Made pictures to document some of my glaze experiments.

First up, a few photos of a line blend based on Sperry Mud Crackle.

Sperry 80/20 – 80 neph sy, 20 magnesium carb. Very glossy, poor fit, but nice as a thin wash.

Sperry 70/30 – 70 neph sy, 30 magnesium carb. Another poor fit; cracked the porcelain pods, though the glaze was thicker than the clay. But it looks great, and stoneware takes the abuse.

Sperry 60/40 – 60 neph sy, 40 magnesium carb. Another one that’s good at any thickness; it has more surface tension, crackles more than beads, but the edges on the crackle are soft.

Sperry Mud Crackle. Robert Sperry’s glaze. Half each mag carb and neph sy. It’s a nice crackle glaze. Picks up atmospheric copper and turns pink.

Sperry 40/60 – 40 neph sy, 60 magnesium carb. Very, very, very dry. Nice when it’s thin, but pulls apart too much for my taste when it’s thick. The neph sy leaves a gloss on the clay body, though. With all the mag carb, it also doesn’t like to stick to greenware, at all.

A couple of random ones:

Not a glaze test. A series of pods made one evening. Not the usual.

Neely Sea Slug, on FCSI, c.10 wood-salt. This is a really nice glaze.

Slip is nearly glaze. Lowfire white slip in back doesn’t quite flux. I already knew that 111 slip in front is just enough with a tiny bit of atmospheric sodium. Either just enough or barely enough without it. And I really, really like the subtle shade of white. Don’t know what I”ll use it for, but this is a keeper.

Next up: fun with trying shinos.

Glaze tests, Malcolm’s Red Shino. I particularly like it on porcelain, front and center. It’s lousy when it traps carbon on porcelain, but nice on stoneware. The glaze grows some big soda ash crystals as it dries.

Milk thin luster shino. Stoneware back, porcelain front. On stoneware it’s enough to flash the clay; the orange is lovely on porcelain… if you need an orange glaze.

Last, a series of experiments doing blends with luster shino:

Line blend, luster shino to yellow salt.

Additions of magnesium carbonate. Back rows: left to right, 1c luster shino + 1 through 7 T magnesium carb. Front rows: left to right, 1c luster shino + 8 through 14 T magnesium carb. First the magnesium made the glaze flux more, then on 4 and 5 it traps some carbon, then the glaze tension goes up and it holds a thick edge.

Left to right: 1c luster shino +1T, 2T, 3T, and 4T silica.

Left to right: 1c luster shino +4T, 3T, 2T, and 1T alumina.

Luster shino with 3T alumina hydrate per 1c of glaze. On porcelain it’s a nice satin matte and the glaze fit is better. Nice on stoneware too, and runs from the iron to shino color range. I look forward to using this one.

After eating from handmade pots two or three times a day for the last five months and drinking handmade far more frequently; after beginning to consider making some functional work to add to the cupboards; after using a friend’s collection of handmade pots; in handling and re-handling literally hundreds of pots while helping glaze, wad, and load them into a kiln: I realized my appreciation for the anonymous pot.

It’s just a good, beautiful object. Doesn’t matter who made it, just that somebody did. Doesn’t have to shout the name of the maker. Maybe better if it doesn’t. So the functional object is the foundation for a composition. If it’s a composition that stands alone, so much the better. (Possible? Very architectural question, that.)

I’m still thinking about making functional work, and probably will, sometime. It’s an interesting set of design criteria.

Matt Bukrey (currently Simon Levin’s apprentice) generously invited me to participate in the third firing of Gary the Groundhog. And I accepted. Also firing the kiln were two local ceramicists, Gail and Gareth.

This post is partly about the woodfire, and partly about how beautiful I found it to be up in Wisconsin for those few days. Bear in mind that it was cold and rainy the entire weekend: we jokingly and repeatedly inquired after each others’ sense of the absurd.

Absurd or not, though, for me those were some happy days.

I arrived the night before, in the dark, and stayed with Matt and his wife Jaime. This view beats my bedroom by miles; thirteen feet away is a bunch of vinyl siding.

Gary doesn’t have a kiln shed, so our first task, given the weather, was to make some shelter. I took this photo later; here’s the finished product, a tensioned-green-tarp structure. A marvel of improvisational architecture and engineering, if I say so myself. This architect had a lot of fun.

