Warm plates

I am pulling warm pots out of the kiln.  I love the feeling of them and I wish they would stay warm forever! I was holding one and suddenly I had a memory of myself as a little girl siting in my mum’s studio watching her unload the kiln.  Her studio is in the basement and is sometimes chilly.  I remember she would sometimes hand me a mug or a plate and I would wrap my arms around it and absorb the warmth until it was cool and she’d hand me another one.

I visit her studio a lot in my mind.  I was glazing mugs the other day. Mugs you say?! Wait a minute, you don’t make mugs Sarah!  That’s right but when my mum was here this winter she made me about 50 mugs!! So all I had to do was glaze them…yeah, that’s all!! (sarcasm there) It’s different glazing a mug than a plate, but I think they’re turning out pretty well.  Anyway, I was glazing the mugs and suddenly had a strong memory triggered by the smell of the glazes  (kind of damp, mineral-y, earthy smell).  Again I was in my mum’s studio looking at all the mugs that she had glazed, lined up beside the kiln.  I love how  our memories can be triggered by a smell or a sound.  Pretty amazing the human brain.  Oh listen to me getting all introspective! I have WORK TO DO!!!!

If you want to visit my mum’s studio (not the one in the basement but the other lovely, bright and cheery one) you can go to Wells, BC where she is now open for the season.  Or visit www.beckspottery.com

Have a great day wherever you are.  It’s sunny and bright in Cape Breton and the Lupins are in full, exuberant bloom!

Summer’s Coming

I’ve been so busy in my shop/studio the last few months, trying to be ready for the tourist season.  It is starting to pick up a bit now, but days are still unpredictable, sometimes lots of cars, sometimes only a few.  I like this time of the season because there are people around but it’s not too busy so I can still get things accomplished in the studio.  Once the full on busy time starts it is hard to get much work done because I’m too busy chatting with customers. (Not a bad thing!   One of the things I have accomplished lately is making some jewellery.  I have made some pendants and learned how to wire wrap them from my friend Gayle Bird.  Gayle makes awesome wire wrapped jewellery. I wear it a lot.  I also finally got my rings finished.  When I was a kid I used to pick up pieces of glass in the park behind the Community Arts portable and then I would make a little dish and put the glass in it and my mum would fire it.  I always loved seeing that rather drab old beer bottle glass turn into sparkling melted glass in the bottom of my creation.  That image has stuck with me and I decided to try and incorporate that sparkle into some jewellery.  I’ve made two different sizes of rings, one is HUGE! But it is fun to wear huge rings sometimes.  There’s a smaller size too, not really that small actually, about 1.5-1.75″.

Today was the first day that I had the rings in my shop and I sold 4!   I’m pretty happy about that because even though I might like a new product that I make it’s not always guaranteed that the public will like it.  Jewellery is such a different thing for me to be making, so it’s nice to see that people like it (other than me!).  I just listed the smaller sized ring in my zibbet shop.

Excuse the rough hand!  This is actually the smaller sized ring, although it looks quite large here.

Bye for now,

Sarah

Website Updated and Featured Zibbet Interview

Hello,

MY WEBSITE IS MODERN!!!!

I finally did it!! The old, rickety, archaic looking monstrosity that used to be wildfirepottery.ca has been replaced by something that at least resembles a website made this century.  The rave reviews are pouring in (well at least one)

“Your website is very sophisticated but witha touch of whimsy so as not to be stuffy!”.

Ok, so that is from my good friend Brenda Adam, painter extraordinaire (she did the painting of me below), but who cares! So go and visit and press buttons and ooh and aah. (And if you find any glitches let me know, I’m still tweaking.)

FEATURED ZIBBETER INTERVIEW

I’m also so pleased and honoured to be the Featured Zibbeter this week on the blog at zibbet.com. (Really, I was jumping up and down when they contacted me for the feature!)  Every week they choose a seller out of the 1000′s on the site and do an interview with them.  So if you are curious (or plain nosy ) and want to know a little more about what inspires me, what my passions are as well as my reading habits then click the banner below.

