Something Is About to Change
Nothing has changed yet — and to say the plain thing first, nothing is launching today either. I'm in the glaze-testing part of a new collection, which is the long quiet stretch before there is anything to show. The light still comes in at a summer angle, the air still smells like it did in July.
But there's a particular quiet in the studio this week that I only recognize in hindsight, every year, right before something shifts. I've been testing a few new glazes. I won't say more than that yet — some things need to stay half-formed a little longer before they're ready to be shown to anyone. I wanted you to know something is stirring, though, the way you'd want to know a friend was working on something, even before they could describe it.
Testing is stranger than it sounds. Almost every glaze I mix is the same chalky pale grey in the bucket, whatever it will eventually be — you cannot tell an espresso from an oat by looking at it wet, which is why the name goes into the clay of each test disc before it's ever dipped. And the same recipe over a dark clay and a pale one comes out as two different finishes entirely, so a glaze isn't really tested until it has been fired on the body it will actually live on. That is most of the reason this part is slow.
It has taught me something I now use outside the studio too. When you don't know about a thing yet, give it a fixed stretch of time instead of a decision: put the test disc, or the paint sample, or the piece you're unsure about, somewhere you'll walk past it every day for two weeks, and let familiarity cast the vote instead of taste. Almost everything I've kept, I kept that way. Almost everything I forced a verdict on, I ended up redoing.
I'll share more soon. For now, I'm just enjoying the part where it's still a secret, even from me.
A particular quiet, right before something shifts.
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A few things mentioned: the big handle pitcher in the last photograph, and — if you'd like the longer version of what happens between an idea and a finished piece — Inside the Studio.
I've come to like this stretch more than the launching. Once a thing is named and photographed and listed it belongs to everybody, which is lovely and is entirely the point. But for a few weeks beforehand it is still only mine and still allowed to turn into something else, and that has quietly become the part I'd miss.
Do you feel it too — that specific hush right before a season turns? I'd love to know what you're noticing.