Saturday, Blondie and I made our now annual trek to Ky. Mudworks in Lexington for their annual anniversary sale. It's a 2hr drive from here but I always have a good time and can usually save enough to defray the cost of driving down. Mudworks is a complete clay supply house with a teaching studio, gas kilns, and tools galore. They have their own branded "Dirty Girls" tools. I always liked dirty girls. It's also a good chance to catch up with some old friends from Ky and meet new friends from wherever. Blondie just likes that it's dog friendly so she can get a free wiener ( she doesn't like for me to use that other term) to eat while she watches the contests and demos. The first contest was how many bowls can you throw in 5 minutes? 10 won. They were also doing one for biggest 7lb cylinder in 7 minutes but somehow, that was when I was buying some 20% off bats and a 15% off Shimpo banding wheel.Those bearings are sooo smooooth! It just spins forever.
The big event was watching Yosuke Koizumi from Shimpo throw a 50 pound
bowl. He centered very carefully, adding 2 25lb balls of clay to the
wheel. He was very good at using his body weight to move the clay
without having to strain himself. He then spent a lot of time opening
and compressing the floor of the bowl and keeping the rim compressed and
true. Finally, he laid it over with a big rib and there it was, 50 lbs
of bowl! Blondie was an excellent studio dog through all of this and
basically laid down and watched Yosuke demo for about an hour and a
half. Not bad for a dog in a crowd of strangers. Thanks for stopping by.
Yosuke came to STARworks, our local clay supplier, last month. So cool to watch him throw that big bowl!
ReplyDeleteI would definitely be the loser in any "how fast can you throw it" competition.
...shimpo banding wheels are the best. I love mine, and it's such a pretty blue.