WIP, WIP it Good!!

WIP, short for works in progress and we have some.  Here are the finished pieces from the last blog, they have now been trimmed and turned right side up.  Now they will dry slowly and be fired (hopefully before the end of the month). 

Here are some vases that I threw yesterday

This morning I went back out and put them together, now they are drying a little before I trim them and finalize the shape.  I’m still not sure if I want to round off the bottoms and then build stands for them.  I will probably round off a couple and leave a couple flat.

Also, if you remember back to this post.  I was talking about making some large vases for my mother-in-law, well here they are.  Two vases about two and a half feet tall, with a layer of shino glaze and another layer of a glaze called Woo Brown to Blue.   I really like this combination of glazes; they make some nice colors together.

This weekend I also worked on our hoop house some more, I added a “hallway” to it.  We will be adding a door to the end of it pretty soon (right now it’s all rainy and cold out, so I’m inside).  The other door set up we had was a real hassle to get in and out of, I figure if the door was easier to get into we would go into it more often (to check for bugs and other signs of life).  So check back later to see what our door turns out to be (made of).

A Coven of Bats??

So we were working on some new “artistic” work in the studio last night, and I realized that I only had seven bats.  I don’t usually use bats when I throw functional ware, because it’s usually smaller scale. But when I throw “art” work it tends to be too large to pick up without distorting the form too much.  So today I decided to make some bats of my own and this is how it went…

First I collected the tools I thought I would need to go from start to finish without stopping to find another tool.  I had most of the tool in our studio, but I was missing a jigsaw, which is quite important when cutting out circular shapes.  Luckily I was able to find one at my favorite in-laws house (Thanks Cindy!), so I was set with tools.  Here is a list of tools I started out with: Jigsaw, drill, a nail, hammer, sharpie, drill bit, and an old bat.  I also needed a sheet of four by eight Masonite; to cut the bats out of, so I went and got one of those too (cost about twelve dollars).

After I assembled all that stuff, I started tracing the old bat with the sharpie to see how many bats I would be able to get out of the Masonite.  Here is an overall picture of the Masonite after I traced all my bats, and the next picture is a close up so you can see the circles.  I was able to trace twenty fourteen inch bats, one twelve inch bat, and four eight inch bats.

Next step: Cutting

This step took the longest and made the biggest mess out of all the steps, and it’s not that exciting so we will move on pretty quick.

While I was cutting out the bats, I saw this little bird appear more than once so I thought I would snap a shot of him to share.

Here is a picture of all the bats cut out and ready for the next step.

Next was to get all the holes drilled, and drilled in the right places.  I did this by stacking and clamping them and placing the old bat on top so that I could just drill down through the holes on the old bat.  It was at this point that I realized my drill bit was too small and the next size up was way too big.  So I went ahead and drill the hole, and figured that I would make them bigger (somehow) later.  So now I had a stack of rough cut bats that had holes that were too small to fit on my wheel.  I went through a couple of options to make the holes bigger, first was a rat tail file (didn’t work so well, it was too coarse), second was our dremel with sanding attachment (too big), then a grinding attachment (too fine, just burned the wood), and finally wood cutting router like bit for the dremel.  This last one was the sweet spot, it worked perfectly, so I got on with making the holes bigger.  After that I had to smooth down the edges (so I wouldn’t hurt myself), I did this by putting them on the wheel and holding some rough sand paper to them while the spun at full speed.  I only put holes in the fourteen inch bats, I figured that twenty bats was enough to get me started, I think I will leave the eight inch bats alone, and the twelve inch bat will get holes another day.

 So I ended up with twenty bats for about twelve dollars, I was looking around the internet when I came back inside and saw that I could have just bought them for six dollars a piece.  It would have only run us $120 to buy the same amount I made for twelve dollars...

I mentioned at the beginning that we are working on some “artistic” work, here is a picture of the beginnings of said work.

Urge for Growing

So we are trying to keep some of our tomatoes alive in our hoop house, but if that doesn’t work we have a backup plan.  We took some cuttings of two of our heirloom tomato plants (one grape, and another mid-sized tomato), and we are going to keep them in the house and replant them in the spring.  

 

We are also growing some tomatoes we got down in Texas that were purple with green stripes.  They look so cool I thought I would save the seeds and try to grow them ourselves. 

So far so good all the seeds I planted sprouted and are looking pretty good so far, we will keep these guys inside for the winter as well.  Also, while we were in Dallas our friend Andy juiced a bunch of fruits and vegetables for us.  One of the fruits was a pineapple, and he gave the top so that we could try and grow our own at our house (he is currently growing 2). 

 

I know ours looks pretty sad right now but I’m told that it’s growing roots so some of the leaves might die off.  Hopefully it will perk up once it gets some roots going, and in a year or two we might get to have a pineapple that we grew ourselves (which would be pretty cool).  We will keep you updated on our different wintering techniques, and how they are working for us.

Autumn Harvest

We set up our hoop house the other day, but left all the plants inside of it until this weekend, when we planned to go through and cut them back and see what we could find in there.  Well we found quite a lot of stuff, a bunch of green tomatoes, Serrano peppers, bell peppers, Anaheim peppers, and Thai hot peppers, and outside of the hoop house we found a couple good sized eggplants, leeks, and some more cucumbers.  Here is a picture of everything we picked in the last couple days.

You can see all the green tomatoes that we gathered from our tomato jungle on the left, in the middle are cucumbers that are covered by the leeks, front right are a ton of Serrano and Thai hot peppers, and in the back right are our eggplants.  Also in this picture are our pineapple, aloe, and some tomato sprouts.