Thursday, June 13, 2013

Peeking in on the Pottery

      No good town should be without a local pottery. If you need a handmade, useful gift, a container, a variety of vessels, new dinnerware, or just don't have a pot to piss in, where do you go?
This is the store front of Thwilville's finest mud-slingers..as yet unnamed. Oddly.
I made paperclay brickwork & then sculpted trunk-like vines to be intertwined with hundreds of  their own leaves and multi colored morning glories to wrap around the windows of this "Chaplin" kit from Canada:  Victoria MiniLand (Ebay).  Those hundreds barely filled out a twig, so thousands more are in various stages of making. Tedious, but oh so awesome. Eventually. Plus tried the Rik Pierce stained glass window look, though apparently things went askew more often than not. That's to be expected.
This front panel is held in place by embedded magnets- just love it!  The original kit includes a front walled area, but I'm modifying it all anyway so as to have a  kiln yard in the back, and a second story.


 
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I'm now using the original back wall as my second story floor, and made a new back wall out of foam board & paperclay, so I'd have a backdoor to the kiln. (There is ridiculous brickwork on its outside wall, you'll just have to wait to wowed though.)
                                                                                                                                                                                      The back broken brick doorway reminds me of one of my father's potteries from back sometime in the 70's.......I don't know which one, but it's part of a deep tactile amorphous memory of dust, brick, clay, leaves, sun..... but also as Jain said:
" & I smell old alley plaster, I smell Omaha Nebraska" 
                                                                                                                                                   and  "So now that I've lost you......"



Still playing with the layout of the room- have two sets of ware racks, but probably only one will fit (made to resemble the shelves we use in our real studio), the wobbly kick-wheel (that we surely don't use in real life),  many more shelves for materials and tools, and where to add work spaces and tables, and somehow squeeze in a gallery space too? 
When all that is settled, I'll have the great fun of carefully realistically messing it all up with sloppy slop buckets, glaze drools, dried trimmings, splattered slips, re-claimed clay piles & maybe a spilt beer & some dog hair.
And then on to filling up all those ware boards.......with no game potter yet in sight

Stocking the Store


While Uncle Rooster's is still greening up & taking shape these past weeks, I've also been trying to create everything a well appointed stockist of " All Things Air-Bourne" would need:



Firstly, Music, of course! A small but growing selection of  LPs no record store could exist without, our personal family favorites & of course copies of all my real-life musician family & friends record albums! Yes, my LPs are extra groovy....& that's just groovy with me.


 Then there were hours spent making a slew of giant out of scale push pins so I could authentically tack up some rock & roll posters....starting with The MAN in his circa '70-72 hippie grandeur!
Next, duh, it's a Head Shop.....Smoking Paraphenalia & Incense
The giant hookahs were fun, albeit tippy.
Some frustration with realism led to wild experimenting with incense sticks. Like finally trying out real granular & powdered incense.. .. & yes they burned! Quickly, and with a strong odor of toothpick!
I also gave up on having my rolling papers actually be pull-able from their packets, damn it, but many do contain papers.
The special brownies are for after work only.
 credits due:  Pink"Rooster Plate" by  Alavenderdilly  (Etsy shop)



 One weekend's accomplishments- display cases for wild varieties of papers, still too big  incense cones inside open-able boxes, various "rooster" themed  posters and a wholelottabunchmore LPs.

 Some more giant incense cones & crates, crates, crates, because more wares are coming..........