Pottery Isn't Only Throwing

So I know pottery isn't always about the throwing of the pot. And as a student of course I was involved in wedging and weighting for prep and then the clean up at the end.  I always tried to be more and move involved in the overall process leading to my current situation.

I'm no longer taking classes and haven't for over a year.  A comment was made that Kuky and I were in charge of the kiln (not formally true but we do most of the firings).

So I had big plans as to what I was going to throw, but I didn't quite get that far. However I got a lot of other stuff done.  Kuky and I fought, and fought and fought the new scale.  Won, declared victory and made more ^6 Clear Glaze.  I cleaned the kiln, scraped the shelves, made kiln wash and then kiln washed the shelves. We then loaded the kiln and I took off to my day job and she fired it off.



So not bad at all for a day in the studio, and then I got these jam jars done as well as a bowl.

A Moment of Silence Please...

So the firing schedule is long and involved...

But we candled. We (I) should have let the pots be bone dry.....

So a Moment of Silence for the Dead

The glaze came out ok though, not an issue....

Single Fire

After yesterdays schedule going a bit different than planned, I wasn't sure how wet or dry the work would be.  If it was too dry I could not glaze it for a single fire. Well, it was still wet enough that I was able to slip the pots and then glaze them. the exception was the wide mouthed jar with no lid. I set that aside to possibly Raku with Ferric.

I did not show pix of the pots glazed as, at this point, it doesn't show much. they were all liner glazed with Blue Fur.  The outside was glazed with Clear with the exception of the pot that was not slipped. That pot was glazed with Amber.  I did some further glaze on the lip of red or white, depending on the pot.

So Single Fire, or Once Fire. This means firing from greenware to glaze fire, with no bisque state. This is actually the way all pots were fired for most of the history of pottery. It is unclear when the idea of Bisque came to be, but widespread use did not seem to occur until the basic demise of the wood burning kilns The firing schedule is different, and in this case I am using the manual electric kiln.  A typical electric kiln firing is a "set it and forget it".  Even with the manual, it is a bit of baby sitting at the start but in three hours it is off on it's own. 

For the Single Fire, there is a lot more baby sitting.  Simple version... it is a slow climb to draw out all the water, eventually to chemically break the bonds of the water out of the clay (what happens at bisque) at which point the climb can continue to the target temperature (in this case ^6). So with this kiln, the process is slowed and facilitated by both the typical use of the kiln as well as keeping the lid open until the second half of the firing. This slows the heating and allows the steam and chemicals to escape easily. This prevents bloating of the clay or possible explosions.

Looking For HELP

Ok, needing some help if anyone has any leads.

for my kiln building project that I am doing with... for???.... the community studio (Cup & Bowl) I need:
SOFT BRICK
AN OLD ELECTRIC KILN
ABANDON KILN SHELVES

The stuff can be old, and non functional as well.  Here is the issue.  I can see via Blogspot who actually looks at this blog. Well I already knew it wasn't many of my friends and family. But it is folks all over the world.
Really, to be of help, this needs to be in driving distance. So Colorado, Kansas, Wyoming or New Mexico...

Worth a Read

So, Bernard Leach wrote a book once he was back in the UK and had been doing pottery in the UK for quite a while. It was an attempt to document his thoughts and hopes for a move the craft of pottery had started to take.  He wrote "A Potter's Book" which is equal parts tech manual, history book and art philosophy.

I recently saw a mention of it in a book where the author, wrongly stated, it had never been out of print. Well it HAD gone out of print. But in the UK Farber's Finds, a publish specializing in out of print books that they felt had too much value to go by the wayside, reprinted the book in 2011.

Leach wrote at a time when pottery was just starting to become the "Studio Pottery" model we are more familiar with. The old potteries that were working in small communities were dying out in the extreme and factory style pots were being made.  Now at this point, those factories have almost died out. There are few "throwing" based pottery factories, the process has become even more mechanized.

