Glazed and loaded

This past weekend was a long weekend and I managed to get pretty much everything from the last bisque load into 2 kilns. I spent a bit more time on the glazing than I normally do, and it took me from Friday to Sunday to get it all done. I cleaned pots and waxed feet on Friday night. Saturday was spent glazing the interiors of mugs and bowls and then waxing those interiors so I could glaze the outsides without making a huge mess of the whole pot. I then finished spraying and dipping the outsides of everything and began loading. As I knew it was going to take more than 1 kiln, I tried to get an even distribution of small vs large pots in both kilns. It worked. The first kiln fired off without a hitch and was cooling all day yesterday. The 2nd kiln began firing around 2:00 on Monday and will hopefully be cool enough to have a peek at tonight. These pictures represent the "controlled chaos" of my glazing methods. The swearing was minimal, but I did take a few ibuprofen's when it was all done. My hip cant take that much standing on concrete.

In even more exciting to me and probably boring to you news, apparently the engineered hardwood was being installed on the weekend in my condo. Next come the kitchen cabinets I guess and then I might be able to move in. Waiting for an updated timeline on that. so it was a good weekend. We'll see how Shrodinger's cat (aka the pots in the kilns) did when I get to the studio tonight.

a bit more snow

I just checked the weather forecast and it looks like one more week of cold with a bit more snow. We will finally be busting out of this cold and moving directly into warm weather. We don’t fool around with spring for too long, gotta get green quick. I see that it will be 10 degrees by the end of next week. This winter has been very, very long, with very little in the way of Chinooks. I can not wait. We will be able to put pots outside to dry soon. No more waiting forever for things to be stiff enough to trim, or even fire. Speaking of firing, I put a load in for bisque on Sunday. In that load is a whole bunch of little bowls that were thrown off the hump very quickly. I will be using them purely to calcine Alberta Slip for our new “purple rain” glaze. The recipe comes courtesy of Plainsman Clays, but we need cool studio names, not a boring number, so as I was the one to push for it to be included in the studio glaze repertoire, I got to name it. I have had a lot of water in my life, so purple rain came to mind. The purple is a bit transient, in that if you get it too thin, it will be more of a light amber brown, but when applied properly to a buff stoneware or white porcelain, it is a floating lavender blue on a brown background. When applied to a dark body, it is a beautifully intense and compellingly juicy (too many adjectives?), floating blue. It also works really well with all of our studio glazes. If you are curious, the recipe is this: 40% Raw Alberta Slip 40% Calcined Alberta Slip (fire the raw to ^022 and hold for about an hour to drive off excess moisture) 20% Ferro Frit 3134 4% Rutile I will hopefully be mixing up a slightly larger test batch for the studio this weekend. I am using my labor as the incentive to include this glaze in the studio glaze line up. If Dave doesn’t have to do it, then he gets more agreeable. We are quite limited in colour choices. We have dark brown, celadon green, turquoise, hares fur blue, pale stone blue, periwinkle blue, white & clear. You can see the trend. The addition of a purple(ish) glaze will hopefully get the creative juices flowing. We try to keep the costs down with each glaze, as well as ensuring that they are all as non toxic as possible. We don’t use barium or lithium or anything that could leach out or cause problem. Fairview Studios is a reational studio where there are times when nobody is there to ensure that students are not eating, drinking, breathing, or bathing in the glaze buckets, so we try to keep it simple, the result being quite a neutral pallet. The cost of frit is also quite a challenge to overcome. We try to make glazes that use very little, if any, to avoid not only the cost, but the inevitable hard panning that occurs with heavily fritted glazes. This new one should be quite acceptable. The cost is a bit more with the 20% frit, but there are only 2 other ingredients, 80% of which is clay (AB Slip). Even though it settles quickly, it does not hard pan, even after sitting undisturbed for 3 or more months. I guess glazing is the next thing on the agenda, I have a sale looming on the horizon (end of May), and I just don’t have the stock. I did however do a down and dirty studio sale this past week. Essentially, cleaned out all the pots that have been sitting on my shelves, that have travelled to one too many sales and never sold, or are just not quite good enough for the galleries and sell them off to the students. I put all the pots on a rarely used hand building table with a note saying to take these pots if you want them and if you feel the need to pay, to put what you feel is fair in a jug on my shelves. It worked great. I cleared a lot of space and made a few bucks in the process. So that has been my life lately: cold, waiting for summer, working, glazing, mixing etc.

