These are made from slabs also

Handle cut from a slab of clay

Well, different for me anyway. I usually pull, coil or extrude handles, but this one is cut from a thick slab. When the beaker was finished, I made a paper pattern for the handle and “tried it on the pot.” I laid the pattern on a thick slab of clay and cut around it with a needle tool. Once it was on the pot, I added clay where it attaches to the pot and used a needle tool and my trusty green scrubby to smooth and round out the handle.

Here’s a few new pieces - will post most of them for sale on www.leepots.com.

Round pouring vessel

Teabox

Bottle

Slab-built vase

Nesta Nala with one of her smaller beer pots

Just posted a couple of new articles on the website - one on Jomon Pottery in Japan and one on Nesta Nala, a modern day Zulu potter who made traditional Zulu beer pots. Doing some more research on Zulu beer pots in general and will hopefully be posting something soon.

Been doing some research on Jomon pottery in Japan. Geez, I love it! Posted some of what I learned on my website. If you’d like to read a bit about it, here’s links to the articles: http://leedanielspottery.com/Jomon%20Pottery.htm and http://leedanielspottery.com/Jomon%20Dogu.htm.

I hate stinky clay water in the studio. It reeks. My studio doesn’t have running water, so I use my slop bucket to wash everything, including my brushes. I’ve found that since I’ve been using antibacterial dishwashing liquid to dip the brushes in before washing, I don’t get stuff growing in the water, hence no more stink.

That’s what my lazy self likes - great results, no extra work. Unless, of course, you like stinky clay water. Plenty do. Yukkers.

Was reminded of one of my favorite quotes today -

“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”
~ Albert Einstein

This quote was used in an article in the Summer/Fall ‘09 issue of Studio Potter discussing the need for craftspeople, potters in particular, to keep open to different ways of working, thinking and living in a world in which change is inevitable.

Covered bowl by Bernard Leach

Bernard Leach visited the United States in the 1950’s and had several rather controversial things to say about the state of studio pottery in the young rootless country of America.  I think the following paragraph says a lot about making work that springs from something authentic inside ourselves.

“An American potter needs to discover his own soul and to live in and contribute to an America which has found its meaning and purpose, by producing pots as an expression of his whole being, heart, head and hand. Just as the heart beat keeps our physical organism alive, so too do the heart beats of feeling, intuition and at its height, inspiration pulse through our spirits and vitalize our actions. This is what I mean by working from inside our actions. This is what I mean by working from inside out. Pots produced from an intellectual level, or for utility alone, or to display technical skill, or just to make money are progressively outside in. Such is our procedure most of the time, not only in pots, but in everything else in our modern Western civilization.”

Here’s some of the stuff I’ve been working on since my neck surgery. Having great fun - don’t know if I want to go back to the wheel just yet . . .

I make lots of French butter keepers. Unfortunately I have problems with the lids cracking. I’ve got so many cracked lids that I bisque them and put them in front of the studio all lined up like soldiers. Okay, so maybe they’re drunken soldiers. Here’s some of them, there are more in the studio and on the other side of the stairs.

Cracked butter keeper tops

 Last February my fingers went numb. My cracked lids went from about one per dozen to 10 per dozen. As I got used to throwing with numb fingers the cracked guys went back to about one per dozen again. Since surgery the numbness has been changing - more numb in some fingers, less in others. Back to almost all the lids cracking again. It’s changing so fast that I can’t figure out how to throw them without cracks. I’m hoping that soon all the numbness will be gone, never to return. In the meantime, I’m learning how to repair cracks. Not all of them - many, like the picture below, are too big to repair.

Too big to fix

Paper clay slip works pretty well on some greenware or bisqueware, but not all. If the cracks are fairly small, they can be repaired after the glaze firing by (ceramic purists should stop reading right now, you aren’t going to like this one bit) using Sculpey or Fimo polymer clay to fill the crack and baking it in the oven at 275 for 10 or 15 minutes. The pictures below show before and after views of the same lid.

Before and After