First off, it’s kiln cooling day, which means I feel like I’m working when I’m actually not, so I think I have time to write blog posts.
Second, while we’re still being very safe, we’re up and running full guns. The studio is at capacity (even with class Covid limits) and the street shoppers have emerged and are buying pottery.
Which means my year long pandemic projects need to culminate. Or at least they need to become a slow trickle.
The basement walls are finished (for now) and the tools have been beaten back into their closet, and the furniture is all back in place giving us new room on the lounge side of the basement. The two little windows I added for fun make things a little more interesting visually.
My self-taught slip pouring project gave us a ton of new fancy tiles, and while I haven’t gotten around to pouring any two-part molds, I did happen to come across some weirdly interesting antique molds on eBay and thought that would be a good next step to empirically learning what makes a two part mold functionally good or bad. And because eBay is eBay, and 1AM shopping is never good, I decided to take a fun path and turn a secret ambition into a pottery form. I love steampunk, but I absolutely can NOT add another tool-collecting, stuff-collecting activity to my space. So some of the old pottery molds looked like they’d be fun to re-purpose into forms they weren’t intended for, lending a steampunk-ish feel to the results.
I wish I were the only artist to think of this, but I’m hoping to add enough ESP style to make these uniquely ours.
My self-imposed rule is that I need to make two beautiful objects for every one weird form.
All of these molds are antiques from when porcelain chachkies were popular, and this vintage eyeball mold could NOT be passed up.
The repaired, cleaned up basement