Octopus' Birthday

Still in use!

I’ve been painting octopuses practically since I first started playing with drawing on my pots, before I started diving, and long before I decided to be a professional potter. Over the years I’ve painted thousands of them, so much that their broken parts, softened by a noisy spin in the cement mixer, decorate and provide mulch in my yard. In addition to reading all the books about octopuses (the latest being, Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness which was delightful), watching documentaries and scavenging images, I love seeking them out under water.

Pacific Octopus (w/papillae)

This summer we encountered a severely tormented octopus, only 3 complete tentacles and under the constant menacing of garibaldis, off the Mexican Coronado islands just south of San Diego. I giggled and gushed so exuberantly that I filled my mask with water and sucked my oxygen like a maniac. I was like the double rainbow guy for the entire encounter and will be again the next time. This same passion guides my sculpting and painting, I love tangling the tentacles and placing their suckers just so. This year I received a commission to do a Cephalopod dish set, so my fascination was given business expense legitimacy (just like my diving trips). In doing this and my latest GoPro-recorded love-fest, I realized I have overlooked the glorious papillae that the octopus uses to change its texture. So there are new octopus designs for 2017 and more varieties of them too. I may have been doing this for a while, but I still adore it and it still feels fresh. Thank you, truly, for your support.

   In addition to sharing my passion for octopuses, which, if you’re a fan of my pottery, you likely are too, I am writing this to report that I will be off in Europe for the latter half of September to, amongst other things, celebrate my (and the Octopus') birthday.  Feel free to place orders while I’m gone, as I’ll keep track and make them when I return, fresh and possibly inspired in new directions.  There’s only one show left for me this year and it’s all the way in December (KPFA). In the meantime, I will be doing a Day-of-the-Dead celebration whose details I will hold close until I return…
        Stay well, Stay inspired, Stay joyful!
                 Thank you!
                          -Liz R

Argonaut

Flamboyant Cuttlefish 

Cuttlefish

Dumbo Octopus

Nautilus

Squid

OCF 2017 and Hopefully More

 Petition for a Permanent Spot

I tell my family it’s the “Naked Hippy Festival”, but it’s so much more than that.  Yes there are many exposed body parts and body types of every variety, but it’s more than a nudist experiment.  Teeming multitudes of volunteers work for months before, during, and after the event, taking care of everything from security to trash collection, intake and construction, and firing the cauldron that heats the gloriously hot water at the Ritz (where everyone is naked on a freshly re-built wooden floor under an open sky).  There is a genuine concern for the land where the event is held, attendance to its archaeological heritage and the environmental impact of tens of thousands of tromping dazedly all over and camping within it.  It is an amazing feat.  At night, when the paying guests have been “swept” from the grounds, a whole other faire begins under the twinkling lights reflected on the the trees and dangling disco balls.  There are nearly as many people at night , a population made up solely of volunteers, vendors and faire workers of every sort.  There are spontaneous pockets of music and darkness appropriate wear.  I felt like the belle-of-the-ball with my LED outlined jacket.

     This was our 5th time, which, according to the rule book, means we are eligible for a permanent spot.  I've been all over the faire under the One-Year-Only (1YO) butterfly.  This time we were in the newest section, Xavanadu, which boasts a massive oak tree, glowing jellyfish lights and a phoenix at night.  Once I got over trying to call it Xanadu, with its disco associations (and I find it more than appropriate that when I googled Xanadu, it quickly led me here: which exemplifies the spontaneous expression of joy and art that reflects the OCF experience), I've declared it my favorite spot.  We had about 1/2 the traffic, but there was room to stretch (literally: a yoga tent out front), a tree house, and the grass hasn't been turned to dust like it has on the eight.   I missed the parades, but hopefully they'll start to trickle down there.
    Which brings me to THE PETITION.  Namely, I would like anyone who would like to kibitz in on my behalf, to see me permanently at the Faire, to send me an email, or even mail me one if you hate computers, so I can add your input to my petition.  As it is, I apply each year for the floating available spots, or share a spot with someone (thank you Colin of Liotta Designs!)  One of the more interesting, and challenging aspects of this event is the extent of sharing.  If you receive the honor of a booth assignment, you have to share it with another juried artist.  At all the other shows I attend, I get my 10x10 easy-up tent space and fill it with my own things and chat with the neighbors about tying ourselves together against wind or getting each other snacks.  But at the Oregon Country Fair, you have to negotiate with structures that have been flooded many times, moss, roses, natural obstacles, uneven everything, and truly chaos in every form.  And then you have to divide up the space amicably so that we can all sell and live and pack peaceably together: an idealistic microcosm.  And I would like to make it my July home.  Even if you've never been, if I've wooed you with my story to explore the Faire for the first time, please fill out my petition and tell them so.  It's a truly amazing event!  Hope to see you there next year!

