Day 27... Diversify and Adapt...

The special pot is out of the kiln and I have sprayed it with a can of varnish to fill in the porous clay. In the old days, I would have used soap, Murphy's oil soap works good. This would be absorbed into the fine holes of the fired clay. If I do not seal the pin holes, when I pour plaster over the mold, the plaster will also soak into the fine holes of the model and I will not be able to separate the model from the mold. So I use a "release" such as spray varnish or oil soap.



Norwich CT pottery and beehive kiln

 I have been making pottery since 1970. In 1986, I was inspired by my moms old yellow ware bowls to try to make some myself.  I had grown up in this house making cookie and cake batter in these bowls. My girls were 1 and 3 years old when my sister and I went on a road trip to Ohio to research the production and lives of potters in the 1800s. Liverpool, Ohio was the center of yellow ware production in the 1800s.  Thousands of pots were cranked out for years. Every home had a yellow ware bowl.  Many people also used the pie pans, blanc mange molds and colanders that were very necessary in the kitchen. Yellow ware was not widely used for dinner ware. Paupers used simple red ware porringers and mugs and ate off of wood tureens... http://www.rogerabrahamson.com/... Tradesmen, shop owners and the wealthy used fine china.. earthen ware and porcelain imported from Europe. Yellow ware was mostly a kitchen tool.

Potters have secrets. Like most tradesmen, they were in competition with others to make money to survive. When they stumbled upon a good decorating or firing method, they tried to keep it to themselves. Very few notes were made on clays, glaze recipes and firing procedures.  There were no books on "Yellow ware for dummies". I had to experiment.  My first pots were quite ugly, but I had to start somewhere. The clays came out too pinkish or too tan. Glazes were cloudy or crazed. The wonderful feathering disappeared when fired. Colored bands fell off the pots as they dried.

I persisted and finally found out the best clays for the yellow color, temperatures to fire, and glazes to fit properly. It is still an uncertain task.  The clay I get now is from Missouri.  It is shaft mined, and as they mine out deeper and deeper into the earth, each 2000 pound batch I get every year has changed a little. I have to readjust my temperatures. The recent batch has much more grit to it and I find that extremely annoying as I had to adjust the glaze thickness to cover the roughness of the fired pots.

Back in the later 1980s, I went to trade shows and sold my reproductions to museum gift shops or antique and country stores. Places were folks that wanted the country look could buy yellow ware that was much less expensive than the antiques.  Old yellow ware was the Tupperware of the day, it was carelessly used and tossed around. Earthen ware is not as durable as stoneware and many pieces cracked and broke. So today, though thousands were cranked out by those early factories in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York.. ok, most of New England and Midwest were making some form of yellow ware by the 1880s, many of the pots were broken, chipped and thrown out. The market in the 1980s also wanted lead free pots they could use and save their antiques for posterity, which is a good thing.

I cranked out thousands of pieces of pots for a few years before the market started slipping away. Shop owners were not selling and they wanted to see the pots to buy rather than place the large orders I depended on.  Traveling expenses went up.. gas, hotels, food.. I stopped traveling and started camping out.

Then a friend set me up with the Goshen Fair.  This was my first paying demonstration. I have set up for ten years now in the Antique Barn near the entrance every Labor Day weekend. I get to talk to people about pottery, show them how it is made, talk about Hervey Brooks the famous potter that had an 1800s shop two miles down from the fair grounds, hang out with farmers and craftspeople and make money doing it.

Next came the Big E. Another friend suggested I call Dennis Piccard at Storrowton Village in Springfield MA. Now, every year, I demonstrate with my wooden treadle wheel, in 1800s clothing at this great little spot of Heaven at the Big E every September.  http://www.thebige.com/sv/

I now demonstrate all over New England and this will be my first year at the South Carolina State Fair. Great! However, fairs are only running for four or five months in the summer and fall.  In the off months, I teach after school classes, museum workshops and at my home.  My pottery list has moved into some red ware, stoneware face jugs and casting figure bottles and sundries.  I make clay marbles and tiles too. Diversify. 

I also fill in with working at greenhouses. I have woven some planters, birdhouses and little red cardinals for garden color into my stock of pots. 

I still love yellow ware though. I am making more one-of-a-kind special pitchers and steins that show off the beauty of this style of pottery. But I also have to change with the times to accommodate more customers.

When my grampa came from Brooklyn to start his own greenhouse here, he built one greenhouse to grow chrysanthemums and ship them back down to New York by train.  Originally he and his brother raised homing pigeons, chickens and a few dairy cows. Times may have changed for him, because he gave up on chickens and cows, expanded and started growing geraniums and petunias for cemetery boxes, which seemed to be a thriving business in the 60s. He also grew strawberry, tomato and pepper plants for gardeners. He stopped shipping flowers to New York.

Our local Indians once populated and hunted game on this ground. There was a wigwam 1/4 mile from this house when the first English settlers moved in from Windsor CT in 1744.  They cut down all the trees where the Indians had hunted. Killed or scared away a lot of the wild critters. Moved in cows and chickens. Plowed up the land and piled rocks for stone wall barriers. Then mills moved in and roads improved so locals started buying goods from farther away instead of from each other. Growing flax was not profitable when large mills in Massachusetts started turning out yards of cheap cotton. A few of our large dairy farms survived into the 1960s. Then car dealerships sprawled across the east-west highway as horses and oxen became a thing of the past.  McDonalds put the small hot-dog stand out of business. The old Applehouse has been replaced by a conveince mart. Walmart, Petco and Price Chopper moved on top of the cemetery in the middle of a cow pasture.

All along the way, people had to change and diversify. They had to adapt to changes and life styles in order to make a living. That is what I am trying to do too. So this special pot I am making will be mold cast. I am setting aside my love for turning yellow ware to try to pay off my tax bill!

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