help!
I have been saving this photo for just the right time… and that time is NOW. This is a door in the barn, I have no idea what it means, or who put it there. It's just a door to a workshop area (which has another entrance), not some kind of dungeon filled with the bones of prisoners as I first thought.
We have been so so busy. Last weekend was our wedding anniversary and we celebrated 19 years of wedded bliss by taking a 4 day weekend and working nonstop! Romantic, right? We did take an evening out for fine dining which was absolutely delicious and then we got straight back to work!! I am going to write about everything at some point, maybe when it’s rainy, but I can’t tackle that today. Yesterday the contractor who is installing our perimeter fence called to say that they want to start next week which put me in full panic mode. We need to turn the compost because it’s currently in the way of the planned fence, we need to dig and install a 20 foot culvert, and we need to move the boys (and all of their bed pack) because they are also in the way of fence installation. I have no idea where to put them that won’t be in the way, and it’s supposed to rain nonstop all weekend. Fork. The logistics of fence installation when there are animals on the property are complicated. The sheep have just sort of gotten on pasture and they are not going to appreciate a week (or more) of containment with dry hay. The valley will soon be filled with the sounds of my sheep complaining about their circumstances.
Anyway, in the interest of trying to write semi-regularly, I’m going to give you an update on a project in the house! We are going to have to get in the time machine to go way back to the summer of 2020 to start from the beginning.
It was the end of September, dusk was quickly turning to pitch darkness and a thunderstorm was heading straight for our fresh, fragrant, round bales. We have never had proper hay storage, and we don’t really have it at The New Farm either, it’s something we need to work on. I was hoping to switch to wrapped bales (the ones that look like giant marshmallows), but the farm I was hoping would make them for me has gotten out of the hay making business.
Back to The Old Farm… Each year, we would stack the bales and cover them with giant hay tarps. The tarps always eventually blew off and our neighbors would drive by and shake their heads at our optimism, but our thinking was that if we could at least keep them covered until January or February (prime tarp blowing time) then it would at least mitigate the loss in quality? Or maybe it just made us feel like we were doing something? So this night we were trying to work fast and I had bought these 4 foot bungee cords to stretch around the ends of the stack. Have you ever noticed that bungee cords come with some pretty extreme safety warnings? When Chris tightened his end, it created slack on my end and I thought the bungee cord hook had fallen out of the tarp grommet. I grabbed one end of the cord and started walking. I made it pretty far before it snapped back at me and hit me on the back of my hand. OUCH. We finished covering the bales while Chris was saying things like, “you’re such a brave girl” and I silently plotted his accidental death. When we got inside and in the light maybe 20 minutes later my hand was already extremely swollen and bruising fast. Remember 2020? I have a chronic lung disease and I was terrified, so I wouldn’t go to the hospital. In my paranoid little mind I felt that an urgent care would be safer somehow, so I went and the wait time was something like 6-12 hours. I declined to wait that long in my car in the parking lot, so I went home and ordered a splint on the internet. I am pretty sure I could feel a break, and now I feel a lump there like a bone callous, so I think it was broken, but either way, this injury put an abrupt halt to my fledgling pottery career. I couldn’t throw pots on the wheel so I decided to try my hand (the unbroken one, anyway) at tile making.
The old farm has a big brick fireplace which was ok, but then the previous owners had kind of expanded the facade of the fireplace and the new bricks didn’t match very well and it made it look kind of cheap, if that’s not too snobby to say. My plan was to make tiles and tile over that brick so it would look like one of the historic Arts and Crafts fireplaces that I love.
I watched a couple of you tube videos and I felt that I was fully prepared to be an expert tile maker in the time that it takes for a small bone to heal. It turns out that making the tiles was going to take literally years at my rate of 3-5 hours per week.