But... Leach might be surprised as the UK and USA especially, but elsewhere as well, had a mixed feeling about technology. And the slow food movement, increase in stay at home dads and similar "quality of life" movements make functional pottery more valued that it has in a generation.  From the looks of things, such a move will only grow.

The Joy of being Bloated.

 So this is from the last glaze firing. My pasta bowls did not fit, only one was fired. It is not listed here as it had a glaze issue.  I will retire that one and fixed the other four before they were fired. So that was a good thing.

I think this bowl, GP size, is my favorite.  It was done in Rutile. I really need to dry it out so the green comes out better and take some out to keep it this milk consistency. I really do like it like this, but I don't think anyone else will be happy with it as it won't be what they expect. This has an iron oxide design.

Another bowl but with waterfall brown glaze and a splash of blue

This again has rutile green  There is a splash of blue.  Under the glaze is a white slip stripe.  You can see the rutile in effect real strong when this glaze is done so thin.

This is glazed similarly. I did three pix because I was trying to show the flaw, but it is hard to see with these pix so I kept taking them.

Look here carefully, it is a "bump". That kids is called bloating. I think there was an air bubble and it screwed up the pot. I really really like this pot, so was pretty sad as it is now unsellable. I will keep it and use it for the doggz cookies.

Not as Planned but...

Things did not go quite as planned, but as usually I had bigger plans than I could execute.  Yesterday I got a call on the glaze kiln being unloaded, I will post those pix next. But I figured today I would throw aiming towards a single fire and then throw aiming towards the soda fire. I would then create slips, and decorate.

Well instead, I met with a few folks unrelated and related to pottery. And I threw the storage jars below. All but one has a lid (so yes if you do the math I have an extra lid). This are very wet right now. I am hoping by tonight I can put lids on so they can dry together and then make slip in the morning and decorate and get back to throwing.  I am unsure if I can single fire any of these because that depends on if they are too dry to glaze tomorrow or not.  We will see.

Gearing up for…..

Yup, we are doing this….

New Goals for Firing

So... I like controlling firing and playing with slip far more than "glaze". I say that in quotes as much of the firing is better viewed as "atmospheric glaze firing", where it is the wood as or soda that creates the glaze/firing effects.  Maybe the best way to say this, I like the use of a firing where glaze and firing effects are highly intertwined allowing the firing to more strongly be a part of the decorating process rather than simply the process of setting clay and glaze to temperature.

So here are my goals:

I need only for my burners to come in the delivery and to purchase the part to transition the opening on the propane tank to the hoses I have...

Once I have these parts I can move forward and set the kiln to do a soda fire.  We have all the other parts we need. This will be a modified up draft soda kiln.

Now I need some soft fire brick, an old electric kiln and then.. well we can create a gas kiln for C&B.  So I am on the look out for this.  This, once we have the parts, is basically a day project to make it work. This is secondary, as we can do a simple reduction fire in the soda kiln with no soda. But we will do this as a down draft.

We have all we need, except the pots, to do a Ferric Firing and will do so the next First Friday as the first firing in the Raku Kiln.

I now have permission to use the manual electric kiln to do some once firing!

The Selling of Pots...

So the important rule for measuring how important something or someone is to you is pretty simple. Where do you put your money, time and energy.  I tell clients this all the time.  It is very telling as at times we identify things of value to us that simply don't make the cut when we apply this simple test.

I have a very limited ability, as we all do, to offer up any of those three things.  It is because of it's limit that it becomes meaningful.  So one way, in recent times, that I have been able to give back to organizations I want to support is through the gifting of pottery for the purposes of silent auctions and such. Below is a piece I donated to the Southern Colorado Equality Alliance (SCEA).  You can see the statement about the pot.  I will admit (but not reproduce) that I originally sent a "long version" from which much of this is taken, that also said some things that were not appropriate for public consumption. the "short" version was simply that this pot was food and dishwasher safe.  These were taken and the one you see below was created.

In keeping with this, I have NOT donated a piece this year to another organization that works with kids. I won't name them, but some of the things they have done within the last year leads me to not support them. This brings us to another one of my life rules... you don't reinforce bad behaviors.

Below is from the pottery sale.  I was very surprised who all came, to be honest I have had little support from friends and family with anything like this at all. So this was my first sale where it was mainly me, I did so with two friends only. We did well for this kind of thing. It more than covered the fee. This isn't "pay the bills" kind of money, but we don't expect that (and frankly what we price our pots doesn't lend itself to that). But bottom line, we were all very pleased.

Happy Dia de La Raza

So I emptied the kiln. I could have loaded it a bit tighter but I didn't want to add some of the small pieces that had glaze very questionably close to the bottom of the pot.  that and we really really need to kiln wash all those shelves, should have done that on Saturday as well.

The inside of this bowl is Blue Fur, the outside is Rutile Green, which thin comes off almost as a clear with flashes of green.

This pot I threw back on the wheel and decorated with with random brush strokes of iron oxide. I then glazed it with Eggshell

This actually was from my very first push of reclaim clay. Like literally the first piece of clay to come out.  I decorated it with blue slip and stamps.  This is also Eggshell.

These plates you can see below. This was shown above freshly glazed.  The Iron Oxide design was done very very dark, no clay and not a lot of water added. So I purposely made this dark. The glaze itself has Iron Oxide that helps give the color. It breaks with this slight reddish orange to it.  Here I glazed with a brush, and where the strokes were thick... it created this break.  I will be doing this again.

And this one, well I have been going on and on about this project.  It is glazed, thank you very much.

My Day, October 12, 2013

There were so many people at the Empty Bowls Open Studio day that we did not make glaze. So today I taught someone how to make glaze, and went through the basics of what makes up a glaze both material basis (specific ingredients) and the more "base" components (that are present within the materials).

We build EggShell, a typical ^6 glaze here at this gallery. You see a lot of it in my work.  Kuky had already build two other glazes we were super low on. We were going to make Clear as well today, but time went pretty quickly.

On my end, I made a very small amount of an Ash Glaze. This is a new one, and we will see if it really does fire at ^6 as advertised.  You can see below me breaking up the ash into usable sizes using a #40 mesh.

Here the other components are added and I am pushing the glaze through a #80 mesh.  I also made an Ash Pantina Spray, very similar in composition.  This I made only about a cup of for testing purposes.

I tried to load a bisque kiln today, right after I unloaded the one that was just fired. But too many wet pots. So we moved on.  I glazed some pieces of mine and then some of Jessie's.   You can see the Eggshell here with Iron Oxide designs. I did other pieces as well.

A new toy to help with glazing.

Loaded a glaze kiln and it's fired!

Throwing Pix

Throwing Pix by Angie

Todays Work during Open Studio

This is part of my work today. I also trimmed the plates I made last week, including the large platter.  I also helped some people review basic throwing and then helped some folks with hand building. In general I did mainly clean up.

Here is a large plate I threw, you can see the butt for a sense of Size.  I let it dry outside but kept painting slip on it. I think that helped it dry without cracking.

This is an early picture of this large bowl, you can see size based on the bat used.  I say "early" because there is only one coat of white slip. I painted that line at least five times total by the time I was done.

This is a different large bowl, again see the bat for size.  It has a thick bottom so I can put a decent sized foot on it.

Five plates, 3# each. This is one of the last batches of reclaim clay made, so it is very "buff" in color. They don't quite look like a set, but they have the same basic "form" idea going on, a high edge to give more of a "pasta plate" look. Or at least that was the idea.

Here is a jar I created, a few different shots to get a good sense of the form. There were about five coasts of the white slip on this.

I plan on, with the jar and the plate, to pass this on to Kaven as well. It gives him a large area to carve into.  The greenware tea cups (I posted this already) were quite a hit today.  The more I think about it the more I want to Soda Fire them.  I can't do this with my soda kiln as it hasn't been built yet.  That hasn't happened for various reasons that are not worth discussing here.