{"id":1099,"date":"2012-06-12T09:30:17","date_gmt":"2012-06-12T00:30:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/karatsupots.com\/wordpress\/?p=1099"},"modified":"2012-06-23T16:18:23","modified_gmt":"2012-06-23T07:18:23","slug":"mayjune-update","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/karatsupots.com\/wordpress\/2012\/06\/mayjune-update.html","title":{"rendered":"May\/June Update"},"content":{"rendered":"

Well, all lot of little things have happened over the last month or so, but nothing really blogworthy all by itself, so I thought I might do an umbrella post for May\/June.<\/p>\n

First, and what I posted about before, was the Workshop in Taku, 2012: The Simple Teabowl workshop, with Kawakami Mako, Tsuruta Yoshihisa, Okamoto Sakurei, and Maruta Munehiko. We started with a wonderful tea ceremony demonstration and talk, then we moved outside to prepare tea ourselves. The second and third day, Tsuruta sensei demonstrated his pottery making techniques, fourth and fifth day Okamoto sensei demonstrated, and on the sixth day we watched Maruta sensei at his studio. The last evening we had a very nice banquet at Hisago, and Kawakami sensei joined us again for that.<\/p>\n

After the workshop I needed to decompress for a couple of days, then found out I’d be needing to go back to the US for the summer, so I moved up my kiln firing schedule to the end of June. Got into the studio to start making work again, and also found some time to bid on a Furo being auctioned off on Yahoo Auctions. A Furo is used to heat water for tea ceremony. Next, after years of looking for a suitable garden hose storage device, I broke down and decided to just make a few which I am pretty happy with, we’ll see how they look after the firing. Several friends came over last weekend and spent much of the day playing on my wheels. They ended up with about 20 pots which will go into the next firing. I wedged up some clay and played too, some guinomi and chawan for the rear chamber. Lastly, I spent yesterday morning gathering wood from the local mill, who sold me three K truck (a very light little flatbed type of truck that is used a lot in the country areas of Japan) loads of mill ends for about $30, a real bargain, so I donated some coffee mugs to their mill office. Hopefully they will get some use out of them.<\/p>\n

Well, that’s about it, have a great week!<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Mike
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