to go about doing it.

According to The Free Dictionary reclaim means To bring into or return to a suitable condition for use. When you are done working with the clay you are often left with dried crumbled bits of clay and clay slope. Basically clay in all sorts of different wet and dry stages. To reclaim this clay you need to give it even moisture and consistency all around so that you can re-use it.

The key to reclaiming clay, is time and patience. Most of which I don’t have. Often I either wait to long to wedge my reclaim, and then it is too hard, or I try to do it early and then I leave my wedging table a sloppy mess. They key is to wait for it to be just right.

The first step to reclaim is to get all your clays to even consistencies. For the hard and dry bits you want to let them completely dry, mash them up into maybe 1 inch max pieces place in the bucket or container and then add water until you just cover the top of the broken pieces. The chunks of dried clay will basically melt and absorb the water. You can then siphon of the remaining water and let more of the water evaporate for a few days.

Remember when working with clays in the powdered form they contain silica which is really bad for your lungs for your protection and the protection of others you should mash up the clay outside in a ventilated area and wear a mask.

For the slop (water with clay or slip water) you will need to let the water settle and evaporate. Once it settles you siphon the top layer of clear water off. And let it rest for another few days. The you repeat. I often keep my slop in large Rubbermaid plastic garbage can outside. Our studio is in Florida, so it stays pretty warm and as the sun bakes the can the water evaporates. Eventually you are left with a mush. Sometimes, if I am impatient I will take pillow cases and pour the slop in them to further dry.

This last section applies to the slop and the dry materials. Once you have mush and not really liquid stuff you can transfer the mush to plaster bats and let the plaster bat absorb the water. This process can take a day or several days. It is faster if you put the plaster bat and mush out in the sun to bake, but you need to watch it because it can rain, or if not, it can dry too quickly and then you have to start all over again. You can tell when it is ready to be flipped like a pancake if you can lift a corner of the mass from the plaster bat without leaving slop behind. You flip the wetside down on the plaster to further dry. At this stage you will need to cover the top part so it doesn’t get to dry. And within a day you will be able to wedge it up and reclaim.

Reclaiming clay is time consuming. I don’t know a single potter who enjoys this process. A lot of people just throw their clay away saying it is cheaper to buy new clay than waste their time wedging. I agree with this people to some respect, but the truth is that it isn’t really cheaper in the long run. And by long run I mean in the course of the globes history. In order to make the clay and minerals that go into our 25lbs of perfectly pugged clay they earth has taken hundreds of thousands of years. Even though we pay maybe $17 for that bag of clay, that is the cost of the manufacture to mix it, pug it, and ship it, but who pays back the earth? And what is the million years of time the earth spent making the clay worth? I don’t know and maybe we won’t know in our lifetime, but I don’t like to throw away something that someone or something took a long time to make.

It gives us omething to think about as we work with the earth and materials that have been around a lot longer than humans have. Enjoy the process!

Waterfall Brown over Mike's Israel with butter on top

I have been experimenting with our Cone 6 Glaze recipes.  And found some amazing combinations.  Most of our recipes we used straight from Mastering Cone 6 Glazes by Ron Roy and John Hesselberth.  The book is really insightful about the theory of Glazing, how the chemicals work together and the properties of a good glaze recipe.  It is kind of like a good cooking batter, you need the right amount of protein with gluten and a rising agent.  In the case of glazes you need the right amounts of Silica and Alumina and Coloring Agents. Some of the combinations I like are Floating Blue with Butter sprayed on top.  Licorice with Waterfall brown on the edges.  Butter and Waterfall Brown on the edges, and Licorice with Volcanic ash painted on as highlights.  There are pictures on this blog somewhere I will figure out how to attached them .

One of the most interesting things I found when reading the Mastering Cone 6 Glazes book was that you can re-fire the Waterfall brown in a bisque firing and the iron content in the glazes turns red.  I have pictures of that as well.  Basically what is happening is during the bisque fire you spend a lot of  time at the key Crystal Growing temperatures between 1500 and 1800 degrees.  What was most interesting was that the licorice in the test went from a shiny black to a more opaque metallic black.  The pictures really don’t do it justice.  I will also take the bowl and fire it again in the Cone 6 firing and see if the melt will bring the black back.  I’ll post the pictures again after the firing.

I did the same with the floating blue sprayed with butter.  When you spray the butter you get very vivid blues and purple flashes.  When I fired it in the cone 6 firing it turns to lime green opaque color, it is really neat.  and it really mixes up well.  I think because of the high boron content int Floating Blue Glaze it melts at the low temperature enough for there to be a little bit of movement.  I am not sure if that is the right speculation, but if I find otherwise I will post it on this site.

My next experiment will involve taking all the glazes in the studio and overlapping them in a cross grid and reversing the order to see what you get.  I am starting to realize the most movement and interest out of a cone 6 glaze you will have to do some kind of overlapping.

