urn

Continental Clay, Coarse White; 3.75"H x 7.25"W; greenware

I visited two major clay resellers in the Twin Cities recently and picked up a sampling of some of their clays. This high-grog, low-fire clay fires at cone 04 to 4. I bought it partly to compensate for my present lack of a place to do high-fire work; I can do bisque locally, so the salesperson and Continental suggested I get some clay I could finish at lower firing temperatures.

I had two flops to get to this piece. Pulling out a wide shape like this is difficult to do safely. This one ended up rather too thick near the base. Dry (or very nearly dry), it weighs in at a hefty 3.5 pounds, including the lid. The lid is nearly flat and its fit is a bit loose--- that is, it can slide from side to side with lots of leeway before the lid's rim contacts the urn's rim.

WARNING

I learned the hard way about not backing up one's blog entries!

I have just completed a laborious reconstruction of the entire mudjoy blog (so you'll know why entries you've already viewed read a bit differently now) after blogger's server eviscerated it.

So far as I can tell, it was just a bit of bad luck: I had moved across country and changed ISPs. I needed to update the URLs for all my image links because I had to move the files from one webhosting ISP to another. So I edited all my entries, one at a time, all the while checking with the Preview link that things were working as intended. Everything went fine until I finished all the edits and republished the blog. All but the current entry (created using the new ISP's URL) and, unaccountably, a single original entry, were gone! All that remained were the entries' dates, titles, and comments! Neither images NOR text content were to be found!

I rechecked my work and everything I'd done seemed to have been done correctly. I checked blogger's status messages and found mention of recent server troubles that affected editing and publishing; of course, they made it seem like everything was under control. Clearly, it was not. I emailed blogger support and got an automated "check this, check that" response--- all things I had already done, of course. As per the email's suggestion, I replied to it, no satisfaction having been attained: I've received no response after three tries of that.

So now I'm keeping a backup of every entry. I've learned my lesson!