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Thursday, December 05, 2013

Hiding in the bedroom this morning

This morning the electrician is coming to do the wiring for our new generator which will enable us to just turn it on and have everything working without having to individually plug in everything. The bad news is that the town has to turn off the power which is going to be off at least 4 to 5 hours, so I won't be getting any time in the studio after 9:00 am this morning.

I played with the slip trailing again but didn't have much better success than the day before. Big groans and a few unmentionable expletives were being heard from the studio yesterday! I finally gave in and did a quick sgraffito on one of the cups and just did a few slipped dots on the cup. One of the cups was to test how the pale yellow slip would look overlapping part of the black slip. A couple of the cups I slipped late afternoon were still too soft after slipping, to hold to slip trail, so I covered them after dinner and will try deal with them on Friday.

We're planning on just holing up in the bedroom with the gas fireplace on. I put some new and scrap clay in the pugmill before I left the studio last night and mixed it a bit; but I let it sit over night and was in the studio at 6am pugging, de-airing a couple of batches of clay .

My plan is to bring a little clay and my portable work table into the bedroom after breakfast and make a few texture tools and line rollers, and will definitely practice some slip trailing. I thinned the slip a bit more last night and am hoping that might work better; but first I'll get my email done before they turn off the power.

Fortunately we have a gas stove top to heat water for tea and make some soup for lunch.

My original plan for dinner tonight was to have friends over for some pasta, but we're taking them out to the Mexican restaurant instead. We've been waiting weeks for the electrician to show up to hook up this generator and do a couple of other little jobs for us, and since I have no idea when the power will be turned back on or how long it will take for the whole house to heat back up, going out to dinner seemed like the wisest choice. I'd rather have an icy margarita in a warm restaurant than a hot dinner in a very cold house!

4 comments:

  1. Generators are a good thing. I hope it's not cold and/or wet today and that you have electricity as scheduled. Much better to plan on going out to eat than chancing an unfinished house.

    Re: Slip trailing.....I know several potters who use a baby ear syringe fitted with a football inflator needle for trailing. It became very popular in our co-op after Angela Fina demoed it in a workshop in the mid eighties.

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  2. Suzi, I actually used that baby syringe today. I learned about that years ago from John Glick. I liked it better than the small plastic bottles I used the other day.

    It was 17 degrees here this morning but the gas fireplace actually kept the bedroom and living room quite warm. It was a good thing because the power was off for 8 hours while they did all the re-wiring for the generator hookup. They'll be back tomorrow to show us to turn every thing on when we need to and to fix a couple of other smaller electrical jobs.

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  3. My go to slip trailer is a clairol hair color bottle, not to say it isn't problem free - the slip has to be just the right consistency. I learned this technique from a decorator at Salmon Falls Stoneware in Dover, NH and Maureen Mills, the chair of ceramics at the NH Institute of Art, also uses them.

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  4. Thanks MIchele! I have one of those but haven't tested it yet. My sip was too thick the other day and I thinned it out a little and it seemed to work better yesterday.

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