Well, last weekend’s firing is now unloaded and most everything turned out well. It was all for a wedding, so always good not to have to do it all over again…
Before and after pictures:
Loaded and ready to go…
Finished katakuchi, about 25cm wide.
interior detail
Next are some teabowls for the next wood firing. Made from some really gnarly clay, I had high hopes for trimming these…..until I forgot about them and they dried out too much to trim! Dag’nabit!
teabowls
Guinomi
Have a great week!
*Testing new blog to FB forwarding app* *New gallery image display format*
… some pictures of new fired/finished work. Finally got my brightness and white balance issues resolved and took a few pictures to share with everyone.
I hope you enjoy them…
Sorry to everyone for the lack of posting lately, particularly pictures of results from the last firing. I’ve been taking photos, but keep having to scrap them because the color is all over the place. When I did the remodel of the workshop it totally screwed up the ambient light on the 2nd floor. That, combined with me moving my photo setup downstairs, and my white balance is completely out of whack. So, I will post finished work when I get that all sorted out. It’s looking like I’ll have to move the photo setup back upstairs and go back to dedicated lighting of one type only (at this point all you photographers are thinking “no shit, Sherlock”, no doubt.)
Anyway… back to the slabfest thing. After finishing a lot of pots for a wedding order, I started thinking about slabs, and the fact that I finally figured out how to make them without having them all crack during either drying and/or firing. So this next firing will include thicker and larger slab plates, and also one experimental interlocking slab wall hanging that will be about 5 ft. tall.
Lately, all my slabs are made by slapping a piece of clay out on the floor until it is the desired thickness. After that, I get them onto a board and paddle the bejeezus out of them. Lastly, the edges get compressed with a damp chamois. On one of my dog walks a couple of years ago, I found an old rusty sickle which I hammered into a curve and now use to facet and flute different pieces. It also works great on these slabs.
smaller slabs all finished and now drying
edge detail. gouged with a piece of rough pine and smoothed over with a chamois and hands.
surface carved to look like tortoiseshell bamboo.
simple fluting
These three do not have raised edges, since they are meant to be a wall hanging.
one of three interlocking slabs.
they will be held together with wooden butterfly keys
all three will have iron underglaze brush decoration with traditional motifs.
36cm square slab, same size as the others above. This one will be for food, so the edges are raised, and smoothed.
detail of rim and fluted surface
tabula rasa. I haven’t decided what to do with this yet. It is double the size of the others, 10kg of clay.
This last wood kiln firing was a real disaster. All of my large pieces cracked or collapsed completely, and all of the smaller work ended up under-fired badly. The upside to this is that they can all be refired, and I just finished the 2nd of 3 refire loads in the gas kiln this morning.
From the first refire load, my favorite pot is a porcelain teabowl glazed with rice straw ash glaze. I don’t normally work in porcelain, but in my search for bodies that vitrify a little better than the local clays, I’ve started using partly or mostly porcelain in some of my work. This particular bowl is porcelain with as much feldspar sandstone mixed in as I could manage, and still have it wedge-able.
In the wood firing it was in a spot that got a lot of fly ash, and in fact a lot of flaky ash collected inside the bowl. Making sure not to dump this, I saved it for the gas kiln and fired it to cone 11 flat. All of that ash melted really nicely, mixing with the rice straw ash glaze for some nice color.
There are several bloats on the interior, but none really fragile or severe. These bloats and the blues and greens on the interior really remind me of some the old Karatsu bowls with their warty bloated surfaces and subtle coloring of fly ash on rice straw ash glaze. Another nice thing about this pot: the fire color from the wood kiln was not lost in the gas firing. There is a nice gold luster on the melted surface of the bare porcelain body.
This just made me sad when I saw it this morning. We had a LOT of rain over ten last 36 hours, and I think the footers sank a bit, tilting the stack forward, then dumping it. This will take some time to clean up.
** Just one quick amendment to this post: on re-reading the post and comments, I realized that I may have mislead people to believe that the stack (chimney) went over. Not so, thankfully. Just the stack of wood. No damage to the kiln other than a few scratches to the insulating top coat, and about 5 unlucky shelves that had been sitting right where the wood struck.
Location:Taku, Saga, Japan