100 Days...

   It's been hard.. for me as I think it has for many people in America.  "45" somehow became president (like Voldemort, I can't say his name).  It felt like a massive punch in the gut, as a woman, and a nightmarish repeat in the racist kickback it has enabled... I wanted to simultaneously curl up in my studio and scream from every skyscraper.  The Woman's March was therapeutic and energizing.. but it was just a walk, with funny hats.  Clearly there was some actual WORK to be done.  The next day was the anniversary for Roe v. Wade and I attended an event where I sold "Never Again" cups as a Planned Parenthood fundraiser.  That felt good (still have more left)...

    And the more I listened, the more I got overwhelmed and disheartened, but also inspired to hear how many people ARE standing up.  So what do I do? Continue painting whimsical owls in my studio in the forest?  Make ospreys with 45's hair grasped in their claws?  I felt a need for heroes, so I spent several days thinking and listing and breaking away from animal form to struggling with human.  I ended up with 4 mugs: Michele Obama, Sylvia Earl, Elizabeth Warren and Rachel Maddow.  They are all people who give me hope, who make me feel like I have a voice and that if something matters to you, there are things you can do to change it.  I'm not sure what to do with these 4 that stand out from my usual collection.  I will most likely auction them to raise funds for Sylvia Earl's Mission Blue. They diverge from my characteristic confident line.  But then, I wasn't feeling very confident.  I have to admit that I did some crying. But there is a song running through my head:

"Cuando todo parece jodido es cuando hay que poner!"- When everything looks f-*, it's time to act- ("Jose Sabia" by La Vela Puerca). 

 There's inspiration out there.
     It's time to stop reading and focusing on dystopian narratives and look for sustainable solutions, even in the smallest scales.  The robots ARE taking over. They drive better than we do.  But that also means the massive work force of drivers will lose their employment.  What should they do next?  Do we become a nation of artists? Re-users? Bug-eating chefs? Farmers? Inventors? Trash eliminators? The main point is that we remember and celebrate our humanity.
     I was recently uplifted by a news item about local restaurant making their play for sustainability; using their kitchen scraps to feed maggots who then feed fish which poop in the water that feeds the plants that go to the restaurant (Perennial, SF).  Nathan Coffman, the director of Living Systems , Oakland, who provides this service says,

"The way you subvert the dominant paradigm is by having way more fun than them and making sure they know it"  

I can stand by that.

Kiln update/Warning to potters

     Generally I try to focus my energies on positive experiences, which is why I posted, at length, about the excitement I felt about my new L&L kiln last year.  What ensued afterward was ugly and disheartening and I planned to write about it, but was so stressed at the time to be having issues in my busiest season, that I put it off.  But then, because I did not, and because I fell out of communication with my sister, she ordered the same horrible L&L kiln for her school and experienced the same difficulties.  SO... lest someone else be taken in by the slick ceramic element holders that made me swoon:

 DO NOT BUY AN L&L SCHOOLMASTER KILN!

Kiln Sitter w/cone

     Before I purchased this kiln, I had a manual Skutt kiln, with an old fashioned kilnsitter that turned itself off by melting a cone.  I had to babysit it a lot.  First I had 3 1/2 hours on low with all the plugs out and the lid propped open, then I turned it up for an hour on medium, and then closed the lid and plugged all the holes but one and switched the kiln on to high.  Since I was always cramming to fulfill orders/deadlines, this often occurred in the middle of the night.
     I wanted a computer to take over.  The photographs of the L&L element holders in Ceramics Monthly were seductive.  Over the years, I replaced the elements in the old Skutt and my aunt's Olympic kilns multiple times, and every time little chunks of the fragile kiln brick chipped off.  I even had to replace the bricks themselves a few times (a hair-raising gamble that puts even more bricks in harms way!).  So the ceramic holders looked like a perfect solution.  And they made the controls so simple (they said) that even an elementary school teacher could run them (their words, not mine.. and not true anyway).

      So I ordered it, online, happy with a 5-year warranty, and set it up in my studio.  However I soon noticed that it was not firing to temperature.  The glaze was not vitrifying, the witness cones (one below expected cone temp, one at, and one above) I put in there to test it, were not bending.   When I contacted the company, I was given phone access to a technician in Oregon.  One of his first comments, when he learned it was my first computerized kiln, was, “like [his] car mechanic always says, ‘It’s the nut behind the wheel that’s the problem.'"  He walked me through some steps, but because the control panel was so "simplified", I could not simply extend the hold time, or adjust what temperature it considered cone 04 or 5 to be.  It would only display, momentarily, the temperature it was currently at.  So I stood next to the kiln and watched it turn itself off BEFORE it reached proper cone temperature.

