It's the windup

Pottery can be like that home run you work for all your life.
Some times you connect with the ball and it just slides over the fence and you walk with leisure around the bases waving to all the cheering fans and tap your foot on home base.
Safe- home run.

Then other times it is like the most wild ride in an amusement park.
The build up.
The fear.
The plunge.
And the bottom.

With 30 years in on this gig I sometimes wonder what a day will bring. The quiet hum of the wheels or the roar of the brain as it creates new avenues you want to explore.

If nothing, it is, and can be, a daily challenge.
This week after unloading the kiln, sanding the pots, pricing, sorting, carrying them to the sales shop
 ( Gallery?) by the next day we were on to the next thing.

List are made, goals are set, clay is readied and we are at it again.
Off to the races.

The first year we were in business I realized that for us nothing was ever really finished in the sense of wrapping up a project, putting the paper to bed... there would  always be another pot to be made, another glaze to explore, another shape filling out in the mind.
I rolled over this morning and instead of thinking dreams, my brain went right to pots. What if I made this and then did this and then I would make one of these and do this.
Oh, bother time to get up, I am looping on pots.
When I was learning to center and just not getting it I started dreaming about clay.
I think it still owns the greater part of my brain.

I have been thinking about bottles again and the opening of those bottles and why people feel you can not get enough things in them.

This bottle is one from the house that came from some wood firing I had done with somebody somewhere and  it had a big blob on the bottom. I ground off the blob recently and have found this bottle to be a perfect size for cut flowers.
The opening looks small but as you can see it holds a fair amount of flowers.
I make a lot of bottles and have people questions if they will hold anything or hold enough.
What is enough?
 We have been cutting flowers the past few weeks to sit on the bar in the kitchen using a wee bottle that Mark made, it is the perfect size for those flowers as well.

Here they are hanging out with some apples.
This bottle was a glaze test in the Ms. B and has some odd color to the glaze, but holds these flowers  just right, just enough.

I am thinking about pots, bottles and such but I am distracted by these.
I had 6 last night the smell was so fragrant I wish I could bottle it. 

These moon flowers are so delicate like a fine, fine  tissue paper. I once tried to preserve one.
It was not possible.
So now I need to look at them all and admire them as they open.

Next year I am planning not to plant them so high.
These are way up there as you can see.

I want more of these for next year as well.

Now, about those pots, how about those Giants?
Mark is working on teapots, we are working on some cone 6 glazes, fillers are being made,and plans made on the calender for the next firing.
We are setting aside pots marked for our 30th.
Remember- October the 13th and 14th - here.
More coming on that soon!
No wonder I am awake.
Tea?
M