Good’ay friends!

I have been busy in the studio making more work for the Christmas sale again. I decided to bring along my video camera to document some of the ways I work. I am both a maker and a teacher at heart, so the teaching part of me naturally wants to be a part of my pottery. I want to share my knowledge with the world–indoctrinating potters and lovers of clay everywhere! I show only my way of doing things because hey, I only do things my way when making, I can’t help it.

I did some more Hakeme decoration on a select few pots. If you are not familiar with Hakeme, let me give you a little slice. Hakeme is a technique which coats a dark clay body with a white slip. While the slip is still wet you swipe a stiff, clean brush over the pot in order to make the white clay stick to the dark clay underneath. Many times this results in the dark clay coming through the white clay where there are deeper brush marks. The white clays in the east didn’t stick to the dark clays as the white would shrink more and crack off the pot, so they learned that if they scratched the pot with a stiff brush it was kind of like scoring the pot beneath while gluing the white clay to it.

I think the brush was typically made from rice straw, however I made my own hakeme brush from grasses found along a roadside.

Here I am attempting to teach the Hakeme technique: