Starting again

The blog posts have been few and far between for quite a while now. It's been everywhere from physically impossible to just painful or inconvenient to do much pottery at all since the accident last fall. While I have been able to keep up with the day job, it just doesn't leave much time or energy to do the fun part, POTTERY. I really find it hard to blog about it if I'm not doing it.

Since I can't do much myself, I have been trying to keep up with all the other pottery blogs and see what everyone else is up to. I've also spent a lot of time incubating ideas for forms and techniques I want to explore when I get back to it.

And so I began.

First, I had to renew my studio card, which I'd barely used in the past year. Then reacquaint myself with the studio. They've changed white stoneware clay bodies 3 or 4 times since last year I think. I still had a nearly full bag of one of the old ones hardening in my locker.... I wasn't wild about it to begin with, so I got a fresh bag of Loafers Glory, and started over. Little Loafers had been a favorite of mine, so I was happy to see it's big brother. LG is apparently cone 6-10, where LL is strictly 6, so they went with LG to simplify what they had to stock. I'm actually pretty excited to see what it does in a saggar firing.

I threw a couple 2 lb. 'vase-like objects', just to see if I remembered how, and get a feel for the clay again. The first one was hard, nothing seemed to flow. But the second one went a lot easier. This all took about 90 minutes - pretty much the limit of my endurance at this point. I never was the fastest thrower in the world, I like to take my time, but this was slow!