Shenandoah Potter's Guild Conference. . Winchester, VA

It has been a while since I was last on here, so I will take a bit of time to update.

The new L&L is running, and it is fantastic! Phone app tells me temps, and gives me warnings. 

The kiln, a E28M-3 took a while to calibrate as the witness cones were about 11/2 cones off. I am now running a -45 offset on the cone offset setting. Each level is within the cone  6-6.5 region. mostly ^6. I have it with Quad elements and the Genesis Touch Screen Controller and the downdraft venting system. Worth it, as the few loads I have fired have been pretty much flawless except for the early cone offset tuning. 

The latest news is that I recently presented a 2 day workshop at Handley High School in Winchester, VA for the Shenandoah Potters Guild. Negotiations began in the Winter, and the date was set in February or March. I had not realized that the date was set for Memorial Day weekend until two weeks before the workshop.  . I had other things on my mind. I was trying to finish up chalice and paten shipping for my yearly Hickman awards through the Order of St. Luke. Post Covid planning left us with a Disney Vacation, and a Cruise with in two and a half weeks of each other with the workshop in between the two vacations.  At any rate things have been hectic.

This is the classroom of Heather Scott, at Handley High School. It had a few Shimpo wheels that I have not thrown on in years. Pleasantly surprised with the wheels as they had sufficient torque to center larger pieces of clay, always a plus. An excellent slab roller and an extruder. Plenty of working room and AV equipment. A really nice set up, kudos to the district for supporting a quality art program!

The morning began as I had hoped, wedging clay, and getting ready. I had created a presentation using Libre Office 7.3, brought some pieces that I had kept over the years, and a selection of my personal personal tools for working with clay that included throwing tools, trimming tools, texture tools and others. The plan was to begin with an introduction, the presentation, and demonstrate throwing off of the hump, decoration while throwing and other techniques that I enjoy using. The beginning presentation did not go to plan. . . it had to be converted to a MS presentation file, and the fly ins and other effects ended up stacked one over top, , , oh well, adjust. We struggled through that and ended up on the wheel throwing and relaxing. I started with smaller pieces, a series of bowls and stems for chalices to be trimmed and assembled the next day, a honey jar, with lid and spoon. We had a break for Lunch that was pot luck by the guild. . . .Great food !

After Lunch we moved to a pitcher form along with a large bowl and a few smaller pieces. We ended the day around 5:30 or 6:00 after storing the pots and thorough clean up  

First form throwing off the hump

This is the beginning of a chalice bowl with decoration added before shaping. The texture will become larger and softer when the form is stretched to size. Opening up on the hump has become a pancake form with good compression in the center, and then the pancake pulled up to form the side walls of the pot. This helps with the alignment of clay particles in the transition from the base of the pot to the side walls minimalizing the occurrence of the ill fated S shaped crack.

Below is the bowl form in mid stride. I open up most bowls with a bamboo rib I repurposed from a bamboo cooking set. The spoon makes an excellent  throwing rib for bowl forms and I use if often.

Animated potter having fun!

Pitcher form before spout and handle

Extruding a handle

Jig for trimming chalice stems and bottles from plumbing parts

On the second day of the workshop, we started out with trimming pieces and rolling out and assembling a group project constructed of slabs. I also demonstrated some of the tools I used to help with trimming of pots and make sizing lids for the honey jars easier using off the shelf plastic plumbing parts.

Honey jar lid with spoon

Trimming a chalice stem

After throwing the bowl, and before final shaping, I threw a pitcher form, and added a handle created with the use of my electric putty gun extruder. This allowed me to demonstrate the use of that to make all sorts of small parts and handles for pots.

I also started a larger vase form, which over the day I would return to while working on other things. Not the best of timing as the form started to dry a little too quickly, ending up a little wonky, but it did survive.

We also took some time to do a group project that involved slab and wheel thrown combinations. The original idea was to create curved piece with 6 sides. 

Assembling the slabs for the group pot

However, the curve was too extreme to build with the time we had for the last day. So we improvised using 4 sides, with a thrown top and thrown bottom. This did allow me to stress that the side dimensions of the slab form had to match the inside dimensions of the thrown form at the top, and the diagonal (corner to opposite corner) had to match the outside dimensions of the thrown form where the two pieces were to be joined.. The overlapping areas were trimmed causing an arch form at the top of the pot at the shoulder. We decided on added on feet for the base instead of the thrown top.

Heather Scott HS teacher in the background

 I have to say that the Shenandoah Potters Guild treated me really well. I wish to thank Alice Boysen for choosing me to present, and all of the time she took to negotiate the presentation. She also provided me with a hotel room that allowed much needed rest at night. Many thanks also reaching out to Heather Scott, who was able to make the HS classroom available. I was very impressed with her organization and student work that I saw, very gracious and helpful the entire weekend. I would also like to thank Lin Hausknecht for forwarding me pictures she took when attending. A final thanks to   Lucinda and Jim Leaman for taking pictures and creating the video that follows. Without those folks, I would not have had a visual record of the weekend, as I got too involved to take any pictures. It was a wonderful weekend from my perspective. 

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