Oh ya, this one is waiting for the snow to melt too, she doesn't know it though. She has only ever known snow.

There’s A Lot Going On

Well, I guess fall is over. It was a lovely 19 degrees on Saturday, the sun was out, the sky was blue and it was warm. Sunday however was a completely different story. It started out by raining over night on Saturday and by the time I left for the studio at 8:30, it was quickly becoming snow. It then proceeded to snow all day.

But with the snow comes looming sale deadlines, so I managed to finish handling all the mugs I made on Friday, I sgrafittoed 4 mugs in very unique freehand designs, made a couple of glazes, loaded and fired off a bisque and topped my day off by throwing some medium sized bowls.

The 2 glazes I made are very similar; in that they are the same base and that they both contain 4% rutile. One of them however contains 4% tin. I am working with the Plainsman Clays recipe using Alberta slip and Frit 3134. It is the simplest glaze formula, and comes out really, really nice. It feels lovely, it doesn’t craze and it applies beautifully. The only crabby thing about this glaze is that you have to calcine half of the Alberta Slip to drive off excess moisture to reduce the plasticity. Not a difficult job in and of itself, but it just adds another step to the process as well as making you think ahead when deciding to mix glazes. I pop it in the kiln in bisque bowls, fire to 022 and hold for a bit. I do this overnight so I can mix it first thing the next day. It comes out looking like chocolate milk powder. So the one with just the rutile is a lovely purplish lavender colour floating over an amber background. It breaks nicely and is reminiscent of our true Orange Blue Rutile glaze from our cone 10 reduction days. The other great thing is that it plays really, really nicely with our other glazes which can always be an issue when making a glaze that will probably end up being layered with other glazes. This one will hopefully become a studio glaze for all to use.

The second glaze is the same as the first but with the addition of 4% tin. I have not really tested this one, but according to Plainsman, it is a light gloss brown. It isn’t the brown I am after so much, but when a thin wash of Titanium Dioxide is brushed over top, it changes colour to a creamy green and blue variegated glaze that breaks nicely on texture etc. This glaze will not become a studio glaze. The tin is just too expensive for the quantities we would require.

I can foresee that my future for the next couple of weeks will entail more mug carving. I have a few flood mugs I need to finish. I have 19 or so mugs to carve and I will probably do half flood mugs and half whatever comes out of my brain. I will also be glazing and firing as much as I can. There is the Fairview Christmas sale on November 23^rd, and the Moe Shelley Craft Market the following weekend on Sunday December 1^st. I won’t have much, if any, time in between to restock, so I will need to have stock ready for both.

My nose will be on the grindstone (what a weird saying – how does grinding off your nose mean that you are working hard?) for the next while as I try to get ready with my own work in amongst the student firings that always take precedent in the weeks coming up to a studio sale.

Tonight I will be sending out the reminder email about the sale, so If you are anxiously awaiting the info, it is coming. But until then, I will post the info here.

It's My Birthday...

I can only hope that this 42nd year is better than the last. Not that the past year was all that bad, just the last month of it.

I am not doing anything special for it, just going to go make some pots tonight and possibly glaze some with the new spray booth. I need to finish making pots for the salt firing in August, so that is top of the list. But I also need to glaze some pots to put into the gallery. I also have some low temp porcelain that I need to use up and fire. I may do that with the bisque. They fire to 04 so I might just fire the next bisque load a little hotter. It burns out the organics a bit more, esp with the ^5Bmix that occasionally bloats. I think it also leads to a nicer glaze surface. I might even try to bug out of work a bit early today to get to the studio a bit earlier. We'll see how the afternoon goes.

