Plants

Spring is definitely here. The clocks have changed, the daffodils look lovely, and the trees are starting to wake up. All this green and new growth gets us at Embar Pottery thinking about this years plants.

We usually get and grow a selection of plants for making our stand at the shows look nice, and also for planting in some of our pots. Its amazing how a few plants can change a pot.

(apology in advance, I got a bit carried away with the photos for this post!)

So I have planted some Gazania seeds, which according to the packet will have orange flowers and are currently this big...

 

I like to grow orange flowers to decorate our table with, as our colour theme for the stand is brown/cream, so orange looks really good.

I am also nurturing some baby spider plants, which provide a bit of spiky structure to our plant life

Here they are being admired by one of my chickens!

The potter has been busy making some new style planters which have a bowl at the bottom, and then in the middle there is a raised platform with a small bowl at the top, to give a layered effect to the plants.
This is the planter in progress, it will have the same sandy texture as our green men, after it has been fired.

 

The planter came out of the kiln this week, so is now ready for planting up. Last week, the potter and I went plant shopping and came home with these....

They are all rockery/container plants so they should look and grow beautifully in our new planter. The project for this week is to plant them out.

One planter that I have already planted out, as the plants are really quite little at the moment, and need to grow before they will look anything (bear that last comment in mind when you look at the pictures!) is the wall mounted green man planter.
This is a tall planter with a small bowl at the back, for trailing plants to grow out of the top like hair! and a small bowl at the front. Both bowls are connected to make watering more convenient (water the front and it flows through into the back as well!).
At the front this year is a geranium (which looks a bit lonely at the moment as it is so small, and the trailing plant has yet to make an appearance! but trust me will look fab when it has come on a bit)

This planter has four holes in the flat section beside the face, to screw to the wall, and looks great in the summer with hanging basket plants. As the trailing lobelia is not tall enough to grow out of the top yet, I have taken a picture of the back of the pot for you to see as well.

This planter will get to live in my greenhouse for the next few weeks, and I will put it up against something flat, to encourage the lobelia to grow up and over the top.
I will update you with more pictures of these planters, once the 2 bowl planter has been planted out and the green man wall planter has grown a bit!
Both will be coming with us, to the first fairs of the season, and hopefully will find homes that love them (so I get the opportunity to grow some more!)

The first show of the season is almost upon us The Framlingham Country Show 12th-13th April at Framlingham College
http://www.classicfestivals.co.uk/#!about/c1enr



Bird Feeders

The sun is shining, so the clay is drying and the Kiln is back in action! All this means it is full steam ahead in the preparations for our first craft fair of the year on 12-13th April
(http://www.classicfestivals.co.uk/#!about/c1enr)

Here at Embar Pottery, we do like to make practical things fun and decorative. Last year we started a new line of bird feeders. There were seed feeders and fatball feeders.

This is the seed feeder and below is the fatball feeder.

about half way through last year, we decided that we needed to make a smaller version of the fatball feeders, so we made a collection of small feeders with exactly the same design but which hold 1 or 2 fatballs instead of the 3 or 4 that these ones hold.
Both the large and the small fatball feeders were a success, and we have made a selection of new ones for this year.

Unfortunately the seed feeders were not as successful. We have been debating the reason why, and we have decided that one of the reasons people are put off them is that they are quite heavy. The large feeders are the same height as the large fatball feeders, but the fatball feeders have large holes cut out, so are about half the weight.

We have put our heads together and decided that we need to make the seed feeders smaller (thus reducing the weight) and have a rethink on the style of them, so for this year there is a new design of seed feeder.

The new design are much shorter with only one feeding platform, and have a pointy hood (not shown in this picture) to keep the seed dry.
They are going to be glazed in a variety of colours, and we shall see if they match the fatball feeders in popularity this year.

Kiln elements

Here at Embar Pottery we have 3 kilns. We have our workhorse kiln, which is an electric kiln with an internal size about that of a fridge. We have a small electric toploading kiln, and a gas fired outdoor Raku Kiln (the potters favourite!) which is about oil drum size.

The electric kilns have coiled elements which heat up to heat the kiln and these have a life span. The elements life span is dependant on what type of firings you do.

We like to make things for outdoor use, and to make things that are frost proof they have to be stoneware and fired to a high temperature. We also like making things in a sandy texture clay which gets a raw but toasted finish, and to achieve this the temperature is even higher!

Items that would be for indoor decorative use only are fired to a much lower temperature (between 100-200 oC lower) and thus the elements last longer.

Unfortunately the elements in our workhorse kiln have worn out.

 

 

As you can see the coils are misshapen and not evenly distributed along the element. They also have a layer of deposit over the metal.

When the elements are almost worn out the struggles to reach the required temperature. It takes much longer to get up to temperature and uses far more electricity. The other problem is that the clay matures best when fired at a particular speed. If it is taking much longer to reach maturing temperature the clay becomes overworked.

 

So this week it has been the job of the (other) pottery assistant to make new elements for the kiln. The special kiln wire was collected at the beginning of the week, and he has been hard at work coiling and fitting them so we can be back in service.



And look how fab they are looking now, so this week they will be tested out as the potter has now got a pottery full of things that are ready to fire (and needs the space!)

Labels

We used to have little stickers which we wrote a price on, and other little stickers which had our website information on. A great system except that they used to unstick themselves from our pots and restick themselves to whatever we had transported them in, until we wanted to unpeel them and then they would stick like they had superglue on them!

So over the last couple of years I have been playing with changing our label system completely!
Last year the mini labels were ready for action, we took them to the printers and were really pleased with the results...

They looked really great, the image and writing had a smart, slightly shiny appearance, and my favourite bit is the tear off price section (with perforation!) so no more fighting with the stickers that won't unstick when you need them too!

This year I have finally got the normal size labels ready and the first lot are back from the printers. They come printed on an A4 sheet and then the get cut up and folded and then string threaded on them. Inside is a short description about Embar Pottery and space for a description of the item.
On the back is our contact details. The QR code is a link straight to our website and like the mini labels there is a perforated tear off price section.

 

 



 

Its amazing how much time something as basic as labels takes up, and how after using what we thought was a great system (with the stickers) for a while, your ideas change and how you want to present something changes. 

Little House Numbers

I was going to make this post more about what we have been up to over the last couple of months, but I can't wait to start with revealing the new lines for this year, although we actually started planning this at the end of last season, any one who saw us at the last show of the season would have seen the potter developing these (obviously with help from me, pointing out what I didn't like!)
So this is the first of the new designs to show you.

The house numbers that we make (see previous post) are designed to be seen from a distance. For fitting to house walls or fence posts etc. Because of this they are quite big (approx 17cm tall).
Over the last couple of years we have regularly been asked if we make smaller numbers for flats or to be attached to front doors.

This year we have finally spent some time planning how we could make this work successfully and this is the result. They measure approx 9cm tall.

 



 We spent a long time considering the best way to do these. The potter attempted to make a mini version of the large numerals that we make, but they were too fussy and you lost the crispness of the number and the definition of what the number actually was.
For a while we have made number plaques (to order) with a large picture design and a number, so we decided to go with that principle but smaller to come up with these.

The potter has been busy making all the numbers 1-20 as well as a 1a and 2a ready for the show season, and we shall see what the response is.