Big news! Zizziba Studio is getting a new home!

I bought a piece of commercial property with a sweet old house-cum-office building and a one-car garage that will be converted into a studio.The house is circa 1930. It is so sweet and has a ton of potential. The garage is a simple wood frame building with a corrugated steel roof and a dirt floor.

I got the keys September 1st. Watch this space for the exciting transformation!

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)