Unmelted cones in LnL kiln

    The way that cone gauges work is they melt at a range of temps.  For example, bisque firing is generally cone 04, or a 1945-1971^o range.  Cone 5 (glaze) is 2167-2205^o range.  But the L&L kiln consistently turned itself off at below temp: 1921^o for cone 04 and 2123^o for cone 5 and with the recommended VentSure system sucking the heat out, there was no way any part of the kiln reached bisque or glaze temperature.

    So I called L&L again.  They sent me a new control card.  Simple though it was, I was unimpressed that, with their highly advertised 5-year warranty, I had to install it myself and no mechanic was sent out to check my situation out, especially when the first message it flashed was "ERR P" which meant "bad control card".  This time, they had me remove the entire control panel and ship it to them.

   I had already sold my old kiln to a friend so I was effectively without a kiln during my busiest season.  When I called L&L to put an express rush on the control panel shipment,  I was told by the office manager, Denise, that I should "take [my] greenware to a friend’s kiln to fire it" while they shipped parts back and forth.  Clearly inexperienced with the product she sells! Greenware is already like egg shell, likely to crack with the lightest tap, and my pots are decorated with slip that can also be rubbed off with the friction of bubble wrap.  So that was NOT AN OPTION!!  Luckily, she did express the shipment.  But that was not the last of my problems....

LnL on left, Beautiful Skutt on right 

     In the end, I spent way too much time and money troubleshooting, test firing, calling a technician, being a technician and being talked down to.  After they delivered and I installed the upgraded control panel, Dynatrol, which had twice the value of the original, was more dynamically controllable and could supposedly take the kiln up to cone 10- I was THROUGH!  So I sold it, at a loss, to another potter in Novato and did what I should have done in the first place: bought a Skutt kiln at my local ceramics store, Creative Ceramics, where they are knowledgeable and helpful and if anything goes wrong, they will help me make it work again.  A lesson I can apply to almost every purchase.

I've said my piece.  On to better things... 

(BTW, in the photo, terrible temporary cord placement until LnL moved out.. don't do that!  It's not like that now)

  In short, here's the Calendar of Events as they occurred to me. A season of woe:

Date	Event	Result
4/13/16	Noticed that kiln was underfiring	Ran tests to identify problem: Kiln turns itself off before it reaches the temperature appropriate to the cone selection- 04 & 5
5/10	Contacted LnL kiln about issue
5/17	LnL Kiln sent new control card	Arrived 5/25
5/25	I installed new control card	Got “ERR P” message (bad card)
5/27	Returned entire control box	“fixed” control box arrived 6/9
6/9	Test bisque firing	Underfired
6/13	Test glaze firing	Underfired
6/17	Called technician. Offset thermocouple	Contacted LnL and they sent new thermocouple
6/21	I installed new thermocouple	Did not solve problem
7/5	Returned entire control box	arrived 8/8. Upgraded to Dynatrol (fires to "cone 10".  GOT RID OF KILN!

Cooking with Pottery and Blue Apron

I listen to a lot of podcasts while I paint. From NPR to Radiotopia and RISK, most are sponsored by Blue Apron.  My mom joined Blue Apron first and when she brought it on a short trip, I cooked pleasantly with my Dad.  It was a tasty meal and there was no bickering at all.
     So I signed up, and when I went to visit my sister for a week, I had it delivered to her house.  The meals are nicely designed, can be easily adapted to feed more, but mainly, it's a good restaurant-quality meal that you don't have to plan ahead of time and all the ingredients are fresh and thoughtfully harvested.  But the best part is the ease of cooking it together, with anyone, and the kitchen bonding that creates when it goes smoothly.
      I love using "plate" as a verb and the pride in the meal it creates when you plate it nicely.  So now it's time for my own product placement....  People often complain that they can't see the design when it's full of food.. but what motivates you to stay on target better than a gawking owl! And when you empty it of the prepped portion, he stares at you again!

   Ever since I started making octopus serving dishes, people have said it would be perfect for Squid Ink Pasta.   So when it was an Blue Apron meal, I felt the cycle was complete and I had to test the hypothesis.
      I got out all the mini bowls I tell all my customers are great for preparing meals (they are trully the bowls we use most).  And we filled my octopus platter with squid ink pasta.  It was delicious!

"Plated" pasta

Some customers worry that the pots are "too beautiful to use".  People have been cooking in ceramics longer than anything else.  The casserole dishes I've been making recently are built on a mold made from a set of antique Danish (?) ceramic dishes that have been heavily used.  I fire my pots to 2200 degrees, so your oven is certainly not a shock for them.  Just recently we had friends over and we cooked Dutch Babies in my pots (though I neglected to take a photo).  And with all the apples and berries ripening, I've been making pies like mad... .  Now I'm determined to make new pie pans this week...

NEW Kiln!