That Was Exhausting

I taught my regular Tuesday class last night and it was jam packed (14 people I think?) In contrast, I taught on Monday night, and there were only 5 people there, 2 of which are taking some time off to have a baby and were only there to finish glazing their pots. I like teaching smaller classes, but of course, that doesn't keep the studio doors open. Fairview Studios is in fact looking for more students as enrolment has been down for quite a while. This past summer we dropped the Wednesday night class as nobody was showing up. I know we would like to bring it back on line, but the demand has just not been there. Hint - if you are looking for classes and you live in Calgary, check Fairview out.

I can usually deal with large classes, but I had a couple of fairly new students, and I had to do 3 demonstrations when normally it is usually just 1. First the throwing demo (normal), then I had 2 new students from last week that needed a trimming demonstration, and finally I had students that had yet to glaze anything so they needed a glazing demonstration. I usually arrive at the studio at 5:30pm right after work so that I can get a few of my own things done before class begins at 6:30, and then I can usually continue to work on my own stuff throughout the class in between the odd question. Not so much last night. I was going to load a bisque last night, but that definitely did not happen. I will see if I can load it on Friday and glaze on Sunday. I really need to get some work finished to take to the galleries and complete commission work etc.

getting stuff done

I managed to get a few things done this weekend, despite the heat. It managed to get up to at least 29 degrees with no breeze or a cloud in the sky. I started the day on Saturday at 9:30 by going to the mall (I know, I know, I hate the mall too). I needed to go see a man about a power cord for my macbook. Lately the cord has been kinda flaky and not charging properly. I took it in, saw a “genius” and got a new cord. Works like a charm. The mall is on the way to the studio, and after the apple visit, I toddled on over there, but splurged on a venti caramel latte before I left. My theory was to try to get to the studio as early as I could to beat the heat, but it was pretty toasty inside anyway, there was a kiln that had recently finished firing and was doing a good job at heating up the joint. When I pulled into the parking lot, there were hundreds of cars parked in every conceivable space in every lot, along the road (except ours thank goodness). There is a motor cross track at the end of the road and normally all you can hear is the annoying whine of dirt bikes flying around the track. Not so on Saturday. There was a Spartan race going on, and if you don't know what that is, and neither did I, it is an obstacle course that involves crawling under barbed wire in the mud, running up hill, running down hill, etc. I saw a lot of very muddy racers walking to their cars when they were done.


Anyway, I mixed 3 glaze tests, fingers crossed, glazed a billion pieces, and loaded a kiln. Ok, probably not a billion, but there was a lot of stuff to glaze, and not knowing exactly what will fit in the kiln, I try to make sure I have enough glazed to be able to pack it as efficiently as possible. I managed to get the custom “fire” bowl in, about 24 mugs, some tall stuff, a large platter and 4 smaller square plates, a couple of casseroles, and teapots, as well as all the test pieces. As I had mixed 3 tests, I had the 3 test cups in there, plus one where I poured all 3 in an overlapping manner around the outside, and then for giggles, I dumped all 3 tests together and tried that out on a couple of small cups. The base glaze was identical, but the oxides were different in all 3. One had just copper carb, another had copper carb and iron, and the 3rd had cobalt oxide and iron. I am hoping for a mottled green/brown, a pale mottled green, and a dark mottled greenish blue and all will hopefully have a lovely satin feel to them.

I am hoping to get the crystal firing loaded this coming friday night and then program it so that I can be there during the critical cooling and holding phase to ensure that the temp. drops as fast as possible by opening up all peeps and running a fan across them to draw as much heat out as fast as possible until the hold temp is reached.

