Flatten them, squish'em, squash'em into jelly.....

      Some of you might remember this post (here) where I made my own bats to throw on.  I was pretty happy with them for a while, but I started to notice some things about them that bothered me.  One big one was that the bat pins (the little nubs that hold the bat in place) stuck up about an eighth of an inch.  I know that doesn’t seem like much but when your hands are pressed down on a spinning bat it gets pretty irritating, it also stop you from cutting off larger objects like plates, bowls, and platters smoothly.  I thought I could deal with it; I have a few other bats that I could throw those types of things on so I kept using them.  The second thing that bothered me was that they are made of masonite, which is basically like compressed cardboard.  So when they get wet they tend to swell a little, and then when they dry they warp a little.  I was okay with this, again for a while but when you’re ready to throw and flipping through your bats and cannot find a flat one it gets pretty annoying.  This happened to me the other day, so I thought I would try to flatten all of my masonite bats at once, prompt like.  I soaked them in water to get them nice and pliable, and then stacked a couple of five gallon buckets full of water on top of them to get them nice and compressed, and left them for a day or two to dry.  

The all important close-up.

So now I’m thinking that my problems are solved (well one of them) and my bats will be flat and ready to use when I want.  I take my seat at the wheel and reach for a bat, and the first one I pick up is warped far worse than any I have yet seen.  Luckily it’s just that one, and the next one is pretty flat.  

Now it’s been a few more days and my bats are starting to warp again.  I’m thinking it’s time to invest in some of the higher end plastic bats that never warp, just to save myself the grief that I inflicted upon myself when I decided to make my own bats.

Maybe next time I will use a treated/sealed, and thicker plywood….

A Bowl with a Hook

Here are some yarn bowls I've been working on.  Keturah designed the hooks for me, and I cut them out of the bowls.  They look pretty good I think, I'm excited to see them finished.

A Table to Work On

Let’s play a little catch up, I made this table a month or two ago. 

                After looking at my studio I decided I needed more table space dedicated to pottery.  The other table I have is used for everything else so it gets bits of dirt and sawdust all over it, not that good for pottery.  So I set out to build a large table.  I decided to stick with the dimensions of a standard piece of plywood (3/4 inch in this case), which is 8 foot by 4 foot, and I went with 3 feet tall.  I also wanted a lower level that I could use to store clay off of the floor.  I used 4 by 4 treated posts for the legs so that if they ever got wet it wouldn’t matter that much.  I built the frame out of two by fours; both the top and the lower shelf have supports running the four foot length to give it a little more support.  Once it was all assembled I covered the top of it with canvas to give me a nice work area.  It took me the better part of a Saturday afternoon but I was able to get it finished, and now it’s in full use and working out quite nicely.

Books and Shelves.

This week was spent finishing up the last two shelves for the house.  Here is a work in progress photo of the shelf for the office.

The office shelf will be about 6 feet tall and 3 feet wide.

 I’ve also been working on making a sketch book from scratch.  So I started by folding all the paper and trying to make each section as uniform as possible.  I ended up with enough paper for two books, but I wanted to finish one before I started on the other so I could make mistakes on the first one that I (hopefully) won’t make on the second one. 

After getting all the paper folded I sewed them together using some silk thread that Keturah had lying around.  

After a few days of looking at what I did, I decided to move on to the next stage.  This involves gluing the spine with a piece of card stock (this I found out after I used some cardboard), and clamping it all down so the spine is as tight as possible.  Here is a photo of the clamping and gluing of the spine and a picture of the piece of cardboard that I glued to the spine…

 

 

 In between working on the book I slowly add another shelf to the office shelf.  I’m using dowel rods to put the whole thing together so I have to wait for the glue to dry before I can remove the clamps.  It seems to be working so far, this is how I make these two shelves for the living room, and the one that’s going into Ewan’s room (Ewan is the baby boy that will be born most likely within 30 days…).  

That’s what I’ve been working on this past week, this week will be used to finish that shelf and the first book, and then start on the second one.  I also want to clean up the studio and get it in working order so I can start making pottery.  I also have fallen off the horse with sketching and reading but I will remedy that tonight.  I’m currently reading Contemporary Ceramics by Emmanuel Cooper, it has lots of great pictures but the reading is going a little slow (there are no dragons, wizards, or T.A.R.D.I.S’s), but it will be finished so I can start another book from my small library.  Hope all of you had a good week and we’ll see you next week.