The Pottery Shop Update

Yes, it has been almost a year.....I have only a few months of the year not consumed by real life - but I have made slow progress on my two buildings.
The kit I used for the pottery was just too small. I had already removed the original back wall & re-constructed one with a doorway, so it was fairly simple to extend the back a few inches. I wanted to extend the width instead of the depth, but that would have taken skills... I have none, I just wing it, although I am attempting to use rulers now...

 So, while I'm making a  small change, I might as well add a second floor as well...living quarters.... so I started by mocking it all up with foam board

 And NO, of course my back wall doesn't exactly fit.....and my doorway is crooked.... I'll fill it in with something inappropriate & cover it with paperclay when I'm frustrated enough.

So, while I'm struggling along with structure it's more fun to ready things for the inside. Some inspiration for the walls......

Some glaze ingredients & tools

 I've so far used actual, real ingrediants....copper carbonate, red iron, flint, whiting, ball clay..... I intend to fill the glaze buckets with real glazes too, or at least splash them up a bit with the real deal. (The red iron has already stained the floor!) I have a  better scale coming as well....

A rack of fully readable Ceramics Monthlys ( though not replications of any particular issues, each is just a dozen pages of assorted misc real ads & articles.) 

 Normally, no frothy beers at the wheel......but this is not reality, so why not?
But now that I have an idea of the layout I must pack it all up & work on the darned building & making all the rest of the stuff I'll need..... a bunch of clay boxes with real bagged clay, more pottery tools, dry ingredients, glaze recipes, spills, lots of splatters, a floor drain, etc... and I'm also already starting to work on the kiln yard out back.... brick kiln, kiln shelves & furniture, a water pump.....

In other town news.....new products for Uncle rooster's: tried to make some cigars & boxes & some medical maryjane (no, sorry, nothing actually authentic in these baggies!!)

that's all for now..........

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