yunomi workshop day 4: kiln results & some trimming...

While we've had lots to do over the past two days, and in many ways it's gone by so fast, there's another part that has run in slow motion, and that's the timeline from when we finished loading the kiln Monday night to when we could finally open it earlier today. Even while bustling through wheel work and studio tours, always in the back of the mind is 'how long till we can open the kiln!?!?!?'.

Well Christmas in July has arrived, and we had some very, VERY nice results. Even better, Matt was able to see a distinct difference in the results he has had in past firings and those we had, using a different firing program and going to a slightly higher temperature.

Here are some results:

Matt's slab-built yunomi with added texture.
These were rubbed down with oxide washes before
glazes were applied. One will stay with me!

Matt's 'vase frames' - a fun design and beautiful in function!
Some had oxide wash, some underglaze brushwork
under the glaze.


our 'super secret slip tests': lizella slip dipped on bisqued test tiles,
and then dipped in each of Matt's glazes and a couple of the house glazes
We were very pleased to see the glaze stayed on, and the textural and tone
results also give us more to play with going forward


more slab plates (I can't wait to see future tests with his wheel work!),
he put texture lines in the wet pots, and the glazes made
some nice accents in those lines.


platter tests: these were lined with the lizella slip. Matt then
painted a line of wax resist up the middle before painting a
different glaze on each side. Again, the tone, color and texture that the
lizella slip brings will be the starting point for many more tests!


plate tests: Matt picked up a couple of new commercial
glaze colors to test, and these are some of the combos.
the bottom two are his commercial glazes accenting
one of my house glazes. The quick & dirty photos don't
show it well, but some of those combos, along with
slow cooling, produced some nice crystallization.


more plate tests, putting various combos of the commercial
glazes together. Again the photos don't do justice to the
way the glazes and combos are working with the texture
Matt put in the plates.


the bottom plate is one Matt fired in his studio, and
the top plate is the same clay body, with the same base glaze,
but fired to a higher temp and down fired. He was very
pleased to see the difference!



We did do some trimming on the yunomi we threw on Tuesday,
but the wet box did its job too well, and Matt left some to finish tomorrow.

Tomorrow is our last day, and we'll be pulling it all together, discussing materials and methods for mixing glazes, oxide washes and conducting line blend tests. We'll talk about equipment and take another look at our glaze results, and finish trimming the yunomi. We also have a bit of lizella clay that we'll be throwing for guinomi, or sake cups. Add to that a last shopping spree at Highwater, some local studio visits and of course ... lunch at Roots! I think I will succeed in my goal of sending them home well fed, in both body and mind!

Results from the recent kiln...

Unloaded both the reduction kiln and a mid-range kiln this week, and had some good tests, some great tests, some continuing frustrations, some pleasant surprises, and still some that just make you go 'hmmmm....'.

And then there was also the sagger test:

The nekkid cup on top of the sagger. Actually there's a honey celadon liner inside, you can see a bit of it on the rim.

The 'after' upon opening. The overhead lights and unfortunate flash kind of blur the interior, but the honey celadon looked good...

The wadding got a little to flattened out, and some of the salt oozed up onto the foot. Unfortunately, I broke the cup when trying to grind off the excess, but it was still a good test overall. The clay body was the Laguna B-Mix w/helmar, and the earlier tea bowls were zelastone. As I do the shot cups, they may be a variety of clays, and some will be glazed in saggers, others will have their own little thimbles of salt.

Other things in the reduction kiln:

A new way to play with shino - ribbed slip on the pot, then my regular shino layers with the underglaze brush work between. I'm working on a series of smaller vases to play more with this...

Another covered jar, part studio demo, part me playing with a carved facet I haven't done in a while, but I love what this copper glaze does on it. The lid is a hollow form with bits of clay inside. Why does this lid need to be a rattle? Well why not! Actually, this is a demo of a pet urn I've made before, I just needed pictures.

