Update

After yet another lapse, I'm giving it another try. The schedule never came together in April, and completely fell apart when the whole house came down with the flu, out of town guests, and a couple medical procedures thrown in for good measure.

So here I am, 2 months later. In summary:
 - I need a lot more practice making lids, and using my new calipers. Even with them, I managed to make lids that were a bit too small. They fit, but are sloppy/loose in the gallery. At least they don't fall through!
 - I've somehow made it on to a list of '50 Inspiring Pottery Blogs' -- I haven't been feeling very inspiring or inspired lately, but it's a great goal to shoot for!
 - I have about a million ideas that I've collected in my brain in my off-time, and I need to organize, edit, reduce, and make a plan for trying them out.

Onward!

BISHOC !

What's that you say?
Well, I've taken the liberty of modifying the acronym BICHOK that some writers use - Butt In Chair, Hands On Keyboard - or sometimes simply 'BIC' to something more alligned to my goals, thus:

Butt In Studio, Hands On Clay.

More to come . . .

Put a lid on it!

I got back to the studio this week and started some lidded pots. I haven't made a whole lot of lidded pieces before. I've never been good at throwing the lids, but I also know I won't get better until I start throwing more lids!
So I watched a few youtube vids to get some ideas and different techniques and styles and dove in. And what do you know, I did actually start getting better at it! Why do we avoid doing things like lids and pulling handles anyway?  Practice makes perfect and all...
And, it gave me a chance to try out my new lid caliper -- It's a California Pottery Tools caliper. I like that it locks, and has a measurement ruler right on the tool so it doubles as a regular ruler too.  I remember reading someone else liked this particular tool but couldn't find one. I tried to find the blog post but struck out. If you're out there - Bailey Pottery Supply sells them here : http://www.baileypottery.com/potterytools/newtools.htm#California

I still may end up getting a LidMaster (I've used the community one at the studio), but I really like the CPT tool.

I'll be back today, to hopefully trim and fit my lids and see which one fits best.

April Goals

I was back at it (again) in the studio this week. I'm to the point now that I need to see if I can establish some sort of regular schedule again. I've set a goal of two nights a week for now.

The first night was mainly experimentation. Finding out just how out of shape I am, where my skills are at, that sort of thing.  I threw 2 pieces in a little over an hour. I'm a rather slow thrower, so that wasn't terribly bad. Then I cut them down the middle to look at wall thickness, bottom, etc. They actually weren't too bad, considering I'd used the clay thats been in the bag for 3-4 months and was almost too stiff to be usable. I'd wedged some water back in, but it was still pretty bad.

The second night, new clay.  World of difference.  Actually made a couple pieces that might see the kiln.

I have some terra sig that I started in January in the garage that needs some attention. It's been settled and siphoned once, and been setting ever since. Since it's settled, I think I might try siphoning off some of the top water to shortcut the evaporation/concentration a bit. Then I want to see what it does on my pots.

Earth Hour 2010

This Saturday night, March 27, from 8:30-9:30PM local time -wherever you are- is International Earth Hour. Show your support for climate issues by flipping off your lights for one hour.

Last year nearly a billion people participated from 4100 cities and 87 countries, including 80 million Americans in 318 cities. Also many cities corporations and organizations showed their support by going dark for an hour, including

• Empire State Building
• Brooklyn Bridge
• Broadway Theater Marquees
• Las Vegas Strip
• United Nations Headquarters
• Golden Gate Bridge
• Seattle’s Space Needle
• Church of Latter-Day Saints Temple
• Gateway Arch in St. Louis
• Great Pyramids of Giza
• Acropolis and Parthenon in Athens
• Christ the Redeemer Statue in Rio de Janeiro
• St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City
• Big Ben and Houses of Parliament in London
• Elysee Palace and Eiffel Tower in Paris
• Beijing’s Birds Nest and Water Cube
• Symphony of Lights in Hong Kong
• Sydney’s Opera House

Learn more here: www.my earthhour.org
Join us in turning off your lights for one hour, and spread the word!

Tech Tuesday - Going International

This week I'm going to talk about the non-English speaking parts of the world. Do you have any foreign readers? For example, this blog as seen visitors from 67 countries since beginning in August 2008. The top 10 languages being English, Portuguese, Italian, French, Czech, German, Dutch, Spanish, Polish, and Turkish. Among the most pages viewed per visit, then top languages are (surprisingly), Norwegian, Korean, Danish, Portuguese, Turkish, French, Japanese, and Finnish. English makes it's appearance down at #20.