Since we had to build our gypsy shelter first, it took awhile to finish the first half of the loading.

And longer to finish the second half, though we could have used a couple more pieces. By the time the door was bricked, it was 4am, and I had the candling shift. A little tiny fire, in one of the primary air openings. For six hours. Fortunately I’d spent a couple hours dozing in the warmth of the studio. Wood stoves are wondrous; this was my first experience with one.

Sometime after I woke up and came to the kiln following my candling shift. Here’s Gary! My next shift was pretty easy, as we were aiming for a 50-degree-an-hour climb through quartz inversion.

I tucked an old pillowcase into the top of my jeans, just to shade my legs while I stoked. Early in the firing, it had a run-in with the jamb of the stoke door. Kind of pretty, though. The radiant heat was such that I had to shed my jacket, sweater, and vest… but a trip to the studio meant I had to put at least a jacket back on.

And absurdity returns. Day and night and dusty camera lens, we keep firing. Got some serious lookouts going with super-stokes.

For a sense of scale, here are Matt and Gareth watching the stack. (Bear in mind that the firebox floor is lower than their feet.)

Stoke door and primary air. I made a groundhog-ish head as a handle for the stoke door. Unfortunately it cracked, but it was pretty fun and cute. (Though it was cold out and after the 4am start, I lost all sense of time. But not my sense of the absurd.)

Gail and I tend the kiln and enjoy some shelter from the elements. I’m down to a longsleeve tee, though it’s chily out: radiant heat. We burned, I’m guessing, about six times as much cordwood as you see in the photo, and two or three times as much volume of lath. This was my favorite spot to sit, though I moved a little further back when night fell. The better to hear the kiln.

Matt and Gail under the gypsy tent; saw horses and a pallet made a makeshift table, which kept our snacks out of canine reach. Numerous guy lines keep tension on our fabric structure, which sheds water nicely. There wasn’t much breeze, fortunately.

Simon’s kiln shed. I love all the pines around here.

(What firing report is complete without a picture looking into the kiln?) Toward the end of the firing, the firebox was full of embers. We birmed up from the bottom of the door to the floor, nearly a foot higher. The firebox is about three feet deep.

Matt, Gail, me, and Gary. Almost done firing. We’re going to make it. Yay.

My favorite part of the drive to Simon’s was this hill, flanked by yellow-leaved trees. It was like something out of “Lord of the Rings.” More shots of the area after the break.

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A friend and I helped another ceramicist burn 50 bales of hay on Friday (October 16), to have ash with which to make glazes. I also learned how to use the hydraulic wood splitter, and split some wood. It was novel. With three or four people, a lot of wood could get split and stacked in a hurry. We finished the day with a G&T.

A few photos of the hay-burning, to give a sense of scale. We burned 25 bales at a time. (Don’t try this at home.)

Here is the ash from the first burn. Not much.

Here we’ve piled the hay around the still-hot ashes from burn #1 for burn #2.

A sense of scale: C uses a rake to pile hay atop the ashes/embers to get ‘er going again.

When it went from smoldering to burning, there was a particular sound. Neat. Here it’s burnin’ away.

Dressed in protective gear, C stirs things up. P is by the barn, hosing it down so evaporative cooling keeps the metal walls cool. I am on fire watch. This includes scattered hay on the ground (I armed myself with a wide hoe-type tool to intercept creeping fire) as well as C’s fiberglass rake, which started smoldering a couple times, and C himself, who did not.

Waiting for things to cool off. Wood piles… my kind of architecture.

So much depends upon a red wheel barrow…

Hot.

All that for this. We thought the second burn was less efficient; there was more black ash and less gray/white.

The cloudscape on the return trip was beautiful.

I use a pocket-sized Panasonic Lumix TZ-5.

Why I love it:

At 28mm equivalent, its wide-angle shot is significantly wider than most competing digicams.

Custom white balancing, macro focus, and a tripod mount make shooting indoors easy.

The user interface is easy. One: the on/off is a switch. I turn my camera on and off a lot, and prefer this to a tiny button. Two: mode selection. The shooting mode, including video, is selected via a dial on top. Viewing is accessed by a switch on the back – shooting or playback mode. To my mind, this is a brilliant improvement over playback’s usual position on the top dial. Three: menu navigation and feature use is intuitive.

If only a manual setting for depth of field or for shutter speed were included.