When I was unloading the student glaze load yesterday, I became quite aware of how little people actually pay attention to anything. I sent out instructions about what to do when glazing with the crystal glazes and where to put them when finished to avoid confusion with regular ware etc. But in spite of that, I pulled out a spectacularly horrible pot yesterday that had a dry and ugly surface on it (glaze not thick enough), but where it was thick, little spiky, poorly formed crystals were evident. So, not only did they not read or follow the instructions, or ask for advice on how to glaze their work, they then put it with the standard cone 6 work. Thank goodness we limited it to the inside of bowls only or there could have been a huge mess.

Here's a pictoral rundown of my Saturday and sunday

This is some of the bisque I had to glaze


Here is a close up of a couple square plates


The ware cart starts to fill and then move into the kiln. This is the 1st shelf.

Then the second, third, and a half. My fingers are crossed right now. I'm hoping for some good tests.

Long Weekend Shennanigans...

This past weekend was the Victoria Day long weekend. I spent Friday night and all day Saturday at the studio, as well as a split shift on Sunday (sounds a bit sweat shopish). I was at the studio from 9:30am to 1pm madly glazing, then I went open housing with a friend of mine who is thinking of buying a condo. Her rent will be going up and other life situations have brought this to a head and now she is thinking of moving, so I went to a new condo project with her and then we drove around for a bit looking and then stopped for beer and food and then I was back to the studio at 4:30 and glazed and loaded the kiln until 9:30pm. I wouldn’t normally spend so long on the glazing at one time, but I was hoping to get one more load out of the kiln before the Mad Potters sale on Saturday. I took Monday off. I slept in for the first time in a really long time, got up, didn’t shower, barely got dressed. Dealt with the ribs that were defrosting in the fridge (I cooked them up and had a mid afternoon dinner out of them). The air outside my condo was heavy with the scent of the lilac in the front yard that is just starting to blossom, and the small tree outside my patio that I don’t know the name of, but it must be a cherry of some type. The pink/white blossoms are all out and I am sure some of what I smell outside is from that.


I did not think about the pots in the kiln at all on Monday, I just vegged out. I got an e-mail this morning addressed to all studio members and the title was Kiln Stuff. Hmmm. I read on and it looks like one of the elements went again. As this is not my kiln, I can’t really comment on how it is maintained, but when the elements start to go, it would probably behoove you to change them all out at the same time. Not so here. In an attempt to not have to buy all the new elements at once, they are being replaced as they die, which has been about 1-2 firings in between every replacement. I think so far 3 of the 6 elements have been replaced, so this would now be the 4th that needs changing.

This is of course interfering with getting ready for the sale. I had a few things in this firing that I really wanted to put out on Saturday. Maybe it will get fixed today and then no worries, but then again, maybe it will get fixed on Thursday, which would mean very hot pots on Friday. I will be in the studio tonight to teach so I can take stock of the situation and find out if it might be fixed in time for a refire on Wednesday. I had a lot of my bas relief shellacked pots in there. Approximately 14 teabowls, a tall jar with wire doodads on the lid, a test piece for Dave using some Alberta slip, a couple of large platters and other random tall stuff. I had a few glaze combos in there that I was anxious to see as well. Oh well, just another case of Murphy rearing his ugly head again.

I won't be taking these pots to CC to refire, just not enough time. I have a lot of stuff for the sale, that is not the issue, I just wanted some of these pots too.

round and round I go...

3 more classes to go! I only have to teach tonight, and then Monday and Tuesday next week. Every day at lunch I drive over to the studio and make sure that the studio is open, or that there is at least a key in the mailbox if no one is there. Walter (our resident perfectionist/potter/carver) is usually there, but you never know. Then today, I went over to Ceramics Canada (after I drove by the studio) to pick up some clay, and to see if the Green Barn order had arrived with my lustre. The answer to that is no. It should have arrived yesterday, but Trudy (da boss lady) thought it would be here tomorrow at the latest. My fingers are crossed so tight, I can’t stand it. This means that I will be pulling a very late night on Friday trying to finish those stupid place settings. I feel like I am in a race, but I can’t see the finish line, I don’t know who I am racing against, and I’m not even sure I am on the race track. So, if you see me looking a little harried and out of sorts, these are the reasons why: Not enough time and not enough energy. I can’t even sleep in on the weekend. I have to work on Saturday, pray that my lustre firing worked (if the stupid stuff even arrived for me to apply and fire it), and then I need to price and pack for the sale that starts at 10am on Sunday.

In hindsight, I should have backed off from teaching so much for Dave, but he was in a bit of a bind and needed someone to teach for him and I was the only option. The next time he gets a bee in his bonnet to go to Kansas, he shouldn’t plan to go right before the studio sale...just a thought.

I never seem to learn my lessons

My demo for last night’s class should have been titled “how to make mud pies”. I was roving around on the interweb yesterday and came across some nifty neato altered vases. I thought to myself “Hey, those would make great teaching demos, I can do that”. Yeah right. I know that I should never attempt a new form (to me) for the first time in front of an audience. I threw the body of the vase too wide, and the neck too narrow so when I started pushing out the ribs with my finger, the shoulder collapsed and that was good by vase. It still demonstrated the essentials of throwing, ie, centre, open, collar, raise, collar, raise, raise, shape etc... but the “wow” factor was definitely not there. They all gasped when it collapsed, and they all made helpful suggestions on how it could be saved, but it was also a lesson for them on when to just throw in the towel and start again, learn from your mistakes and make the next one better.

While I was in the studio last night I was also attempting to glaze what I bisque fired on Sunday. I know I should never attempt to glaze during a class night. One, the time to do it is not enough; and two, there are constant interruptions from students. So, in an attempt to get a jump on glazing, I think I just made more work for me on Friday when I will be in the studio again. Another lesson left unlearned.

 

 

Tonight

Tonight I will be glazing and loading the kiln. I need to clear the glazing backlog so that I can start filling the shelves for a bisque. I am running out of time for the dinner ware show, and I need to make enough for a bisque firing so that I can begin testing the lustre that I want to use (if it ever arrives from Ceramics Canada that is). Firing my own bisque is new to me, I usually just stick it in with the students work. Now I am going to have to be more prolific in order to fill the kilns in a timely manner.

another video

random

Ok, so I have not finished the teapots with infusers yet, or the chicken cooker, or the cups, or the mugs etc.... They are sitting waiting to be glazed. I will be teaching a lot this week with not much hope of getting them done during those classes either. I taught on Tuesday night, and it was a busy night, very full of questions and "can you show me?", not that I mind, I am not there to work on my own stuff anyway. I will be teaching again on Thursday night and It might be busy, but it is full of long time students, so they usually don't require as much hands on attention, just the demo. It looks like I will also be teaching on Saturday night. This is not normal, as the studio is usually only open until 5:30 on Saturday nights and then it is only open studio time. This will be a bachelorette party for somewhere between 6-8 people. Not sure if they have ever done this before, or if this will be their first kick at the can. They will not be taking anything home, and nothing will be fired, so I guess it is just a night to get muddy for them. I have not been to many bachelorette parties, but I thought it always involved making idiots of yourselves at a dance club, or bar. Anyway, I will be the one teaching, and Dave will be there to "help".
On another note, I asked Dave if it would be alright if I started firing lustres. I was actually prepared for him to come up with every reason why I couldn't, and would then just take the work over to Ceramics Canada to fire there. But, he said, along with the suggestion that I should probably start firing my own kiln loads. So, I am going to get a section of shelving that will house my work that is waiting to fire, and then I will fire it myself. I imagine it will be loading Fridays, firing over night, and unloading on Sundays.I am looking forward to the lustres. I don't want a gold, lustre, I am looking for a silver or palladium lustre to just run around the rims of some of the white and blue bowls and cups to enhance the undulations. In order to not screw them up, I will be buying a book on how to use them as well. Just to make my life a little more frustrating though, I thought I would try a lithography method in order to transfer prints onto clay. I saw the technique on Ceramic Arts Daily, and it looks very simple (ya right, I am sure it just looks that way). I read up a bit on true lithography to better understand why the process works, and we will see what happens. I might even try to incorporate the lithography AND the lustres....sooo many ideas, not enough time...

Heinz 57 on the Pot

I really wish I could post images from my cell phone directly into my blog. However, I have yet to discover a method. If this were possible, I would post a heck of a lot more often. As it is, I have to e-mail the photos from my phone to myself, ONE AT A TIME (sound of disgust), then go to the hassle of going home, opening my computer, opening my e-mail, saving the images to my hard drive, and then posting them online. What a pain in the tookus.

Anyway, that is why I have only just posted this picture of the glaze that turned out really well on my little bowl. I have mixed up a batch of what I hope turns out to be the same glaze. What I glazed the bowl in was our Heinz 57 mix but from my test tiles, I think this recipe is really really close to the same result:

12.5% neph sy

12.5% Gerstly Borate

37.5% Ravenscrag*

37.5% Magnesium Carb.

2% copper carb

4% iron

*For those of you that don’t know what Ravenscrag is, it is a clay that is produced by Plainsman Clays in Medicine Hat Alberta. It is a clear glaze all by itself when fired to cone 10, and with a little bit of frit, it is a very nice clear at cone 6 (I don’t think you even need very much frit to get it to melt).
What I like about this glaze is the texture. It has a slight pebbleyness to it that forms when the glaze tries to crawl, but then heals over again. It creates a fine pattern of satin and gloss areas, kind of like islands of satin amongst rivers of gloss. This glaze takes stains and oxides well, and this combination of iron and copper creates a toasty warm glaze with iron speckles, but where it gets thicker it has almost a wood ash appearance, in that it takes on a greenish hue and the pebbleyness is accentuated. This tendency for the glaze to crawl can be accentuated even more by bumping up the magnesium just a little bit, and it becomes way more crackly. It still stays somewhat shiny though. This would then only be good for non functional ware, and the outsides of pots (see my test tiles in the previous posts)

The only problem I have with any of these glazes is that the magnesium carb makes the glaze want to start crawling and cracking before you fire it, so as it dries it starts shrinking and forms cracks. This is even more apparent if you dip it over the top of another glaze. It actually curls up and lifts the other glaze off the pot as well.

So, this is either something I have to live with, or try to eliminate. I am just not sure if I will lose the qualities that I LIKE by eliminating the qualities I don’t.

I think I need to add more clay, so perhaps a bit of ball clay, or maybe I just need to back off the mag carb and increase the ravenscrag content. I will have to play around and see what I get.

On another note, I was at the studio on the weekend (what else is new), and I threw some more “pint” glasses. I have been trying to throw a drinking vessel that would hold a thirst quenching quantity of iced tea, water, etc, and to make the shape appealing and elegant, but what I came up with (totally subconsciously) was a pint glass. It looks just like a pint of Guinness (mmmmm.....Guinness....droool). Not sure if they are elegant, but they sure will hold a pint. I also mixed a batch of my new glaze and dipped one pitcher to see how it turns out (fingers crossed), and then I threw a couple of chicken cookers (based on the beer can method, except the beer can is replaced by the ceramic cylinder thrown in the middle of the cooking dish). I will post the chicken cooker as soon as I trim it so you get a better idea

The “pint” glasses, by the way, are all made out of white stoneware, with a clear liner glaze and a blue hares fur on the outside. I have added a spiral sprig to the outside of each glass that I carved out of plaster, and each of those sprigs is dabbed with hot tamale stroke and coat, it looks really good as it melts into and runs down through the hares fur. I will post pics when I have a couple handy. I sold the first 2 that I made at the student sale, and sadly, I did not get any pics of them.