There are probably 10 good reasons that handmade tile is crazy expensive, and I’m going to talk about those now. It is way more complicated, finicky, and time consuming than you think. Step 1 is to wedge the clay. You have to do this for any kind of ceramic project, so it doesn’t really count, but if you are wedging clay for tiles, you are supposed to mix in grog which I think is fired clay that has then been crushed to bits? I skipped this step since I was putting tiles vertically where nobody was going to walk on them. Then the tilemaker has to roll the clay into a slab. Thankfully, my amazing teacher owns a slab roller which makes quick and even work of this. Next you cut out the tile shapes very carefully because you can squish or stretch them very easily. Then the tiles need to dry which is THE TRICKIEST step. I sandwiched them between two sheets of drywall which held them flat while absorbing the water out of the clay. This worked like a dream… until it didn’t. The atmospheric humidity had a huge impact on the drying time. Everything was great during the fall and winter when The Potter keeps his studio toasty warm, but as the spring and summer came, and the humidity rose, the drywall became completely saturated and the tiles stopped drying. For a while during the summer I was moving the whole drywall stack with tiles into my car so the hot sun would bake the water out of them. This worked pretty well, but I ultimately decided it wasn’t worth the effort. Even after all of this fiddling and waiting, some warped in the kiln. Once the tiles are bone dry, then they need to be finished, which for me was just sanding off the rough edges. I love jobs that require zero brainpower while I can chat with my pottery friends, so I enjoyed this step. Then they need to be bisque fired which means that every single dumb little tile needs to be loaded into the kiln which is a top loader so you have to bend way over on your tippy toes to get the ones on the bottom and it is super time consuming. I’m pretty sure The Potter did many loads like this for me and it takes forever, and he is a wonderful person regardless of whatever I might say under different circumstances. Then we reverse the previous step which is just as unpleasant. THEN! Glazing. This is my weakest skill in the ceramics studio. Some people seem to just have a feel for it, but I do not. At this point you have already put so much work into a piece and this can ruin the entire effort. I dipped the face of the tiles in shallow dishes of glaze. You have to be super careful not to get glaze on the bottom of the tile or it will fuse to the kiln shelf during firing and live there forever. Glaze is a colloid, so water with little bits of stuff floating in it. The key to uniform glazing is to keep those bits suspended perfectly, so I would dip two tiles carefully and then stir. If you want to get information out of a spy, you could make them do this activity and they would tell you anything you wanted to know within just a few hours. I made about 600 tiles total, just think about this for a minute. After this, we load them BACK into the kiln and repeat the fire and remove process, and then we are done. Finally.
People who do this for a living deserve the Nobel prize for patience.
By the time all of these tiles were ready, we had sold the house that they were intended for, so we packed them up and brought them to The New Farm!
At the end of 2022, we replaced two of the pellet stoves in the house. One of the old stoves had a hopper fire pretty much immediately upon our first use which wasn’t great, and is also not something that the electronics recover from, so we had to replace that one. The other one just didn’t have very sensitive controls (or maybe I didn’t know how to operate it), but it seemed like the choices were shiver or sweat. The generous tax credits for buying pellet stoves were changing for 2023, so we closed our eyes and wrote the check.
The one stove is in a big room with high ceilings, so I wanted to make it more of a focal point and I had this big plan to frame in a faux fireplace and chimney breast above, with a nice mantel and then at Christmas I could decorate it like a Hallmark movie and drink eggnog in front of it. I even made the drawings. It was a real plan. Then I was cruising architectural salvage on eBay and I found this big mantel that would be cheaper AND faster, and realistically probably nicer.
Here it is temporarily installed for our Pajama Ball in December. Hard to really see it with my excessive Christmas decor. It's a problem.
Then I thought… “what would make this even better?” So I called up the wonderful fireplace people and they brought this enormous slab of local bluestone to make a proper hearth. It was a job. I neglected to tell them that the room was on the second floor, sorry guys.
And finally we circle back to the tiles! I decided to tile the area behind the pellet stove and inside the mantel opening WITH… my handmade tiles!!
You might be thinking, “Tricia, you have a culvert to dig and compost to turn!! What are you doing?!?!?!” And you would be right. However, we have a huge event happening here at the beginning of June so this project is also working to a deadline. No problem.
Remember when I said I am bad at glazing? All of these tiles are supposed to be a grey green color and some should be kind of a satin finish and some shiny. Well, with my glazing skills, they turned out like this. There are a few tiles where I pressed fern leaves and other flowers or plants into the tile after cutting it which I was really happy with. The leaves burn off in the kiln during the bisque firing. I wish I had done more that way.
In order to try to make the distribution of the different colors random, I had to lay out the tile on the floor and then move them all around until I got tired of it and decided it was good enough. Which is my approach to every project.
Here they are on the wall:
Then I had to grout them which I’ve never done, but seems easy, right?
I tried three grout colors and didn’t really love any of them. The brown (top) probably looked the best with the tiles, but I was worried it would clash with the grey bluestone hearth. I definitely didn’t like the grey, the swatch in the store looked darker and slightly green so I was hopeful, but it was a fail. So I went with the charcoal. It’s not perfect and it might bother me forever, but I am working to a deadline, remember?
Here’s it is grouted! I don't love how the color of the grout really emphasizes those steely patches of glaze. I don't know yet whether I am going to get over this or embark on an annoying 'paint the grout' project.
As you can see, despite my best efforts, the tiles are off-square and vary in thickness and degree of flatness (the dark grout also emphasizes these features). This is OK because I like the kind of organic faceted effect that it has, but because I am always hedging any decision that would be hard to undo, the tiles are mortared to backer board that is screwed to the wall and can be easily removed. I am a commitment phobe in all areas except my marriage. See above.
That is the project as it stands now. Stay tuned for future updates!