Who's Going to Philly?

I'm headed to the city of brotherly love tomorrow with Laura Zindel to assist in the wholesale madness (hopefully). This will be my first visit to the Buyer's Market show and I'm curious to check it out. I'll be sad to leave VT for a week, but I'm looking forward to some visits with friends down yonder. Let me know if you'll be at the show and I'll stop by your booth!
I know it's been a while since my last update. I've been pretty busy with working for Laura, housesitting, making pots, and teaching my first class at the Clayworks. The teaching has been fun and I'm finding the challenge in verbalizing just what it is I do with my hands to do that thing with the clay.
Ok time for sleep.

Oh Nuts!

I've been making plaster molds for Laura this week. Just as I had finished pouring the plaster into the last mold of the week and leave work before the snow storm got too crazy, the mold let loose and sent a wall of mixed plaster slurry. It was quite the mess. I guess 15 lbs of water + 22.5 lbs of plaster is too much for one pour into my gerry-rigged mold form. Crud. Oh well, let it harden then clean up is the only thing to do.
Once the plaster was all spilled out in a big puddle it reminded me of watching Tom Spleth working with plaster to create vase forms, if you've never seen that check it out here.
On a good note: Happy Holidays! Quinn and I went to Sears earlier this week and got our ugly holiday-sweater-portrait taken.

good morning

I woke up this morning and for some reason the light through the bathroom window was really striking so I had to take a picture. This window is also one of the reasons we first signed our lease for this place. Quinn and I are both really big fans of hot dog plants; they have such beautiful flowers. Some times we talk about farming hot dogs as a business venture.
In all honesty, we don't know who made this window, but it's always a pleasure to live with.

Islamic Platters

I've been looking at these platters recently. I saw a picture of a similar platter a year or two ago and was just floored by it. I can't remember which book it was in but the other day that platter came to mind and I just had to find some images to look at. There's something so alluring about them. The Arabic sayings that are painted around the circumference are so stark and intentional. There is a beautiful simplicity to the stylized script. The one above is from the 10th century and is a serious 18 inches wide! These are all Central Asian from Nishapur or Samarqand.



This one (below) says, "Whoever talks a lot, slips a lot." This one (again below) says, "Frugality is a symptom of poverty." At first that seems pretty obvious. But what's the deeper meaning? It comes off as if frugality is a negative, perhaps poverty is a positive state of being. hmm...

fizzy cider

I'm enjoying a cup of one of my favorite late fall treats: fizzy cider. Here's how you make it:
Buy a gallon of cider sometime in October and drink about a quarter or third of it. Then put it in the back of your fridge and kinda forget about it. Then in mid to late November when the plastic jug looks inflated and about to blow the cap pour yourself a glass and notice the way it fizzes. It's that easy.

The new kiln, a slideshow

It went a little something like......

Photos from the unbuilding

The Brattleboro Clayworks kiln served a hearty 25 years with only one partial rebuild until now. In one day we removed and sorted the whole thing into about five piles of work weary brick. Clayworks members came out of the woodwork and pitched in to create the best damn brick brigade I've ever been a part of. Not even walls could stop us, nope we just go right through those.


Here's the very bottom of the chimney complete with cracked lintel which crumbled in my hands as it came out.

Here's the main reason for the rebuild. As you can see the wall was feeling a little tired.