This week I’m attending Cape Breton’s Women in Business Conference.  It’s a two day event held at a resort about 45 minutes away.  two other friends who have craft businesses in my community are going with me.  We’re going to attend a trade fair and make sure people in Cape Breton know about the St. Ann’s artist community and what we have to offer.  There are more than 10 artists with working studios all pretty close to me so we really want people to know that it makes a good day trip.  Retail therapy, don’t we all need that?!! I am really trying to make an effort to network these days.  I just came back from a business trip to North Carolina where we looked at the handmade craft movement.  It really helped to strengthen a belief I already have about the importance of group marketing.  I think the more we all work together the better we’ll do. So that’s why I’m going to the conference…of course a girls night out at a resort has nothing to do with it!!

Be well everyone,

Sarah

oh, I’m now on Twitter.  Follow me if you like for updates and web specials.  (I still can’t get used to that…follow me…it’s like begging for a stalker.  I feel like I need to look over my shoulder when I get that message…”Cape Breton is now Following you…” EEK!)

Knee Pots

I thought I’d do a quick posting about how these Moose Bowls are made.

I roll out a large slab of clay and cut out some circles.  I use something called a “needle tool”, which looks something like a pen with a large, you guessed it, NEEDLE, attached to the end of it.  Hey diabetic potters, save your syringes, they’d make great needle tools!   It cuts cleanly through the slab of clay.  I then slap the circles onto the table, stretching them out a bit and changing their shape slightly because I don’t want them to be perfectly round, that’s boring.

I then stamp some designs on the non-circle, today they were all moose bowls.  I have a moose stamp and a hoof stamp that I have made out of clay.  Here’s where the knee bit comes into it.  I put some plastic over my knee (sometimes i don’t, it just depends if I care if my pants stay clean or not…they are never actually that clean…I am a potter!).  Then I drape the stamped, elongated, ex-circle over the plastic and press it around my knee.

(ps, if you recognize the sweatshirt I’m wearing it’s because you left it at my house after my wedding…that was two and a half years ago, you aren’t getting it back now…but thanks!)

Then I take the piece of clay off my knee, now it is bowl-shaped.  I even out the edges because they can be a bit crinkly sometimes and place it upside-down on the table.  Then I cut out a flat strip of clay with a beveled edge on one side.  I form that into a ring, joining the two ends, and place it with the bevelled side down, on the back of the bowl.  The contour of the bowl fits into the bevel in the ring. This ring will form the foot of the bowl.

I draw around the ring, outlining where the ring is going to go, then I take off  the ring and scratch the clay where I’m going to put the ring. (That’s “score the clay” for all you people who are already clay-lingo savvy). You can see that in the pic on the right. I do the same to the bevelled side of the ring.

Next I wet the scored clay and attach the two pieces. I flip the bowl over and press firmly from both directions to join the foot to the bowl.  I smooth around the outside and inside of the foot ring to make an attractive join.  I also make sure the edges of the foot ring are rounded a bit to prevent chipping from use.  (A sharp edge will chip more easily than a rounded one, you can keep this in mind when you are buying pottery….Of course sometimes sharp edges are part of the design of a piece.)  Lastly I sign my name inside the foot ring.  I will glaze the front and back of the bowl, but I don’t glaze that part.

Here’s what they will look like after they are glazed.  I’ll be listing them in my Zibbet Shop soon.

Tomorrow I think I might try some elbow sake cups…hmm….wonder what other body parts I could use? LOL!

Thanks for reading,

Sarah

ps, If you also are an artist or crafty person and are interested in selling online check out this link to  find out how to set up shop on Zibbet. Exciting times there as so many new sellers are joining the site.

Peep Peep. Easter Tweets, March Hares and Blog Features.

Here are some new Easter Chicks I made just over a week ago.  I had fun making them because I’ve never done an Easter ornament before.

It was good to try out these different glaze colours.  Mostly I use glazes that I mix up myself from “scratch” but all of these colours (except the white) are commercial glazes that I buy in small jars.  They worked perfectly to get the nice bright Easter look.  I have these little guys for sale right now in my zibbet shop.  If I have any left at Easter I am going to take them to my friend’s annual Easter party and hide them around outside for people to find.  I bought some of those plastic hollow eggs that come apart in two halves and they fit snugly inside them.  A little bright tissue and it’s the perfect non-fat Easter treat!