FB w Butter

Floating blue with butter

Licorice with Volcanish Ash painted on

Floating Blue with butter after cone 06 firing

Water Fall Brown Solo

WaterFall Brown after Cone 06 firing

Workshops are a great way to rejuvenate your craft.  When you feel blah and bored and don’t know why you are doing what you are doing any more, conferences, seminars, and workshops are the way to go.  It doesn’t matter if you are a potter, nurse, doctor, engineer, or in waste management.  There is always something to do and something to learn.  It is something I hope to continually inject into the studio.  The pursuit of knowledge, if not for any other sake than to expand our bubbles.

At our studio I am will be hosting at least 2 workshops every year.  We had our first one last year with Jan Kolenda on the art of working with stamps on hand built forms, and what can I say is that it was fabulous.  She shared so much valuable information with us, that I couldn’t possibly absorb it all.  It was decades worth of trial an error that she condense for us, into simple and effective techniques that everyone was easily able to apply.

The effects of the workshop are still showing themselves through the studio today.  Lidia has taken the stamping technique to make these wonderful yoga signs with Namaste on them, as well as for her little garbage pot for the kitchen with a cute little lizard on the lid trying to eat the goodies.   Errol has incorporated the stamping made some neat hand built plates, Mindy stared working the handle making technique into these beautiful platters.  Even my mom used what she learned to make small dishes (I’ll make a potter out of her yet, yesterday she handbuilt a pot! I was so proud of her, she used the slab roller and everything! Sadly though  I accidentally squashed it:(…).  The workshop at the pottery studio was a wonderful experience for me as well and I have used to teach others especially teaching the kiddies and the boy scouts on how to handbuild and turn some otherwise bland forms into something unique.  I definately sparked something new and different in the studio.

This years workshop will be with Klawdia Proia from Haiti.  She is an amazingly talented potter and a woman after my own heart, fast, quick, and she loves to dip her glazes!  She will be throwing her lidded vessels and showing us how to do verticle stamping on large platters.  Then she will show us how to do glaze trailing and wax resist using Stroke and Coat and our home made Cone 6 studio glazes.  I can’t wait to see her techniques and to see how everyone in the studio interprets and applies them.

This years workshop will be December 12 From 10 am to 3pm.  And as of the writing of this I only have space for 3 more people!

The moral of the story kiddies is that you should attend workshops to help you find a new life for your work, to inspire you to work differently, and to learn.  If you aren’t learning… You aren’t paying attention!  Go out and learn something new!

Denise

Over the past 3 years glazing has been a great learning experience.  Especially in working with cone 6 and low fire glazes.  The mix and match of temperatures and chemicals can make your head spin.  But basically you have to ask yourself 2 things when dealing with each.   Do you want bright and vivid colors that stay were you put them?  Do you want you ware to be sturdy and to stand up to abuse?

High fire clays and glazes are sturdier and can take a lot more abuse for day to day ware than low fire glazes.  The glazes typically have a lot more depth and motion than with low fire. But the colors are more muted unless you are working with Mason Stains.

Low fire clays and glazes are bright and vivid and stay were you want them. But the look can be too stark unless you are good artist and have fluidity with a paint brush.  The ware also tends to be brittle during usage.

I guess you could say that with high fire the art is more impressionistic and with low fire it can be more modern and realistic.

Can you tell I am biased with high fire?  I like the look and feel of high fire, the durability and the movement than you can get with high fire glazes quickly and efficiently. I find it more interesting, but that is me, and others have other opinions.  But that is the great thing about working and playing at a pottery studio, you can be strict and straight or you can be lose and free form or experiment and do both.

Pottery STUDIO

I can’t believe I am writing to no one in particular… But I guess this is the technology of the day and when in techworld do as the geeks do.

Let’s make this simple.  My name is Denise Mendez and I own a pottery studio.  It is run by the support and love of a lot of people.  People who care about having a place to play, people who just like getting dirty, and people who tolerate my muddy habits.  I don’t know how it happened that I came by the studio, it just kind of fell in my lap and I opened my mouth and said, “sure I can do this”… And my world has never been the same, in both good ways and bad.   I still have a full time job and run the studio, which is now becoming another full time job.  I love the studio though.  The trials and tribulations, learning to deal with different personality types and trying to make it all work with a lot of sweat equity from all the “volunteers” and a shoe string budget.

We share the space with wonderful artist who help me run it, care for it, open it, close it, and love to give me advice on how to manage it. Who am I to complain?  They are all people that care a lot about the same things I care about, and really enjoy being there.  It is truly a great place to work, learn, play, and hang out.   I am 32 now and have 20 people in my studio with 100;s years of experience in Ceramics and Pottery.

This will be about the trials and tribulations of running studio, teaching, throwing pottery, and general stuff related to ceramics and pottery, and my general musing about different aspect about running a business and how it ties with life in general, plus some bonus engineering contemplations.

Happy Reading!