Or maybe there's a blog that you want to read that's written in French? I'll show you how to do that also.

It didn't occur to me right away that people in other countries might find this blog worth it to read. I didn't even know how many English speaker would. But soon after starting out, I began to see an occasional visitor from a far off country. I began to wonder if they knew English, or were translating me somehow. I thought that if they were finding my blog, the least I could do was make it easier for them to read.  Maybe you've noticed I have a Google Translate button prominently at the top of the right column. This will translate all the text on the page into whatever language you'd like to see it in. Go ahead, play with it for a minute, I'll wait....

Pretty cool, right?
To add a Google Translate widget to your blog, go to your Blogger [Layout] tab, and click on Add Gadget.
Select the HTML/JavaScript gadget. Then paste this script into the code section:

Then click [Save] and you're all set. 

Now anyone who doesn't speak English (or actually whatever language you write your blog in) can translate your blog when they land on it.

So what if there's a really cool pottery blog in French that you'd like to read?  Well, if you're using Google Reader, it's a snap. (If you're not, see my post on using Google Reader here) Remember in that previous Tech Tuesday how I showed you how to subscribe to blogs? Just a simple extra step will have you reading foreign blogs.

With the feed selected, go to the [Feed Settings] button, and just click on [Translate to my language]

and, as the French say, Voila'

English!

One big way I find other pottery blogs is by checking out the blogrolls of blogs I already read. So once you find a few non-English blogs, a whole other world opens up. The world of pottery (and other) blogs just got a lot bigger!

And for everyone in other countries reading in your native language, welcome! and thank you for reading! If you have or know of a pottery blog in your language, I'd love to hear about it. 

Tech Tuesday - Feed readers 101

Last week I talked about FeedBurner, a way to track how many people are subscribed to your blog feed. Along the way, I realized I was following over 200 blogs (I hadn't really checked in a while).

Clearly, trying to visit that many blogs individually via blogrolls or bookmarks would take forever, and seriously impact my mental health.  I figured out early on that if I wanted to keep track of all the pottery blogs I was finding, I'd have to use a feed reader.

Feed readers can be separate programs you install on your PC, or web applications you access through your web browser. I've experimented with feed reader plugins for Firefox, and a social media browser called Flock that has very nice feed reading and management. Ultimately, I've settled on using Google's Reader app.
Since it's a web app, it's available wherever there's access to a web browser - it doesn't have to be installed on every computer I want to use it on, and that also means that all the history of read posts is there and searchable as well.

Using it is pretty self explanatory, just head over to https://www.google.com/reader/view/ and log in with your google/gmail account.
There are a couple ways to add feed to your Reader. One is to click on the [Add Subscription] button in the upper-left, and type in the URL of the blog you want to add. In most cases, Reader will find the feed and add it.  Or, while visiting a blog, you can click the Subscribe link if one is provided.

Now you have one place to go to find all your blog subscriptions.  You can quickly go through the unread posts using the [Previous] and [Next] buttons. I starting at the 'bottom' of the list and using [Previous], which keeps me in chronological order.

You might notice that a blog here or there doesn't show the entire post, only a few sentences, or sometimes just the post title.  This is because the blog is set to only show a limited feed, presumably to get you to click through to the actual blog. If you're not putting ads or affiliate links or otherwise monetizing your blog, there really isn't a reason to do this. Here's how to turn on 'full' feeds and be more 'feed reader friendly':

In Blogger:

Look under the Settings tab, and set 'Allow blog feeds' to 'Full'

In Wordpress:

Look under the Settings > Reading menu. In the Reading settings, select 'For each article in a feed, show Full Text'

Other platforms will generally have a similar setting somewhere in the control panel. Take a look around.

Tech Tip Tuesday - FeedBurner

I've been thinking about doing something like this for a while now. My time in the actual clay studio is still so intermittent that I just can't seem to get a lot accomplished. I'll get there, but it's slow going for now.

I also thought I'd share some of the knowledge from my 'other' life in IT. I read a lot of pottery/art blogs (200?!, jeez, how did -that- happen?? Look for a future tech tip on how I do this without spending all day, or losing my mind.), and occasionally see a tech question or issue pop up. When I can, I try to suggest an answer, or point them in the right direction to a solution.