Lately I have been really getting into taking pictures of my pieces because I’m doing all these new listings in my Zibbet shop.  Some of the pictures are still a little dark for my liking but I’m learning how to play with the lighting levels in photoshop and it’s fun trying to come up with different backgrounds to place the pieces against.  For example I am trying to “work with the snow” and not against it (although I really want it all gone NOW!) by using it as a backdrop for some pictures.  I think the seals kind of look like beers in a tub of ice.  Seal pops!

This rust coloured background is just that.  A large rusted boiler cover I pulled out of an old dump on a neighbour’s property.  I love the texture.  I’m trying to create a cohesive look to the pictures in my zibbet shop without making them all the same background, so looking for natural colours, moss, snow, rust, gravel…. I’ll probably try some birch bark at some point.  I’m really enjoying it.  This hare was featured in another blog with an Easter/Alice in Wonderland theme, you can see that post here.  This morning I got an email saying that one of my starfish had been chosen to be today’s blog feature at the I love Handmade Blog.  I was very flattered.  (In case you haven’t figured this out you can click any of the orange text links in this post and that will take you to the site I am mentioning.)

Well I better get back to work. Bye for now,

Sarah

Zibbet is back!

Just a quick note to let you know what happened with Zibbet over the last few days.  (Zibbet is the online site where I sell my work)

Last week there was a huge influx of sellers to the site.  This actually overloaded their servers and brought the site down.  The guys at zibbet worked really hard to get the site transferred over to new servers.  There were some complications but now the site is back up and way faster than before.  I was so impressed by the constant updates to sellers by the zibbet staff over the weekend.  They really kept us informed about what was going on. The great news is that the downtime doesn’t seem to have been detrimental to the site. The premium accounts are selling like crazy today.  I have been checking in off and on over the day and almost 50 premium accounts have sold in the last 8 hours. I’m really excited because I intend to use zibbet as my main online selling site and the more sellers we get, the better it will do.

I have been away for the past week on a business trip to North Carolina.  It was amazing and I will be doing a blog post here soon.  First I have to deal with all the things that didn’t get done while I was away…Really I just want to go back to the blossoms and the mountains around Asheville.  Is it ever a wonderful spot!  I saw so much great pottery.

Stay tuned…and go get your zibbet shop! (If you want to sign up for one or have a look at what zibbet has to offer you can click on the banners at the top or bottom of this post.)  If you want to visit my shop on zibbet then click this link.

If you

Zibbet Zibbet

March came marching in the other day and I didn’t even notice.  The days tend to blur into a lazy haze throughout the winter months.  My mum came to visit for a month and it went by quickly in a whirlwind of eating, drinking coffee, doing Yoga and Nia and working in the studio together.  Mum is also a potter (visit her website)and she made me a bunch of mugs for me to sell in the shop this season.  It’s great because I do get quite a few people who come into the shop looking for a mug, bowl or some other piece of functional pottery.  They are sometimes confused when they look around and see all of the raku sculptures that I make.  Many of them end up buying something however, now those people who hover at the door and then flee in terror when they realize they aren’t in the kind of pottery shop they thought they were in can have something to look at!  I still have to glaze and fire the mugs, but thanks to mum the clay is out of the bag and mug shaped!

I have been working on puffins the last few days.  I looked at my sales from 2008 (haven’t totalled up 2009 yet…taxes…ugh)  and I sold over 80 of the same type of puffins that I’m working on now!  That means I’ll have to make at least 100, probably 120 of them to have enough for the tourist season this year.  They are such popular little guys.  So…about 2o down…only 100 more to go! Yikes! I probably need to make at least 100 or so of each of what I call my 3d pieces to have enough for the season. Those are like the owls that I posted in my previous post (and the puffin pictures at the bottom of this post).  3D because they are round, not cut from a flat slab of clay. They all start out with 2 balls of clay that I make into “pinch pots” and then join together to make “eggs”.  For some reason the egg making is one of may favourite parts of the process…I guess because it is so repetitive, I kind of get into a nice rhythm while I am making them.  So for the puffins I make 9 or ten “eggs”, let them harden under plastic (sometimes overnight) then pinch out the cheeks and tail and sort of shape the wings, add on the beak and the eyes and then put in the balls of clay that make them rattle.  I make seals, bear boxes, chickadees, hedgehogs, sheep and other animals like this too.  So sometimes my husband Paul asks me what I’m working on and I can say “seal eggs!”

It’s Here It’s Here, It’s Finally Here!

