I had a terrible day playing with casting plaster today! Not sure what could have gone wrong. The plaster sitting in an old barn all winter in a metal garbage could have gotten damp. The bisque clay model could have been too porous. The Murphy's Oil Soap I coated the piece with so plaster wound not stick to the model.. perhaps that was too sticky. The mold came out flakey and marred on the inside. So I have scrubbed the bisque piece clean and after drying in the kitchen oven tonight, I will try spraying it with shellac tomorrow, and try again.
So many things can go wrong with pottery. Its not like you make a painting and its done, or weave a rug and you can see what you have, the piece is in front of your eyes the whole time. With pottery; clay, glazes, kilns, temperature, humidity, viscosity... so many variables and chances for something to go amis. And you are never aware of whats going wrong till it's too late.
Early in the year 1803, Simeon Birge and his family of 10 children and another child on the way, lived in 1200 sq feet of space that I now call home. One of his brother, Issac, a mute, had already died at the young age of 29. Another brother died as a result of injuries in the Revolutionary war at age 17. His older sister had 13 childen, 8 died all under 6 years old. On a happy note, his sister Anna had 9 children, all lived and she ended up with 50 grandchildren!
In 1803, Simeon lost his oldest daughter at 17 years along with the new baby girl that year. Childhood deaths were common. So many things could go amis. Food, injuries that would not heal, illness and accidents. Of the 8 surviving children, 5 moved "west" to Missouri and Illinois. In the 1830s, wagon trains of people looking for new lands rolled past the Litchfield CT green.
I believe that sometime around 1818, the original clapboard house on this site burned down. I like the idea of Historical fiction. I found a survey map at our townhall that had a house and the barns here in 1785. However, this brick, Adams style house was build around 1820 judging by the woodwork, nails and cut of the beams. Most. Some of the beams are older. It really looks like the family got together and build a new house out of some of the old wood and pieces. There are beams in the attic with burn marks, but not burn marks together. Like they were taken from a house that had partcially burned down.
No one kept a journal or if they did it has been lost. So we know little of what they did every day.
That's the trouble with history. Very little was actually recorded. People were born, lived and died without writing down what they did every day. Our local potter from Goshen, Hervey Brooks, is famous because he kept wonderful journals about the pots he made and all the other side jobs he did on his farm in Goshen. He was not the first potter in our area, but because he wrote things down and his family kept them, we now know much about the life of a potter in the early 1800s. His barn is at Sturbridge Village in MA and his journals keep his craft alive.
Today was a day for playing with the grandchildren, so not much got done in the pottery barn. But tomorrow, I have to cast more molds, pour molds, roll out some redware trays, throw some pots to fill orders, decorate the trays I made that morning, open the molds I poured that morning, clean and check the kiln for bad wires, paint the small shelves with kiln wash after glaze ran onto them last week, set up a new wheel for a new student and then teach a class.
I don't usually keep a log of what I do everyday like Hervey Brooks. Perhaps I should. Perhaps we all should.
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