pottery

Ido bowls….のつもり．．．．

[Me] “Hi, I’m Mike. I’m an Ido Chawan addict.”

[Group]  “Hi Mike.”

So, in indulging my fixation, I had another try at Ido teabowls yesterday. Still not getting it somehow, but am happy with the bowls as bowls. One of the problems was the clay. Too nice, too smooth. It was recycled from some sandy stuff, but in recycling, much of the tooth was lost. I re-added sand, but not enough.

If I hurry, these might make it into the kiln for the Nov. 11 firing. Feldspar glaze, raw glazed and once fired. Who knows, perhaps some good could come of it after all…

僕は、とにかく井戸がすき。何時も諦めかけているが、やはり作ってみてしまう。　今回も何か井戸にとっては足りない。碗としては機能的だが．．．

今回の問題一つ：土　　良すぎて、砂気が足りなくて、削ったら面白くない。再生した土で砂気がなくなり、また足したが結局不十分だった。

急げば今度の窯に入りそう。長石釉、生がけで焼成。

 

Slab and Paddle

These last two summers in Korea got me interested in some variations on coil and paddle techniques. The Korean onggi coil and paddle is very good for quickly making large jars. The south west region of  Joellanamdo has a variation on this which uses slabs rather than coils. The slabs are slapped out on the floor in a very even thickness, then added to the pot and paddled. One of the demonstrators of this technique said that if you could slap out an even slab of clay, that was 90% of the battle.

One thing they don’t tell you is the importance of a suitable clay, and the hardness of the clay. It’s hard. Like slap it down on the floor and it doesn’t stick hard. Stretching it out requires a pretty plastic clay, which is somewhat hard to come by in my neck of the woods. However, when I was cleaning out the studio a couple of days back I uncovered some white clay from Seto that I had ordered a few years back for making Oribe ware. I mixed that 50/50 with some Karatsu clay and got something that while not ideal, is somewhat suitable for onggi work.

In the pictures below I slapped out 3 slabs and made a tall jar. If you make all of the slabs first, the construction process goes fairly quickly. It took me about 40 minutes to make the jar. The craftsmen I saw in Korea could make the same jar in 10-15 minutes. This jar is about 50cm tall.

Kishidake Clay

Although I dig a lot of my own clay, every now and then I find a bagged clay that I like, and use it for certain projects. Since getting the big wood kiln, I’ve done more of this, because I can blow a lot of clay in one firing, and wasting collected clays is a real waste of time and effort. Once I’ve nailed down how to fire the woodie, I’ll go back to my collected clays since my loss rate will be much less (or at least here’s hoping).

Shoko Todo in Ureshino has a couple of clays I like, one of them is called Karatsu Kishidake because the base clay in the formula is from the Kishidake area. It also contains a lot of very fine sand, which is something I really like. Still, I like to add things to bagged clay to improve it, and this is no exception. If a lot of fine sand is good, then a lot lot must be better, right?　Perhaps not.

I started by adding about 15% of my own sand to the clay, and to my surprise it improved the workability, giving the clay more backbone. It also gave the trimmed surfaces more character.

For the next hump, I added about 25% extra sand. I should have known I was in trouble when I couldn’t even wedge the stuff without it splitting apart and having chunks fall out, sticking to the table more than the clay lump. When I started throwing the hump on the wheel, pots would split vertically as I pulled the walls, and I couldn’t get near as thin as with the 15% sand/clay mix. Most of the bowls I managed to finish still had rips in them that I had to go back and fix later. When trimming, this clay gave a very rough texture, and I really liked it, but not enough to go through the frustration of throwing the stuff again. Although, for small things like guinomi this clay is the bomb.

Below in the pictures are two trimmed feet for comparison. One is the 15% mix and the other 25%.

Teapots again

The simple handle-less teapots that I fired in the last wood kiln load all sold, which is very good news. Granted, not a lot of them survived the firing because wood tumbled over on them during the stokes. Not making that mistake again, combined with a larger batch of pots this time around should give me a good little stock of pots to sell.

These are spoutless, handle-less teapots, with vertical grooves cut on the interior where the mouth is, to allow the liquid to escape. They work surprisingly well, and are far easier to clean than a standard teapot strainer.

Also, (my apologies to the squeamish here) I ran into a strange thing on the way home the other day. A Praying Mantis had been run over on the road and its internal parasite was coming out. I couldn’t resist snapping a couple of pictures. These Gordian worms, or horse hair worms as they are sometimes called, really creep me out.

Kohiki cups cont…

I finished the deco on the cups from the previous post a couple days back, and glazed them. After doing the iron brush deco, I gave them a THIN coat of clear glaze, very watery: about 32 on the hygrometer. The deco images were visible under the glaze when it was still wet, though once dry it was no longer transparent.

Here are the images of one of the cups before the glaze was applied.

Kohiki tea cups, etc…

When Nishioka Koju passed a few years ago, a friend of a friend got some of the warehoused clay from one of Koju san’s storage areas. I was  able to get about 60kg of raw dry clay and have been waiting for the right opportunity to use it. I tested it a couple of years ago in the gas kiln and decided it needed wood to really make it jump. The clay itself is a light grey, almost white when dry, so I thought it might be fairly low in iron, but tests showed it to have significant iron and not very refractory. Probably good at around cone 6.

I made a run of about 40 cups yesterday and trimmed them this morning,  then waited for them to firm up a bit. Then, in the afternoon I applied the white slip (kohiki). This was something I have never done before on wet greenware. Last firing I tried it on dry greenware with success, but that clay was different and pretty stable for raw glazing. This clay is quite different so I didn’t know what to expect.  Many sources say to slip the inside, then let it dry, then slip the outside, to prevent the pot from collapsing. The problem with this is that you end up with too much slip around the lip of the pot, and more work is required to clean it off. I decided to apply to the whole piece at once, and did just one test piece to see what would happen. After 30 minutes the pot was still in one piece so I went ahead and did the whole group of 40.

I really like what the slip does on a wet pot. There is a lot more flow and variation in thickness, and I suspect better adhesion too. After the slip dries I will do some brush deco and give them a thin coat of clear.

At the end of the hump, there was enough left for a teabowl, so I threw one. It is intended to be a Todoya style Korean bowl, but we’ll have to see what happens in the firing. At least, this clay trims real nice. Unfortunately the bowl would not hang on to the trimming chuck, so that is the reason for the abrupt end on the interior of the ring. So as not to end up with nasty chuck rash, coupled with over trimmed foot syndrome, it got left as is. Usually trying to fix something like this just ends in disaster…