Another thing that has been occupying my time lately is my new online shop at zibbet.com.  The shop can be found at www.zibbet.com/wildfirepottery. What is Zibbet you are now wondering?

If you think of the word exhibit it will start to make sense (ex-zibbet…get it? Of course you do, I know you are all so erudite!).  Zibbet is an online site for retailing handmade items.  If you are familiar with Etsy it is pretty similar.  If you are looking for a place to sell your art or if you are just interested in how the process of being a seller works then read on for my endorsement of Zibbet! (Otherwise you might want to skip this next bit)  Right now Zibbet is smaller than Etsy but it is getting larger fairly quickly and I am finding it exciting to be involved in the growing process.  The site admin are great, I sent a question and the CEO Jonathan got back to me almost right away.)   Also because the site has fewer sellers than etsy it is easier to be found and newly listed items stay on the front pages of each category for longer.  I’m pretty excited about my shop.  There are two types of shops at zibbet.com, one is totally free, you can list up to 25 items free. (Yes, she said FREE!)  I started out with the free account, which is actually pretty good, but there are of course features that the free shops don’t have.  So eventually I upgraded to the Premium account.  Right now premium accounts are $7/month (As I write this there are 313 accounts left at that rate, the price will go up when they sell out.  When I bought mine near the end of January there were about 1800 available, so they are selling fairly steadily ). If you sign up now that is all you will pay per month for ever, with no listing or commission fees. The admin are trying to spread the word about zibbet so they have added an incentive.  For every person who signs up through your personal referral link zibbet takes $1 off your monthly fees! If you are thinking of signing up you should try out the free account if you want, it only makes sense to see if it works for you before you commit.

The premium account has more functionality, you can change the colours of your shop, make coupon codes and gift certificates, move listed items around in the display and add widgets and outgoing links in your shop (your blog, etsy shop, whatever!). One of my favourite things is that you can upload all of your photos at once! There is an Etsy importer coming soon too, which will be a nice tool for those who have hundreds of listings on etsy they want to put in their zibbet store.  SO, if you want to sell your art online check it out.  And if you are going to check it out do me a favour and click right here which will take you through my referral link, if you sign up for a premium shop down the road you’ll save me $1 per month! I actually have a promotion in my shop right now, if you sign up for a premium account through my link I will give you $10 off any purchase in my store once you show up in my referrals. Plus there’s a coupon code (see below) so you can save even more!

Get 10% off!

So, now everyone start reading again.  If you want to check out my shop at click this link www.zibbet.com/wildfirepottery.  Now here’s the fun part, if you purchase something use this coupon code at checkout: G3HKL3 for 10% off any item.  This is only available in my zibbet shop.

Nuff said!  Stay tuned for my next posting which will be about my upcoming trip to North Carolina (in less than 2 weeks!).  Now I have to go count puffins…here are some for you to count.

The Barred of North Shore

This lovely Barred Owl has been hanging out outside my studio for the past few weeks.  I think he likes us because we have the most mice in the neighbourhood!  I took this picture from the deck of my studio.  If you zoom in you can see the beautiful softness of the feathers.   Of course as soon as I saw him I started making owls again.  I did a raku firing of some of them today and got some great results.  Some really nice white owls with lots of crackle and plaintive looks.  I’ll try and post pictures of them by next year.  (Well, I’d say I’d put them on here tomorrow but my track record isn’t that great…hey look, it only took me about 4 days!)  My mum has been visiting for the last month and we have been working in the studio together.  She is also a potter and has been making lots of mugs.  I will have to glaze them, but it will be so nice to have mugs in the shop again.  I haven’t made any for years!  We also made some little raku boxes and fired a couple of them today.  Mum’s turned out really nicely.  I haven’t seen mine yet because it was still in the reduction can when we had to leave to go out for supper at the English Country Gardens B & B.  Oh what a hardship…lovely green salad with fresh rolls, (stop reading now if you are a vegetarian) then Prime Rib and Yorkshire Pudding (start again) mashed potatoes, delicious brussel sprouts (yes I know that’s an oxymoron), then a HUGE trifle for dessert with lots of sherry.  (And there was so much trifle I got to take some home for breakfast).  Ok, now I hoped this blog wouldn’t degenerate into talking about what I ate for supper and how many loads of laundry I did today (NONE! And I have refrained from posting pictures of our new stacking washer and dryer in Cherry red which almost makes doing the laundry fun…almost).  So I am only telling you what I had to eat to entice you to come and visit our community where you can stay and eat at the English Country Gardens and visit me in my studio…not so that I could brag about how full I am!