Yesterday, the question came up about how many subscribers my wife had on her blog. Not an easy question, but there are ways to at least get an idea.  The tool we're going to look at today is FeedBurner. Yes, it's by Google, and you'll need a Google account to use it. Since a lot of the blogs I see are Blogger blogs, shouldn't be a big deal for most of you. Let's head on over to feedburner.google.com and get started. Don't worry, I'm starting out with an easy one here. It's not hard, and Google actually has pretty good help docs to get you set up.  Here's my 'Quick Start'

Step 1- Get your google account and sign in at feedburner.google.com  Done? good.

Step 2 - 'Burn' your feed.  (hey, don't blame me, I didn't come up with this lingo..)  Just type your blog URL or your feed URL if you happen to know what it is, in the box 'Burn a feed this instant'  and click [Next]. More than likely, FeedBurner will say that it has found multiple feeds, which one do you want to use?  For Blogger users, the default Atom feed is fine. It should look something like  /feeds/post/default. Make your selection and press [Next]

Now finish up by giving your feed a name. It defaults to your blog title, so you'll probably just want to leave it as-is. Below that, you'll see your blogs 'new' feed address. You could write this down for later, but theres an easier way. Press [Next].
Now just [right-click] on your feed URL and [Copy link address] or [Copy link location] -depends on your web browser.
You can continue on and set up some additional tracking features, but hey, we're just getting started with this whole thing, so let's keep it simple. You can always go back and play with the advanced settings later...
Press the [Skip directly to feed management] link. You should now see your feed listed in your control panel.

Step 3 - Redirect your Blogger feed.
So now, go log into your Blogger account, and go to your Dashboard.  Click the [Settings] tab, and [right-click] [Paste] your feedburner URL into the 'Post Feed Redirect URL' box.  While you're here Make sure the 'Allow Blog Feeds' is set to 'Full', or at least NOT set to 'None' (again, look for more about this in a future TechTip) then click [Save Settings]

You're done!
You now can check your feed stats by logging in to  feedburner.goggle.com and selecting your feed. If you have multiple sites or blogs, you can set up a feed for each of them and manage them here.
It usually take about a day for things to sync up and data to start coming in, but soon you should start seeing subscription info and other stats in your FeedBurner reports. Poke around a bit, there's some neat stuff you can find out, some things might surprise you.

It's beginning to look a lot like..... Christmas?

Being a transplanted northern Yankee, I'm used to snow in the wintertime, but this has to be the most consistent, persistent snow pattern we've seen since coming to NC.

Goodbye 2009!

In the spirit of New Years, new beginnings and all that, I'll be making a fresh start here on the blog and in the studio.
After a particularly frustrating 2009, not being able to do what I WANTED to do, or felt I SHOULD be doing or COULD do, I'll be focusing on what I CAN do. Until my recovery and PT and various other procedures are done with, I can still make work. I may not be as fast as I was, or be able to throw for hours and hours, but I can make work. Pain or not, working with clay helps me stay sane through it all.

Pricing in a bad economy

Just read a blog post about the temptation to lower your prices when things aren't selling.
Assuming your prices are set correctly (whatever that is) in the first place, it makes a lot of sense.

Looking around, I sure haven't noticed many other sectors slashing prices. Sure, there are the department stores that have huge retail markup having 50% of sales, but you can be sure they are not selling below, or anywhere near, cost. If they are, they're making it up elsewhere (loss leader to get you in the store) or they're teetering on bankruptcy.

I thought this really fit in with a common theme I've been seeing out in the pottery blogosphere about how people are doing in the down economy. The thinking that makes the most sense for me is that, yes, the big expensive pieces might not be selling right now, so you might want to offer smaller, less complicated, time consuming pieces if you don't already. But offer them in addition to your other pieces, because you just don't know what will sell on any given day.

Check out Molly Gordon's blog here:
Why lowering your prices doesn’t work and how to resist the urge

Mark Hewitt in Raleigh,NC

Mark Hewitt will be the guest speaker at the October 6th meeting of the Triangle Potter's Guild. The meeting will be 6:00PM in Stewart Theatre at Talley Student Center on the NC State main campus.

See the meeting flyer here:
Meeting Flyer

and Directions to Talley Student Center.

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!

Having a bad day?

The next time you're having a bad day and a pot or two collapses because you were pushing the envelope a bit too far, just remember these guys...