The time has come to say goodbye to blogger. It has been good but for a number or reasons I have decided to move the blog over to WordPress. I feel that as I start to develop a website the WordPress platform will integrate more easily when the time comes.
I also feel that this blog started as Notes from an Apprenticeship and should return to that. I have moved all posts from after I left Marks to the new blog and in the coming weeks I will change this blog back to its original format.
Its late as I write this and the rain has just started to fall. It is loud on the tin roof.
I hope you all have enjoyed this journey over the past few years. I have certainly learned a lot. Thank you all for the support and kind words of encouragement. It is a great little community that we potters share and we are lucky for it. Here is a teaser of some new content to be found at here.
Fall it seems has arrived. I mark it not by the leaves or the smell or the clear light, but by the fact that when I walk out my front door and down the stone steps I am wearing a sweatshirt. I might not wear it long, for the days are getting up around 80 or 85, but it is cold in the mornings. The fall always makes me feel slightly energized. There is always an incredibly long list of things to prepare for the winter.
Here is a small sample of the pre-winter checklist:
Split the enormous pile of locust and red oak outside the woodshed asap.
One final bush-hog of the meadows.
Finish kiln.
Move workshop from behind the house to in front of the kiln shed.
Develop a new preliminary clay recipe and mix a batch.
Wrap pipes under house.
Jack up the joists under dining room floor so it does not feel like a trampoline.
Haul jack pine and two red oaks out of woods and take to sawmill.
Fix road into woods and move airstream to final location.
Dig trench to workshop for power and water lines.
Slaughter and process two hogs that are getting very large.
Do a little fishing.
Clean out the spring that supplies the house.
So there is never a shortage of work to be done. All this will hopefully put me inline for a firing around the first of the new year but I will say that I have got very used to the sound a deadline makes as it goes whooshing past.
And so here are a few pictures from last week.
Pictured above is the how I chose to terminate the bricks once they reached the top of the arch. There are nicer ways to do it but they are very time consuming. This is clean and fast, which at this point is just what I need.
Here is the cast key. The white tubes are pvc. They were removed once the cartable cured. The holes will be used for the pyrometer probes as well as blow holes to have a visual cue as to where the flame is in the kiln.
Two guesses what that is.... I needed a way to slide the pvc out of the castable once it had cured. I thought about saran wrap with a little grease slopped on it and then came up with a clever little idea. Condoms aren't just for contraception.
A view from the inside of how the main arch meets the door arch.
This side is now ready for buttressing. After much deliberation I finally found, with the help of my neighbor Steve, a quick and clean solution to the dilemma. But before buttressing it is on the chimney!
I've been listening to a lot of The Game lately. Especially the hit featuring an Auto-Tuned Lil' Wayne called "My Life". I suppose the part I resonate most with is really just the chorus.
"And I'm grindin till I'm tired, They say you ain't grindin till you tired.
So im grinding with my eyes wide, looking to find a way through the day,
a light through the night."
Speaking of grindin'. My friend Joseph Sand does it better than anyone I know. He ground it out through the winter and the freezing mortar and the dirty bricks. He built a monstrous kiln, fixed up a workshop and made a beautiful first load of pots. He then, with the tremendous help and support of his wife Amanda, proceeded to have an amazing SOLD OUT first kiln opening. Joseph, you are a dear friend and a fantastic potter and builder. I salute you.
After his kiln opening Joseph and fellow Peidmonster Levi Mahan came out to help bang up some arch bricks. Another aspiring your potter named Andrew Goldstein also made the trek down from Minnesota to lend a hand.
With all their help we got the sidewalls well up over the sidestokes and in the days following I laid up the base of the chimney and the arch for the flue, then butted the main arch into the flue arch and this weekend I will hopefully figure out the spine of the main arch.
I would also like to thank my mainstay, the lady who can lay a brick, miss Connie Rose. (pictured below on the beach)
and Mr Dan, who always shows up early and leaves late.