Ok bye for now…I need to go lie down.

Wildfire Pottery featured on Cabot Trail Companion

Hello everyone and happy 2010!

WARNING!! THIS BLOG POSTING CONTAINS BLATANT UNPAID ADVERTISING! Don’t blame me if you feel like spending money when you’ve read it!

I wanted to write about something fun that happened in 2009.  Wildfire Pottery was featured on the Cabot Trail Companion.  It is an audio driving guide to the Cabot Trail. (Which for those of you who haven’t been here yet is a route that most visitors to the island take when they visit the island. One of the best things about the Cabot Trail is that my shop is on it! .  So this driving guide is kind of  like when you go to a National Park or a Historic Site and they give you those recordings to listen to while you walk around, except this is for driving.  Its not boring or dry either, its quite funny and has lots of interesting facts about Cape Breton’s history, geology, whales, Mi’kmaq culture eagles and a bunch of other good stuff (including a cheesy but love-able bit by Mike Crimp of Wreck Cove Wilderness Cabins in the role of Giovanni Caboto, better known to you as John Cabot!).  You get to hear interviews done with people all around the Cabot Trail and that’s where Wildfire Pottery comes into it. There’s even a picture of me on the back cover!  Its  a 2 cd set, so when you’ve finished driving from Whycocomagh (Why? Why not?) to Meat Cove (yes there’s really a Meat Cove) you pop in the 2nd cd and drive through Aspy Bay, Neil’s Harbour (lucky guy, a whole harbour!), Ingonish, stop to watch the Bald Eagles off of Cape Smokey and then you are cruising down into my neck of the woods in St Ann’s Bay.  There are a lot of Artisans in this area, something I should blog about in the future, and there are three shops featured on the Cabot Trail Companion.  One of them is Wildfire Pottery and the others are Leatherworks and Iron Art and Photographs. The creator of the CD, Jon Stackpool, a somewhat dry but very funny Englishman who’s now become a good friend, came to the studio and interviewed me about life here in Cape Breton.  He also recorded a bit of me playing my fiddle and that’s on the cd too. If you get the Cabot Trail Companion 2 cd set don’t confuse my playing with that of Jennifer Roland’s who’s lovely and lively playing is interspersed throughout the recording.  The only thing I didn’t like about the set is that there wasn’t enough fiddle! I wanted even more…but I think that’s my own addiction.

The cd set came out in time for the past summer season and it was funny because people kept coming into my shop all excited to meet me because they’d been listening to the cd.  A lady came in and she was trying to decide which puffin she wanted.  I told her about another lady who had been in a few days before and had ended up buying 2 puffins because she just couldn’t choose one.  Then I felt like I was being a pushy salesperson, so I told her I wasn’t trying to be pushy and she said “Of course you aren’t! I know you wouldn’t be like that from listening to you on the cd!!”  Isn’t it funny how you do feel like you know someone when you listen to them in an interview.  I suppose it’s true though, you do get a sense of someone from an interview, so I’m glad that the cd has helped to make people feel connected to me before they even come through the door.  I had quite a few people who came in because they had heard me on the cd and they said they wouldn’t have stopped except for the cd, so that’s great!  I asked every person who said they had the cd and were listening to it what they thought of it and they all said they were really enjoying it.  Ok, I have to stop now because this is starting to sound like an infomercial, but it’s because I think the Cabot Trail companion is a great product. It has the right mix of facts and funny!  If you’d like to order one you can get them here. (I told you it was sounding like advertising!)

Stay tuned for news of my new zibbet shop, coming soon!  Also I’ll be writing more about what I’m doing in the studio, if I can get the studio tidied up enough to actually get into it and get some work done!!

Bye for now,

Sarah

And ps: congratulations to Jon Stackpool who’s been recognized for his contributions to the Chambers Dictionary.

Wildfire Pottery’s Winter Special

Click here or on the Wildfire Pottery’s Winter Special page in the right hand column (——–> just over there a bit!) under “About Wildfire”to see the great specials all with FREE SHIPPING! Treat yourself, winter is here!

Or see the same specials on Facebook