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.
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?
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. ; )
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.
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….. : )
A funny thing happened at the kiln unloading a few weeks back. One of the glazes, a somewhat crawly feldspathic glaze, had really come unglued on one of the clay bodies and gone all over the place, but at the same time had adhered to the pots really well and rounded over, leaving no sharp edges or uncomfortable spots. Not being what I had aimed for, I was prepared to hammer them when my mentor said “No, you never know what people are going to like and there is nothing wrong with those pots, in fact they are pretty interesting, just unexpected.”
Well, my wife comes out, takes one look at them and says “Oh, you can call those Yuki No Yado Karatsu!” which was responded to with much chuckling and chortling by everyone present.
Yuki No Yado, if you don’t know is the brand name of a rice cracker here that is long time big seller, could be likened to Little Debbie snacks or Ritz crackers. It is a salty rice cracker covered with a crawly sugar glaze, and they are pretty good actually. Here is a picture of them:
Here is a picture of one of the cups in question.
I’ll admit there is a definite resemblance…
Anyway, we decided that calling them Yuki No Yado Karatsu, while entertaining, was probably an invitation for a lawsuit, so I finally decided on Shiranami, which is a term for white caps on a rough sea. It is also a name of a popular shochu drink brand, but first and foremost is a regular expression, so probably safe.
Sometimes it is hard to think of ‘cool’ names for glaze. A traditional effect in Karatsu glazes is a crawling that happens on trimmed surfaces or areas where the glaze is especially thick. My friend Stephen calls this glaze effect ‘pink intestine glaze’ because he first saw it from a macro photo of the glaze surface. Unfortunately, though interesting, this name doesn’t sound all that appetizing for most people.
Luckily, the Japanese thought of the more appealing name ‘Kairagi’, which means ‘plum tree bark texture’. I wonder if that particular glaze effect would have become so prized historically if it had been initially named ‘pink intestinal texture’.