Connie and I just returned from a brief but wonderful vacation to Massachusetts. It was a good respite from all that is happening around our place. The only dissapoinment of the trip happened on the last night while trying to shuck a few oysters. I was trying to get the first one open and managed to plunge the knife into the heel of my thumb. The main problem is that it will be out of commision for a few days while the wound heels around the stitches but I have some great help coming on Monday and so we should be able to still get a few things done.
Below are some pictures of where the kiln left off.
That is not how the original went but it is much closer to what my days look at this present time.
Before I talk about the kiln I want to point out a very small change to the blog. You will find it on the right hand side of your screen and it is a very small link that will take you to a nice little form where you can fill out some personal information and be added to my mailing list.
If you chose to continue I will promise you this:
3 or 4 email newsletters per year, well laid out and pleasing to the eye. 2 or 3 postcards via the old snail mail, something nice and shiny to remember me by, stick on the fridge and then wish you could hop on a plane and zoom across whatever great expanse separates us and come to a kiln opening.
Yes...I will actually one day make some pottery. And hopefully, if my training serves me (and you) well it will be nice to hold, look at, use, or put on a shelf.
And so please do take a moment to sign up. I would love to have you on board.
The small news is that Dan, who is helping me out two or three days a week for a modest sum, and I just about finished the strips. We came up a little short and so tomorrow morning I will once again drive down to Lowes and buy more stuff. There is a fantastic hardware store in the town near by which I usually try and support but they do not carry 3/8 inch ply.
For the record, if I did this again I think that I would use 1/2 inch. Over such a long distance it is difficult to get every arch support to be perfect and the 3/8 or 1/4 really shows every minor dip or bulge in the forms. I think that in the end it will be ok and the bricks can be shimmed as they are laid if there are any major problems.
And finally I will leave you with a video of men at work.
I have not been a diligent blogger. I actually cringe at that title. I don't consider myself a blogger. I consider myself a potter (at this exact moment in time a kiln builder) and so it is without a tremendous amount of guilt that I am bringing everyone up to date.
There has been an amazing amount of people out here as of late and we really have made some progress.
Last week Connie and I started laying out the floor and I finished the floor tiles sometime around the weekend.
Doc Welty of Leicester Valley Clay made a surprise visit on Sunday afternoon with his wife Melanie. We drank a beer or two and finished the last few things to be completed before moving onto the arch forms.
On Monday he showed back up and we hung the chain and spray painted 24 arch supports. The curve for the kiln I found by using nice little offering of Google's called Sketchup. It is a 3d modeling software, downloadable, and easy to use. I knew three important dimensions and the rest came from the curve which the software drew while hitting all three of my points. 6ft at the entrance, 6ft at the first step up from the firebox and finally 32 inches at the flue.
On Tuesday I took I worked a half day with Dan Getting the first set of Arch supports up as well as the framing that holds them and then took my lovely girlfriend on a date.
Wednesday Dan in I finished up the arch supports...
...and this morning with the help of Andrew Stephenson, his friend David, and Tom Turner we started laying the lathing.
After a lunch of corn and pasta (with everything from the garden but the pasta) we laid a few more strips and they hit the road. I worked for another hour or so before the clouds thickened even more than they already were and the thunder clapped above and the rain came in thick sheets blowing in from the north. The tin roof roared under the deluge and ran through it all to close the windows and put the chickens feed away and sit down at my desk and write this.
Coming up in blogland: A completely new blog/website!
The last few days have moved by quickly. The side walls are now complete. From the main ware bed they rise exactly two feet and continue all the way back to the chimney. I must thank Tom Turner immeasurably for all the help he has been to this project both in moral and physical support. Tom came out this morning at 8:30 on the dot and we laid about 200 bricks. Tom mudded and I laid them down. We made quite a team. After Tom left my friend Dan showed up to finish off the last course of the side wall with the big 9x18's. After that we started in on the Floor. We didn't get far before Harrison and Bruno showed up and I ushered them up the mountain to the secret pasture for an evening of filming. Their website/blog is right here! They are making a fantastic little film in the genre of mumblecore.
Alex Matisse recently completed two apprenticeships with NC potters, the first with Matt Jones of Sandy Mush, and then with Mark Hewitt of Pittsboro. He is currently working on his own kiln in East Fork, a small farming community outside of Asheville, NC.