My Aunt's old Olympic kiln.
Yes, that's a big redwood root behind it

    I started out with my aunt's little Olympic kiln.  The bricks looked ancient when I inherited it, but I made it work hard.  Replaced its elements several times, moved it, grew my hobby into a business with it.  Until I needed to make more product, because I was finally giving myself more time to do it.  Then I bought the Skutt, from another potter who was moving on to a digital control.  It was pretty new, 7 times

Kiln Sitter

The Old Skutt

bigger than the Olympic, and came with all the kiln furniture.  Both of my first kilns are controlled by the melting of a ceramic cone, in a device called a kiln sitter... and, of course, an eye on the clock.  The firing process required me to prop the lid up with the plugs all out for 3.5 hours on low to get the water out of the clay, or in the case of the glaze firing, out of the glaze.  Then you turn the kiln up to medium for an hour, after which you plug all the holes but the top one, close the lid, and turn it up to high.  I set an alarm for when I hoped the kiln would stop, but it was never exactly correct.  So many factors affect the timing from the age of the elements, the density of the load, the weather... So I usually just hoped it wasn't a faulty cone and would melt at just the right moment.  I could peek in the peephole.  But I really can't differentiate the 1000 degree red from the 2000 degree red.  I could use, and officially should use, a "witness cone", a backup melting blob of clay that I could peep at, if my eyeball didn't melt off in the process, to see if  it too was melted.  Usually I was too stingy with my space to give it up to precision.  Most of the time the firings were fine...but sometimes, making a change in the middle of the night, I would neglect to plug all the holes, or not set the timer long enough for it not to go off before the cone melted...and then I'd have to start all over again.

New L&L Kiln

My NEW kiln, an L&L SchoolMaster, tells me what temperature it is all the time.  It also has a venting system that eliminates my need to wake up different times to adjust the air flow.  And it turns itself up exactly as I request it to do.  And once I determine my ideal firing schedule, I only have to press the one button.  One for Bisque, one for Glaze.  It's not perfect, mind you.  The binder of information that came with it was clearly written by engineers, not the school teachers the kiln is marketed to.  It doesn't do voice control or an app interface, but it keeps me sleeping at night.  And though I was nervous to open up this first load... I am so happy with the result!  And I passed my old Skutt onto another aspiring potter so she can learn the down and dirty of the firing process before retiring to a digital control version.

Oh technology...

Things I Do to Make a Buck

  Self-employment means you have to seek a variety of means to make a living.  Here's how I define those current differing activities that support R Honey Pots:

Bees

1) Bees.  We take honey bees, live, from buildings where they're not wanted and put them in our box.  Then we wait over night for them to move in and collect them, at the crack of dawn, before they wake up.   Transport them home, nurse them and check for queen rightness, then move them to the apiary (at the crack of dawn).  If we're lucky, which, thanks to the drought we haven't been for the last 2 years, we harvest honey which is the extremely messy process of transporting heavy boxes, flinging sticky substances, bottling it, then giving the frames back to the bees to clean up.

Throwing

2) Make Pottery.  I heave a ton of clay from my van down to my studio in 50lb increments where I fling it on a wheel or pancake it in my slab roller.   When it dries, I paint it, fire it, dust it, glaze it, fire it, photograph it, put it in a box and heave it back up the hill to my van.  Then I update the website, post to facebook, instagram, send out postcards.

The Van

3) Sell Pottery. While an increasing amount of my sales are done online, I still fill the van monthly and transport everyone to craft shows, the farthest of which, this year, was to La Jolla- 11 hours one way.  Usually we leave at our favorite hour, crack of dawn, and set up in the 2+ hours before the show starts.  We unload all the boxes, set up the tent, then the display structure, and finally, painstakingly, Joey displays as much pottery as he possibly can in our 10x10 domain.

Some sights have a lot of variation (KMAF)

Levelling the booth at night

Joey arranging the booth

4) Take on New Challenges.  Every year there's someone asking if I can do something I haven't quite done before.  I always say yes.  This year I'm making new tables and meeting with architects and interior decorators to design remodels.  Tile projects I have only completed in my own home are now going to be adapted to someone else's (there will be photographs of this after January).  With Joey's metalworking and carpentry skills, we are hoping to develop and expand this custom installation side of our business.

5) Share the Knowledge.  Around January (details still being ironed), I will be teaching a ceramics class at the Sebastopol Center for the Arts (http://sebarts.org/index.php/classes/).  In February, I will be giving a presentation to the Rossmoor Ceramics Club (http://www.rossmoorceramics.com/)

6) Enjoy life.  Swim in the ocean as much as possible.  Do pilates.  Garden.  Rock climb.  Kayak.  Hunt mushrooms (if it rains!).  Visit friends.  Play music.  Dance...I love being my own boss, even if the common themes are waking up at the crack of dawn, heaving boxes, and being filthy.  The rewards are great!

Doran Beach