I haven’t been completely idle though. My current work has migrated over to creativeyenacts.com. Do come over for a visit!

From the outside this seems like a fairly pointless exercise. “I’m about to spend a whole bunch of time working on a lump of clay before I do an real work on the lump of clay? What’s that all about?”  I hear you cry…

If you are working clay directly out of the bag, it probably is largely pointless. It’s easier to see the point when you aren’t using dress clay and have to mix several different bits of clay all with different moisture levels.  Air bubbles are also a concern…  But there is a secondary purpose to wedging that may or may not be apocryphal, but in my early experimentation seems to bear out.  

The analogy for me is softening butter for pastry work. If you make croissants, after you make the bread dough, you have to insert the butter that is cold, but workable. If you don’t, the butter either melts into the dough and you simply end up with bread, or the butter is too hard and it rips the dough and unpredictable things happen. The best way I have found to prepare the butter is basically to hit it with a stick. If you beat up the butter, what you end up doing is fracturing the structure of the water and fat in such a way that the bits of butter slide past each other and the butter will fold nicely. It seems that something similar goes on with the clay. If you wedge it properly,  basically kneading it, you force any incidental bindings between the bits of clay to break up.  Given that clay particles are apparently platelike, orderly kneading and twisting of the clay will arrange those plates in a regular grain. That this may or may not help with throwing is something that I cannot personally attest to, but it is the popular opinion. If someone has a handy electron microscope, maybe we can find this out…

stupid question really. One should have as many hobbies as one can enjoy.

Came up recently due to a long running yen to do some pottery. I have a couple of functional theories that I can think of no other way to work out than by doing them.  Handily, I also found a really nice potter’s wheel on Craigslist being sold well below list. (I love it when the wealthy give up on hobbies…)

So now in the studio I have the wheel set up and a big block of fresh clay.   Onwards….

One early note that I would like to impart to any other new beginners out there who might stumble on to this post. For your first bag of clay, from which you are going to make a lot of throw away material, buy a color of clay that does not show up well on the workshop floor. Terracotta is lovely stuff, but as a beginner, the last thing you’d want to worry about is staining everything within a yard of the wheel with bright red staining splashes… Learn this lesson well…

if you are working on a piece of project management software, how does one manage that peoject?

Sometimes you just have to duck…

After a regrettably long time, I finally found a workaround for the issue I was having with overlapping gesture recognizes. And Quinda is fixed! … Now I just have to remember how to go through the release process…

Fwiw, For gesture recognition speed, unless you’re going to entirely write your own, I heartily recommend using a pan gesture recognizer and its associated velocity to stand in for multiple swipe recognizers. You don’t have to move as fast, and the uncertainty time is much shorter.

The procrastination circle is breaking down…

the concept of making a resolution is dangerous for me. it tends to kindle the rebellious nature in me. so I won’t make one. however, I will be doing something useful here soon.

I intend large things…

crap, I did it anyway…

the only real question that I have about the thing is what level of water resistance does it have? I know they have a ‘sport’ model, but you never know… this would be killer as a race start timer, but if it can’t get wet in any way shape or form, that would be a serious drawback…

of course I want one anyway…