A bit of a side-track. I've been working with a copper green glaze in our oxidation firings. I'm not trying to replicate or replace the reduction 'crazy green', but I did want to get one for mid-range that made me happy. This cup came out of the recent cone 7 ox kiln:

it's become a very popular glaze for the members...

a new mug form I'm doing for the Sparrow Spa, that I quite like. I've been wanting to do the 'dancing brush' design on other forms, and this was one of the pleasant tests.

Another in the series of unending tests to get that gold shino back. This is still a bit more orange than the original firings, but it's closer.

I'm not posting the ChoLo mugs - they were both a frustration and ones that made me go 'hmmmm....', but I'm going to try something else and I'll hold off on that little series of trials and errors (mostly errors lately!) until the next firing.

Another result from the cone 7 kiln - this is studio member Matt's sweet tea bowl. He's layered glazes with a black underglaze, and got a nice result...

...I'm tempted to post pictures of Scott's cups, as he hasn't made it into the studio in far too long, but I'll just leave this mention of them as a teaser to get him in here to see for himself (then I'll put pictures up later!). :)

Back to the wheel - saw the wonderful opening at Clingman last night - it looks great, get down there and get something before the red dots completely take over! The show is great, but it also showed me there are a lot more shelves than I remembered, so I better get more stuff into the next kiln! peace.

more glazing fun

This week I'm putting some things in a kiln with a friend, and whether it's a full load or a 1/4 load, it still seems to require similar amounts of time away from the studio. It does make one yearn for the day when all aspects of the potterly life are within reach of each other without packing, piling, driving and splitting time and attentions! But this firing is yet another opportunity to get that shino glaze right, so when my larger firing comes later in April, I can fire those plates for Holly & Chad and they can finally enjoy their wedding gifts! And I'll also have several pieces for Sparrow Spa, which makes more room on the studio shelves for the rest of the order!

Another piece of fun in this kiln is a little sagger test. I've been reading and hearing about firing shinos in a sagger, and I intend to try that out, but right now the only sagger I have was used with salt inside, and since we needed a few kiln fillers, I decided to try a little fun with another salt sagger. The last time used this, it was supposed to go into a wood kiln, but got bumped for lack of space, so since the salt was tightly sealed inside the sagger, I stuck it into the next reduction kiln opportunity. Here are the bowls from that experiement:

They were unglazed stoneware, with two little thimbles of salt. It's easy to see where they got the flashing, and the thin walls warped just so to make them really interesting. I still love these, and had them on display in the cooked sagger in my studio. Now they sit on the shelf, and the sagger is at the glaze studio. I'll take some before pictures and later this week when we unload show the whole adventure. And then I'll start making some saggers for the shino tests in the April kiln - little shot cups, each with their own sagger/gift box!

Back to the Monday: update the books, finish glazing, put handles on some mugs, finish the postcard for the May show at Clingman...where did I put that list?...

snow day!

I used to hate it when a 'snow day' happened on a weekend or holiday, took all the fun out of it. But today I'm really happy it was as much of a snow day as we get around here, and it's also on my 'day off'. It made it much easier to decide to actually take the day off!

No snow pictures of Lissa rolling in the snow - I had the camera, but it was too cold to take off my gloves, so that will wait. But we did walk down to the studio so I could open the cool kiln to take a peek at our latest glaze firing. Several studio members did some interesting combos and tests, and hopefully they'll be as pleased as I was. And if they're looking here, they get a sneak peek!

I also got my tax info sent away and am waiting for questions and requests from my tax bwana, so I lounge a bit, read a bit, watched a movie a bit, took Lissa for a long walk in the snow and even got a few more boxes unpacked.

Tonight I'm going to my friend Libby's birthday dinner, and I'm taking a gooey, chocolately dessert delight with me.

So much to do at/for the studio...gotta get some sample pieces done for a new product push, got commissions to finish, work to throw to fill a kiln, marketing, marketing, marketing...but today was a good day to take it easy. And with a snow day, it's nice to know there are others who just had to take it easy too!