A Mining Trip

Today, in spite of the typhoon passing by us, 3 of us potters decided to go out to a construction site that we previously scouted, and collect some great feldspathic sand. The whole mountainside is sandstone and the construction process has done a good job of crushing great amounts of the stuff, with trucks, back hoes, tractors, and the like. Then, when it rains, the fines travel down the hill and collect in the gutters and sumps making it easy to collect lots of fine sand which does  not need to be processed further in the stamp mill.

Today everything was damp, so pretty heavy, but having cloud cover was great and we hardly broke a sweat. Sunny days here in the summer can be quite unbearable.  We got at total of 38 bags of sand, and I brought home about 600kg.

Now that the mountain has been worked over pretty good by the construction company, places to collect sand have decreased, and the whitest sand (less iron contamination) is no longer available. We did get about 7 bags of the white stuff, with the rest more reddish/brown. I also found one nodule of iron (called ‘oni-ita’) in a sandstone boulder and dug it out to make underglaze pigment with.

This sand is great for adding to your clay, really gives it some character and helps it to mature at a lower temp, while preventing slumping. You can mix in up to 50% or more sand into the clay depending on what you are making, and the finest of the sand can be wedged up all by itself and made into smaller guinomi and chawan sized items.

Karatsu Show

This last weekend we had the show in Karatsu.  It was a 3 day weekend, so we did Sat, Sun, Mon. Well, if you are thinking about having a show on a 3 day weekend, let me give you a little advice: don’t. Everyone goes somewhere else. The first two days were absolutely empty, and it was only the during the last day that I was able to make some good sales. Thanks to guests from Osaka, Kyoto, and Chiba. I guess they were using the 3 day weekend to get out of their respective areas as well.

Well, lesson learned. Overall, it was still a very enjoyable experience, with lots of time to sit and chat with friends over tea. The highlight of the show was without a doubt, the shiboridashi teapot with the river crab knob. It is a pure silver crab holding a ruby in his right claw.

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.

Washing your Oribe

Sounds kinda dirty, somehow, or maybe that’s just me. Anyway, when you fire Oribe greens, you usually get an oxide layer over the surface that dulls the color, or in extreme cases changes the color completely to a sort of what I always imagined the color of the Great Grey Green Greasy Limpopo River to be. (always loved Rudyard Kipling)

The traditional method for cleaning this up is chestnut husks soaked in water, which creates an acidic, extremely smelly brown concoction that you soak your dishes in for a few days. Nowadays, people use a 3% solution of hydrochloric acid. Now, this is nasty stuff so if you are going to use it, use it in a very well ventilated area, with gloves, eye protection, etc… When you open the bottle, white mist rises, just like in the movies. Breathing that is not a good idea.

Here is a before after pic of a dish I cleaned up. These dishes did not have a heavy oxide layer, but the cleaned one is noticeably brighter.

Kamadashi / and a nasty case of the runs

I unloaded the kiln yesterday evening, confirming my suspicions about my glazing skills. While I got some good smaller ‘souvenir’ level work out of the kiln, the chawan and guinomi were for the most part not so good. These are the higher yen items, so I like to get more of those than less, but it does not oft happen. Two problems with them this time: the iron glaze was a bit thin, because the water was a bit too deep in my foot soaking dish, and my band of rice straw ash glaze at the top was a bit too thick.

The pieces that I needed for the upcoming show were the small dishes and yunomi, and for the most part they came out great, aside from about 10 that really ran, and had super duper pinholing. The smaller dishes that I tried out my copper green on turned out nicely as well, looking like a cross between an Oribe green and a Nuka Seiji.

I’ll post pictures of some individual pieces in the next few days, but for now here are the unloading pictures: