Soda fired in the Kootenays

Wow, Almost a whole year has slipped by since I posted anything. So, not to bore you with the reasons why I have been so remiss in keeping this updated, I will instead show off a few pots that came out of a very special firing that I took part in at the beginning of September. The Alberta Potters Association organized a pottery retreat to fire Robin Dupont's train kiln, but Mother Nature had other ideas. For most of the summer, it appeared as though British Columbia was all on fire and as bad luck would have it, Robin lives smack dab in the middle of the Kootenays where a lot of the fires were located. That didn't stop us though. Plans were changed, and we fired his soda kiln twice instead. I had made a very large quantity of pots in anticipation of the wood firing (over 6 cubic feet of work), but in the end, I probably got 1/3rd of that volume fired. Still, not a bad haul. These are a few of the pots that came out of the first load. To get these very matte blacks and smoky greys, the kiln was reduction cooled to develop more depth of surface etc. I'll have more pictures when I get around to shooting them.

Work in progress

Lately I have been working on a few different things in the studio. I have begun making for the salt and soda firing in April, but I have also begun to experiment with a low fire porcelain body. I mixed up a 5000 g batch of this "porcelain" and threw a few little cups and even constructed a small teapot to see how this body throws and fires. Kurt Weiser talked briefly about this when I saw him at the workshop in Lexington, but only talked about it as a good formula for making beads etc so I was not sure how it would throw, if at all. The recipe is 50% New Zealand Kaolin, 50% frit3195 and an addition of 2% VeeGum by weight. It fires to cone 04, but just to be cautious, as the test kiln seems to fire a bit hot, I only took the first firing to 05. As you can see from the first 2 pictures below, it is quite translucent. I did not glaze them either, they became quite glossy on their own (although a bit pebbly in texture, I am hoping it will smooth out at 04). Nor did I stilt them. Although the "clay" vitrifies completely, the placing sand that I set them on buffed of with sand paper to reveal a satiny smooth foot. The rest of the pictures are just more of the sgraffito work I have been obsessing over.