: oldlady - Viewing Profile

why are you asking this?

Tyvek is a building product used to keep cold winds from blowing through the walls of your new house. if you know a builder who has a big piece, beg for it. the envelopes used for express mail are made of tyvek. you know how strong that is. i am fortunate that i have a leftover roll of tyvek from building my last house. it comes in a 10 foot wide roll. i have seen it in home depot in a three foot wide roll. don't know why anyone would want 3 foot wide for building a house.

i have a clay boss wheel with a splashpan i never use. Speedball took over for whoever made it. since you mentioned speedball i thought it might be the same shape.

seal the floor. you will be washing it frequently. pits don't matter unless they are golf ball sized and all over. but seal that floor somehow. even concrete paint will do. clay dust seeps into unsealed old concrete and you will wear out mops but never get it really clean.

if you find some TYVEK to cover the table, it will allow you to wash the surface yet it will not stick to the clay. canvas is a dust trap. slapping clay down on a dusty surface in a basement is bad stuff for your lungs.

I've been around so long that i have seen trends come and go. when i started, i subscribed to ceramics monthly. it seemed that the articles were all about fuel firing and cone 10. any "real" potters worked at cone 10. all the colors were brown or dark something. the pictures back in 1972 were few and were only of work at cone 10. the advertisers included the sellers of cone 06 commercial products but were guaged toward the owners of the many "Ceramics" stores which were then enjoying a boom. (we saw them rise and become Paint Your Own shops in the recent past.) and fail again, recently.

the serious work was done by those potters you new folks know as historical figures, bernard leach, michael cardew, shoji hamada, harrison mcintosh, and many more. and glazes were dipped.

in my opinion, color in pots took off after the really beautiful work was able to be photographed in color. what was the name of the woman whose article showed how she made "crayons" and shredded them into her work? started with an H i think. the black background was speckled with all these amazing bright colors. she sold a line of dishes in some very high-class department store. this was probably concurrent with the energy crisis and the attendant outcry about going all the way to cone 10 using gas. such waste!

funny, then we began to see articles in CM about the possibility of using cone 6 and being considered real potters anyway. and now there are many of you using the tiny, little jars of underglaze.

cycles come and go. ain't life grand?