Author: KaratsuPots

Lids

Sometimes it is nice to change the pace a little, and kick the dust off of the woodworking tools. Usually, this involves making lids for pots.

Some of the nice lacquerware lids you see out there can be quite expensive, especially the ones that are custom made to fit a piece. In my price strata, that usually results in my work doubling in price, because the lid costs so much in relation to the price of the pot. This makes it tough to sell them. For a big name potter, that same lid may be only 1/20th the price of the pot, so it doesn’t influence the selling price all that much.

As a way around the lacquer lids, I started doing things in natural wood on my lathe at home. As a sub for ivory tea caddy lids, I use small pieces of exotic hardwood, or sometimes tagua nut, which is an ethical  ivory substitute.

Here are some simple lids I made for the upcoming show. They are fairly ‘quick and simple’, in that I don’t want to spend more than an hour on any one of them, to keep my costs down. I want to have something that looks nice on the pot without contributing to the price. People looking at them can get an impression of how the finished/lidded pot looks, and they may like the lid, or replace it with a lacquer lid later on.

I am not a very good lathe worker, and still end up scraping most of that waste off, rather than a skilled lathe artist who would slice it off, thus avoiding a lot of sanding later. I do it this way because by scraping it is much less likely that there will be a catch, ruining the piece. After finishing the shaping and sanding, the cedar lids get burned and brushed, then oiled. Other hardware lids just get oiled after sanding.

Here they are (remember, clicking on a small image brings up the big image):

Pictures from the latest firing

Below are some pictures from the latest firing (of the gas kiln). There were a few nice pots in the firing, enough to fill in the gaps with the show next week. Lost most of the chawan and guinomi, but got a couple of each that I like.

Chosen Garatsu (the runny white over brown) constantly reminds me that I need more practice. Just when I think I’ve got it down, it shows me just how much I don’t know.

Some new teapots

Here are a couple of the shiboridashi teapots from the second firing, cleaned up with their knobs attached. The knobs are solid silver, polished and fumed to give a muted color that matches with the clay nicely. These are pretty small pots, holding about 120ml of water, mainly used for very nice sencha or gyokurocha.  The first knob is a stylized version of a Ganoderma Lucidum fungi, or ‘Reishi’ in Japanese. The second is a realistic rendering of the same. I am personally very happy with how these pots came together. The test will be at the show next month and the big question is: will they sell?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Final Coat part II

Got two more tons of cob mix delivered yesterday morning and finished up the top coat on the kiln. Lots of mix left over for filling cracks later, and also for finishing up the pizza oven next week.

One thing I was really happy about was not coming across any dead frogs in the cob, like the last load.

As you can see, great care has been taken to keep the front crack free. I’ve been paddling  and burnishing it in a vain effort to keep it smooth.

You would think there is no real practical reason to keep the surface smooth, but the way it was explained to me, this is actually quite important, because during firing when the kiln leaves orbit and begins re-entry into the Ceramisphere, the temperatures and stresses exerted are phenomenal. Any crack or weak spot in the top coat could lead to catastrophic failure in the kiln structure. ; )

new blog for teabowl workshop

http://workshopintaku2012.blogspot.com/

Above is the address for the blog I just started for the upcoming workshop in taku 2012: The Simple Teabowl. It will be updated throughout the year, as the workshop date approaches. Dates, by the way, are 2012, May 12 – 18.

Basic info about the workshop (dates, fees, program, etc…)can be found first and foremost here:

http://karatsupots.com/workshop2012/2012home.html

There are still a few things to flesh out, but the basic bones of the workshop have been taken care of. We currently have 2 amazing potters, and one amazing tea instructor who have agreed to give lectures and demos.

The new pizza oven

Today we got to work on the actual oven finally. We did the base a few weeks back and have been waiting for the rain to abate. We started out pretty straight with our chisel split bricks, the top 20% though gets a bit dodgy, but we hammered the keys in and it is standing on its own, if not very pretty. Over what you see here will be a 5″ thick layer of mud and straw, to seal everything up and add some mass to soak up heat.

The cooking surface is hard castable. Under that is hard fire brick, under which is soft insulating castable, under which are empty beer and sake bottles. The base is a mortared brick cylinder filled with a ‘lasagna’ layered matrix of large and small rocks, and concrete. We needed somewhere to get rid of all the rocks that had surfaced in our landscaping projects, and this got rid of  more than half.

A few strips of bamboo make a quick and dirty arch support for the edges.

Not too bad for a few hour’s work. The bricks are all scavenged, and the dome bricks are wedges cut in half. Arch brick for the door. Left over wedge scraps stuffed in at the apex with mud to fill gaps. The same top coat I used for the big wood kiln will work great for this oven. Inside diameter of oven is 70cm, and inside height is about 46cm. Door height is 63% of the inside height.

The advantage of having the big thick mud exterior layer is that later after a few firings, if the brick dome starts to fall in, the mud dome will remain. Not only that, the interior of the oven will actually get bigger….. : )