2021 Is Going To Be A Wild Ride!

It’s going to be a wild ride this 2021…not a scary/bad ride like 2020…but still wild. There will be some ups and downs I’m sure, every year adds something to the up and something to the down side…but…

…we made it through 2020…AND…

…we’ll make it through 2021.

We were offered a rare opportunity to change our catalog a bit through the Covid Darkness. Not much was selling anyway, so why not make things that I wanted to make without the pressure of sales. I took that opportunity and continue to work on new items. It’s fun to be free. I’m blessed that the response to the new material has been so strong. I’m pretty sure that we’ll be making some exciting pieces this year and can’t wait to show them…when and where? We can’t know that yet, but soon.

The last few weeks we’ve been playing with combinations of glazes which we have in our pallet and retesting the bases. It’s silly putty work…just a lot of routine. But that allowed me play with the interaction between the bases. Months ago I acquired some interesting new glaze components and am playing with those to find new colors…some which are usually avoided by potters. There are some wild things happening on the glaze side of the pottery work. I’m excited to put them onto the new forms.

All of this new stuff has been happening in our “Hobnob Collection”…all stoneware. But we have two collections we work on. The other is “LickinFlames.”

We are not neglecting new ideas for LickinFlames but what I want to work on is expensive. A single valve for the experimental work is about $200 and who knows if it will work. And that’s just one valve…there are several…and gas tanks…and oxygen tanks. But if I can pull it together AND if the hints that the old-school chemist talked about from his Doctoral research can be applied to Raku…it could just be a superlative OMG experience.

Then there is the notion of using native material in my glazes. I’ve always driven by cuts in roadways and marveled at the colors. Most of us are attracted to the reds, yellows and black that we see as we roar along. Those are mostly iron with impurities…easy enough to incorporate as colors into the glaze. But I’m more interested in the rock as glaze components. I’m shopping for equipment and tools to process the rock…again…it’s only money. But how cool would it be to be able to fire my yard onto my pottery.

And lastly, we’ve decided to start our new series of making videos. The working title is simply “MakeIt”…we’ll see if we can come up with a better title. It’s a one episode a month deal where I will take a “deep dive” into one of our products and show its process and progress from before the bag of clay is opened, through the forming, finishing and decorating…right up to the point of the piece “going out the door” and finding it’s new forever home.

I didn’t like 2020…most of us didn’t. But I think we put the negative space to a good use and now are excited to see just how many of these wild and crazy ideas get squeezed through the studio.

Mask up. It’s going to be wild.