Another Trip to Medalta

It looks like I might possibly make another trip down to Medalta in the spring. My friend Susan and I are thinking of going down the weekend of April 27th to fire in their Salt and Soda kilns. Medalta is located in Medicine Hat, Alberta and is in the historic clay district. Back in the day, there was the Medalta pottery, the Hycroft pottery, and at least 1 brick factory that I know of. It is also where Plainsman Clays is located.

When I went down in Feb 2010, we had a very good tour of the Hycroft factory as well as the Medalta museum and the areas of Medalta that were off limits to the regular visitor. At that time, the new Events facility was still under construction. The facility was being constructed on top of some excavated Bee Hive kilns that you would then be able to view through the floor.

If we are able to book our trip for that weekend, it will coincide with a community clay event that Medalta is having. Their long term resident artists will be holding workshops for the public and it would be fun to be involved with that while we are firing.

I am hoping April will be much warmer than when we were there last. It was so cold that weekend that my power steering froze during the time we were glazing and loading the kilns that first evening (note to self: don't leave your car facing into the wind when it's -30 celcius). The temperature difference while we were firing in the kiln area was such that we created our own weather system. The skies were clear and blue, but it was snowing in the kiln compound..

So I am looking forward to that. Right now however, I am still not ready for the studio sale next weekend. I still need to clean out the car and empty out my boxes of pots and decide what is going and what is going into the trash to make room for the new stuff. Then I need to price which is not a science. I usually go on gut instinct for pricing. I ask myself “would I pay $xx for this?” then, do I really want to sell it (still precious to me)? If it is still precious, I jack the price up so as to alleviate the pain of letting it go. Otherwise, I try to price it fairly so that it doesn't make it impossible for the average person to buy.