Here are some pics of the pots that will be going into the fire in the next few days. The style is E-Garatsu and Kairagi, and a combination of the two. E-Garatsu is a clear glazed pot with underglaze iron brush decoration. Kairagi is a crawly translucent glaze which resembles the bark of a tree. The kanji for ‘Kairagi’ means literally ‘plum bark’.

These pots have been decorated with a dark slip which is just a type of clay I dig up and add water to. It has a very high melting temp, so it can be used under glazes without too much fear of everything running. At 1200, it just gets crusty and crawls slightly. At 13oo it melts but doesn’t run.

The larger vases are coil and paddle, the tea bowls and plates are wheel thrown and altered. After the grey slip is applied and dry, I go back and add the iron brushwork.

The loft is finally finished (minus the handrail)! Must think of something to cover the fusebox with though…
I’ll build a removeable light staircase to make access easier. Removable so the area won’t be taxed as living space by the city inspectors.

The latest pics are of the new door to the kiln enclosure which seals off the cold air from the workshop. 2×4 frame with plywood skin on one side, left over cedar doors from our house on the other. I put in 4 inches of insulation before tacking the doors on, and though it’s not very visible from the pictures, urethane weather stripping around the door frame. The door is so wide I had to put a caster on the edge to prevent it from sagging. The hinges are huge, meant for welding onto steel doors, I had to drill holes in them to facilitate installation.
Since installing the door, the workshop is noticeably warmer in the mornings, standing water is no longer frozen, so my new pots can breath easy. This door, in tandem with the new ceiling insulation, has made a HUGE difference in temperature.
The shelves I put in so that a bulk of the tool clutter in the shop could be moved to an inconspicuous corner, out of guests line of site. They are about 60cm deep, so they hold a lot of my junk. : )

Well, I started thinking about all of the work I was going to have to do standing on the tops of ladders with my arms up pinning insulation to the wall and ceiling, and I decided to put in the short second floor I’d been thinking about for a while.

On the north end of the building over the wheel area, the loft will be used as a tea room, display area, customer reception, and ‘hide from my wife when she’s angry’ space. The south end loft for storage.

As you can see from the picture I put a 5×5 beam across the span under the big beam, and another 3×5 screwed to the north wall, then laid my cedar planks across the two. The planks weren’t strong enough to stand on without spreading the weight around so while I worked I laid another plank across them to stand on. Since I’m planning to lay down tatami in the tea space anyway, I decided to lay down some 3/8 in plywood, which I screwed down to the planks, and which really stiffened things up. I can walk around now and don’t feel like the thing’s going to collapse on me. However, I wouldn’t trust it to 3 or more people. So, though I wanted to avoid it, I’m trying to figure out what would be rigid enough to span the 4 meter space across the center of the loft without needing a post from the floor or from the roof beam, either of which would get in the way upstairs or down.

The wooden 5×5 wasn’t rigid enough in my opinion (thus the hanging support from the beam, which I have added to the south loft beam as well since taking the pictures), so I’m thinking about a couple of galvanized metal 2x4s (‘c’ cross section) screwed together and oriented vertically to span the width midway between the beam and the wall.

At any rate, the interior feel of the building has really changed with the lofts installed. More ‘cozy’ now than before.

In the past few years since I moved to Taku, I’ve been around to some of the various kiln ruins in Taku, Arita, and Takeo. I’ve collected various shards that have been laying on the ground or falling down a slope after a good rain. Here are some of the things I’ve picked up along the way.

Since there were no Advancer shelves around 400 years ago, everything sat perched on these pieces of furniture, or perched on each other. Remember, the split bamboo noborigama didn’t have a very high ceiling.

The capital I shaped things are called ‘tochin’ down here, though I think they may have a different name in other areas of Japan. But, you know what they say: ‘ A tochin by any other name…’ The squat, fat thing is called a ‘hama’. This one has a really beautiful white/light blue opalescence , especially when it’s wet, but unfortunately it doesn’t come through in the photo all that well. It has a big old bowl foot attached to it, porcelain from Arita, and as my mentor says, is ‘fairly young, maybe 300 years old or so’.

The two tochin both came from kilns in Taku, as did the inverted cup sitting on the tall one. By inverted I mean it is right side up the way you see it, but it turned nearly inside out in the firing. I thought it was too cool, so I found a tochin of the size it originally sat on to display it. It is Kurogaratsu (black Karatsu), a semi matt black glaze there are many recipes for, though I have found one type of stone on top of the mountain behind my house that makes a beautiful kurogaratsu glaze all by itself, and I’m probably not the only one to have figured that out.

The bottom 3 pieces are my sentimental favorites. They are pieces of the first kiln (a waridakeshiki nobori) built in Japan, by Ri Sanpei, the Korean potter credited with discovering porcelain in Japan, and responsible for the subsequent boom in Arita. He first came to Taku and built 2 kilns here. These wall chunks came from the Tojinkoba Gama ruin, which was excavated and cataloged several years ago. Now, it’s difficult to tell there was anything there in the first place, but some of these crusty old pieces still can be found laying around. The ruin is a few hundred yards from my house. When we built this house we found LOTS of shards of various styles laying around under the rice field. A couple of weeks ago I found a porcelain shard with a basic gosu underglaze design, stuck firmly to another piece of porcelain, and both with lots of sand and chunks stuck to the base. It really gets me to thinking. Here is a piece that is an obvious throw away, no one ever used it. Yet, the excavation at Tojinkoba showed no evidence that porcelain was fired there. I doubt that Ri Sanpei picked up his house and moved to Arita when he found white clay, without testing first. I believe that this piece was a test piece done before he moved to Arita. I spoke recently with the curator of the Taku city historical museum, and he hinted that they believe they haven’t discovered all the kilns that Ri built, and that the area around our house was the center of activity 400+years ago. This makes me wonder if maybe there was another kiln closer to our site (there is a river nearby) that the test was done in. Unfortunately I can’t show the test piece because it disappeared from in front of my workshop, with 8 neighborhood kids running around that seems to happen frequently.

Here are some other stuff that’s gotten fired before and during the wedding cupfest.
I made quite a few of the leaf shaped Chosengaratsu glazed plates. They are small (about 7-8 inches long), and I envisioned them being used for sweets in tea ceremony, or as sashimi dishes. They are about 14mm thick, and I made them that way intentionally because I wanted a heavy form that would be stable in spite of it’s size and lack of feet. Also I felt that it would work with the heavily applied glaze. So far, nearly everyone has said they are just too heavy looking. Argh…

The Madaragaratsu (white straw ash glaze) mukozuke were done in the last firing. They were bisque that had been sitting around quite a while, and I needed something to fill the load. I decorated under the glaze with a dark grey clay slip that I get from a layer of strata running pretty much through most of Saga prefecture. The Madara-yu breaks nicely over it, without running all over the place like it does over Ame-yu or iron oxide. I managed to get 3 sets of 5 out of the batch and I’ve ordered boxes so I can make gifts of them. First set to the Mama-san of a local tavern who used her connections to procure a HUGE orange pumpkin for us this Halloween. We’ve had a real hard time finding orange pumpkins for halloween here. Costco in Fukuoka had some…FOR 75 FRIGGIN DOLLARS!!!!! Just couldn’t bring myself to pay $75 for a pumpkin, go figure.