Let is snow let it snow let it snow

Yesterdays small accomplishments, working in bed, with my portable studio setup. Details below.

We're still dealing with very cold weather, or at least cold for these parts. A neighbor said it was 12 degrees early yesterday morning. Now it's snowing. Nice! The roads are already icy, so we're grateful we can just be "nesty" today.

Our electricity was out from 9am to 5pm yesterday and the electrician still has more to do today. Fortunately our bedroom fireplace was more than adequate to keep us warm for those 8 hours. As I had planned, I brought my portable work table which is just a Michael's plastic version of a bed tray with two deep side pockets to hold tools, etc. into the bedroom with a couple of slip trailers, some slip, a sandwich bag of clay to try my hand at some line and texture rollers. That tray has been a very useful thing. It was somewhere in the neighborhood of  $10 and less with one of those weekly 40% off coupons. I've used it a few times to do some sgraffito work in the house.

It was fun making those little rollers, an idea I got from one of the Ceramic arts daily video samples  and I think I did pretty well for a first effort; but I won't really know how well they work till they're bisqued. 

As I suspected, the thinner slip worked better and I dug up an old slip trailer that I put together years ago after seeing one at a John Glick workshop. I'm sure most know about this, but in case there's a reader who doesn't, you grind down the tip of a football inflator, and insert in a child's ear syringe (the blue rubber one). It was the most comfortable of the one's I've been testing this week and it holds more than those small plastic containers. I have a much  larger trailer that looks like a lot like a syringe used for a whole other purpose, that I've yet to try. Practicing with these smaller trailers, I  have spent more time filling and cleaning them than actually trailing.  I'll try that larger one today along with the one I made with the bicycle inner tube.

Another type I saw on you tube used mylar; but that requires cutting the mylar in 10 inch squares, forming a cone, taping the sides, filing with a syringe, folding the top and taping it and then cutting the tip with a nail clipper. You can't re-use them so it seems like a lot of effort. At least you don't have to clean it out after use and I'm thinking that the softness of the material might eliminate the problem of dragging I've been experiencing. A small zip lock sandwich bag might just work as well by just cutting one of the corners, so I'll give that a go before I rush out to buy some mylar.

The studio heat has been on all night and it's still too cold to stay in there unless I want to dress like I'm driving a team of sled dogs during the annual Iditarod! If it's still that cold after breakfast, I'll just bring the slip trailers, slip and a plastic bat in the house and practice until the studio warms or my trailing shows significant improvement. If that turns out to be the case, I'll bring a test cup or two in the house along with a banding wheel and see if I can actually do more than just one little scroll line and  couple of slip dots on a pot! Where there's a will there's a way, isn't there!