I’ve had a hankerin’ to throw something big lately, so I made a platter. I started with 8 pounds of clay.

First, I centered the clay on a bat and made a flat disk. The disk measured about 13″ across.

Next, I opened the disk up, leaving a base that was about 1/2″ thick. I had to remove the splash guard before I went any further.

The final step was to pull up the side and widen it. The finished platter measures just over 16″ wide, wet. Let’s see how much shrinkage I get out of this Cone 6 Dover White clay.

I had planned to post sooner, but we had some Big Things happen here in Flagstaff in late-mid June. The Schultz Fire burned over 15,000 acres of our beloved San Francisco Peaks. I spent time volunteering at the emergency call center and taking a couple of weeks to recover from the emotional impact of seeing one of my favorite places on Earth decimated. It was a blow. Now we have moved on to coping with the changes and watching nature do its thing, slowly. It takes a long time for a coniferous forest like this one to regenerate, but it will heal over time.

Since then, things are moving along in my life, as they always do. My dream of working part-time didn’t last long. In a couple of weeks, I’ll be going back to full-time at the university. I’ll still make time for the studio, but the dream of spending 2-3 days a week is going to be put on hold for a while. There is a good reason, which I plan to divulge here in a few weeks!

In the meantime, I have enough pieces to do a bisque firing. I have to dismantle the gas kiln and give it a good cleaning before I fire it again. The pilot bar, which sits alongside the burners underneath the kiln and is essentially a pipe with tiny holes, is clogged with soot and the pilot doesn’t want to stay lit. The whole thing shuts off if the pilot goes out; it’s a safety feature. The best way to deal with it is to take the kiln off the burner stand and give everything a good cleaning with compressed air. I’d like to clean it up this weekend, if weather allows. We’re in full-blown monsoon season now, and it has been raining hard in the afternoons.

This bowl was intended to be a cocoa mug but it got too dry to put a handle on. So, I decided to try a new design on it instead. Do you like it? (Colors will be deeper and brighter once it’s fired)

I’m still working two part-time jobs, but one of them finishes up June 30. Hooray! I’ll be down to one job and no school - studio time!

Although I’ve been crazy busy, I’ve been able to sneak some time in the studio. I’ve been working on the color line. It’s nice to use the paintbrush again, like visiting an old friend. I’m also playing with colored clay. Here are a few things I created over the weekend.

I’m finishing up a cup of tea, listing items in my Etsy shop.

Etsy is an interesting place to do business. A lot of traffic comes to shops from the front page of the overall site, where they flash new listings up for a few seconds. The new listings ticker is constantly rolling, so if people don’t catch your stuff when it rolls through, they either need to be directed to your store by you or advertising, or be conducting a search for a specific item. That is how I sold most of my dotted spoon rests, through searches. It is important to put good tags on items so they’re found in searches.

Since a lot of views are generated from the front page of Etsy, I try to time my listings to times when I think people might be looking. For example, early mornings on weekends seem to get views, as do weeknight evenings around 5pm Arizona time. That still catches people who are at the computer at 7:00 back East. It’s all a guessing game. I put in the listing, then check back half an hour later to see if the item got any views. It doesn’t mean those things will sell faster, but at least people are looking at them.

I rearranged the store sections away from “lines” such as “The Color Line” and “The Blue Line” back to categories like “Cups and Mugs” and “Bowls,” etc. It makes better sense that way. It would be nice if an item could fit into more than one category. Maybe that’ll come in a future update from Etsy.