Bonsai Pots: A Tale of Confidence

I’ve recently joined a bonsai ceramics group, one of the groups within the bonsai club that focuses in on the world of bonsai ceramics. The class is sectioned off into a 3 session round that typically lasts one workshop a month. Between the workshops, we’re allowed to work on clay with what we’ve learned from the workshop. This is our second go around and it is definitely a lot easier, obviously.

It’s very visually obvious at the quality of the pots as time progresses. It’s true with all things, practice makes perfect. Confidence is also built as the pots are progressively getting better.

My most recent pot is created under the guidance of our bonsai club president Aaron Stratten. It was built with the knowledge gained from 2 rounds of workshops and it shows how tight the build was.

Overall, my confidence was on cloud 9, I was feeling good. I went about to find possible new shapes similar to the sakura template Aaron let me use. I had expressed to him how enjoyable it was to see your own work let alone see how far your skills have progressed. I expressed to him I wanted to create another template with a more complicated shape. I used AutoCAD to calculate a possible template for the shape and was able to get the right dimensions for the pieces. It was very helpful to at least have the distances for the slabs correct. After some deliberation and consultation, a “good luck” was offered to me and I was set on the path of trial and error.

Started off pretty well, it was a very beautiful day during this hot spell we’ve been having and when temps dropped below 90 and hovered around low to mid 80s, it was definitely a good time to roll out some clay.

It went pretty normally, I didn’t have to roll too much and made some blocks for feet. I had to get everything leather hard before working on cutting out the template. The sun and hot weather definitely played a factor in the drying process. What I did have to do was flip the two pieces twice to get it to dry evenly. Once that was leather hard, in about 40 mins, it was ready.

With all the pieces cut out, it was time to assemble. I gave out a sigh, hoping all things go well, and started to assemble all the pieces together. But before I did anything else, I had to put my mark on the clay.

A chop I made myself fired to bisque, I was ready to put all the pieces together. After a 40 minute ordeal of slipping and massaging this was the outcome.

Shocking… not really. I was definitely way over my head on this template. I was a bit frustrated, it was hard. The template I made definitely showed I didn’t account for curves and angles. The distances were all incorrect which left me to massage pieces into place, which isn’t terrible, but it wasn’t really the right way. I found myself having to add more clay to fix the slabs. Once I added the base and added the coil to fix the base into place, I’ve realized the entire pot was lop sided and had a tilt of about 15 degrees. So, out came the rolling pin and back into a ziplock bag it went. I wasn’t too upset because failure is necessary. Also, dinner was supposed to be ready in 45 mins; therefore, I couldn’t do both.

One success did come from this experience, working with templates is a lot harder than initially thought. Curves has to look a certain way, and angles can be calculated better. Maybe I should use AutoCAD more to my advantage and build a pot digitally.

Anyway, dinner was awesome.

First Post

Through the years, I’ve had several means of recording my bonsai trees. I have an Instagram where I’ve documented my trees by picture; but, not much can be said about it other than snapping a picture of what was “done” to the tree. I’ve tried to post one interesting thing from my collection a day and that proved to be just too much but at the same time, not enough. It made life pretty difficult because there was always something I wanted to show. Not because I wanted to show off rather than to document what I was able to accomplish so I could naturally develop an organic record of all my trees as well as a natural progression of my skills and technique; alas, I couldn’t really go into detail by a picture.

I always ask myself, how do people “know” what to do. How do the artists remember the intricacies so that they will execute the technique that’s most effective at the right moment in time? I think we’ll all get there someday, but the key difference is probably the pros are in fact professionals and they need to know to best execute their art. I tend to not remember as well as they do and this is my way to record my successes as well as my failures should they occur.

So to start things off right, I’d like to present to you my small collection, an ever changing environment.