Studio Essentials

Kitchen supply stores are great places for potters (although these days I'm frequenting the kitchen gadgets section of the local thrift store rather than the mall!). Someone recently mentioned how important corn starch is in their studio: sprinkling a little corn starch on soft clay before impressing it with your favorite stamp helps keep the clay from sticking to the stamp! I've found a lot of other kitchen supplies to be just as useful. I use the corn starch for impressing, but spray cooking oil for making carved pieces such as the lamp pictured in an earlier posting. The oil helps the knife or scalpel cut more smoothly avoiding those pesky clay crumbs! Another useful item is hair spray (okay, that's not a kitchen item, but please indulge me!). I use hair spray on glazed pots that will need to be handled a lot as a way of avoiding smudges. It's particularly useful on my painted pieces (see photos in previous posts) because I use mason stains mixed with glaze to draw on top of a base glaze... so it's easy to smudge everything up.

Important kitchen gadgets include: rolling pins, small strainers, wooden spatulas, measuring spoons, cookie cutters, potato peelers, cheese cutters, forks, assorted containers, cupboard liners, clothes pins, scrubbing sponges... I'm forever finding new uses for household items!

And finally, what well-stocked studio is without the bottle of vinegar and the bottle of bleach? Vinegar to mix with slip for scoring and applying handles. Bleach to splash into the slop bucket to prevent the dreaded mold!

Please share your kitchen gadget or supply that you couldn't do without in your studio!