Today In My Studio 07

It's been a good day....I have a new piece, some good news and a new acquisition to share with you.

For over a month I’ve had an image of a new mandala germinating in my brain. Finally last night I took the time to make it and it felt so good to see it come to life. Shown here above and below in wet clay and is about 12” x 12”:

Next, the good news….
You may remember from my post back in February that I launched a new collection of porcelain tile designs called CLOUD PORCELAIN with Ann Sacks showrooms nationwide. Since then I’ve received loads of sample orders and 1 medium size order. Typically, it takes about 6 months for orders to ramp up and sure enough today we got our first really substantial order and Rob and I are elated.

It is for the LANDSCAPE design. The concept behind this is to invoke a horizon line and the many shapes that can be. Something wonderful about this tile collection is that each design can be used in multiple configurations, here are 2 of the many options for LANDSCAPE:

The layout this customer has chosen is in the Ink/ Raw color combination as shown below. It's very painterly like a brush stroke.

And lastly, a new machine that offers all sorts of hope! This is a used 20-ton Hydraulic Ram Tile Press which looks beat up but is actually in very good condition. This heavy duty industrial machine will open up a wide array of possibilities such as reproducing carved and relief surfaces, making almost any tile without fatiguing the body, largely reducing warping which is the largest cause of loss in production as well as eliminating the need for rolling slabs which is time consuming and tiring.

it took 3 men, a palette jack and cherry picker to lift, move and rotate this machine from the horizontal position it arrived in.

The main goal and impetus for purchasing this $14,000.00 machine was to eliminate the need for some of the more time consuming aspects of making my new CLOUD PORCELAIN tile collection, and to be able to make these pieces with less loss from warping tiles. We have an extremely high loss rate with this collection since it’s porcelain and thus extremely temperamental. I’d really like for it to make a profit rather than break even with each order and especially with this new large order, this machine will be very useful.

The next step is to purchase the rather costly heavy duty compressor required to release the tiles from the molds. Thankfully this post will help fund this purchase. Once that is in place Rob will get this machine running and do all kinds of tests.

As always, you'll be the first to see developments here in my studio, many thanks for supporting my post and blog!