Monday 30 November 2015

Niklas Preukschat - October



Puh… I have to apologize for such a delayed update about Octobers’ time at our pottery but I needed a while to get my head around this.


With the online exhibition lurking around in my head, a little person in there turned on an emergency switch labeled as “fast and furious working mode” and suddenly I couldn’t potter around with my ideas as I did before. So, to get that kiln filled, Nic and Sabine allowed me to have an extra throwing day and with working weekends and evenings, I slapped out pots as mad. At this point, I want to apologize to Nic and Sabine and everybody else who had to deal with that grumpy Me during this time. 
 
music against grumpiness? hmmm... no.
Once a week I also was making pots for our annual Christmas sale in December for which we will have an extra firing after the online exhibition. And because everybody else was making pots as well, the workshop soon spilled over of pots! Then, towards the end of the month, autumn became more and more visual with trees changing their dresses or even standing around completely naked (uah!). So we had to hurry with Nics’ leaf decoration as long as they were of any use for us. 


Our latest apprentice: Elsa

Then Nic taught me a lesson in how to throw tall with coils and although I didn’t get up to his sizes it was a damn great experience! In these weeks of making we all had to think a lot about how to promote our work on the internet, which was tricky because we wanted to get on with things and stopping the wheel here and then to take photos or videos was quite a disturbance sometimes. But of course not only! When we all motivated each other, it was good fun and a great chance to try out new ways of recording (a time lapse app on the tablet was a nice little toy!) 

 

The last week then passed by even more speedy, Nic got prepared to pack his kiln with me to help and glaze my pots possibly at the same time. And then all of a sudden, one of our kiln chimneys was looking for a posher place to move so we gave it a few helping hands by moving its bricks over to Nics kiln. 

making
making
making
I was quite glad that our firing crew arrived a couple of days before kicking off Nics firing to help with all that, otherwise I would have ended up tearing myself apart to get everything done. Yeah! Generally, I would say it was an incredible time of making but also extremely stressful and demanding. But that wasn’t the end of the trip, oh no! The first week of November was still to come, with three firings and two kilns to pack. Haha! It becomes funny, looking back at it. But I save that story for the next post.


Hmmm! A treat to keep us going