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.

Here are 2 sets of 3 cups with Neph Sye/Kaolin ‘shino’ glaze tests. I tried varying between thick and thin application, and the two center faceted cups have a dark clay slip applied under the ‘shino’ glaze on the unfaceted parts of the cups.
The only difference between the two sets is the type of kaolin present. The whiter group is K-1 and the more translucent group is korean kaolin. I prefer the look of the korean kaolin, though it is somewhat grey. I did a couple more tests with iron oxide brush work under the glaze in the last firing, but have not taken pics yet. Well update blog with those soon…

Here are the boxes everything went into, including the labels we printed.
Boxes were about 180 yen each, which I thought was a hell of a deal. My wife did the label design for me, she’s good at that sort of thing.

The kanji at the right indicate the style of pottery (Madara Karatsu), the middle indicates the type of pot (Fude arai), and the left is my name. I then stamp the label with my smaller stamp to finish it.

These were the other things ordered with the cups. They are brush rinsing basins for the groom and his friends in the same profession. I don’t know the name for it in English, but they create forms for teeth as well as false teeth by mixing various concoctions. One of the processes they use involves a little tub of some sort of resin powder they apply with a wet brush. Both a reservoir of clean water as well as a rinsing space for the dirty brush is required so he requested a split basin with indentations for placing the brush when not in use.

I made them by coiling up a round wall, cutting it free at the base, reshaping into a split basin, and re-attaching to the base slab. It’s glazed with rice straw ash glaze and a dark clay slip is applied just to the lip under the white glaze. They were fired on a bed of rice straw ash to give the bottoms some interest.

Here are the same cups, all ready for boxing. Shown also are the second load. This time the Ame-yu was too thin which prevented nice white glaze runs. Argh! Oh well, practice makes perfect?

My neighbor came over yesterday and said that the cups all laid out like that looked delicious, good enough to eat. She’s now my favorite person, for obvious reasons.

When all was said and done (including a disturbing amount of hammering), I had 97 sets of 2 cups each (large and small), plus 24 extra short cups, which the customer decided to buy in addition to the original order. Yes!

Well, finally getting around to getting this blog updated after many months. The workshop is finished and the kiln is in and getting fired.
I got a large (for me) order to do the presents for a wedding and have been busy with that for the last 5 weeks.
Here are some before/after shots of some of the cups in the kiln before being ground and cleaned. This was the first of 2 firings to get the number of cups needed for the order. I fired too quickly and as a result nearly everything in the top and outside of the setting ran onto the bisquits, requiring lots of grinding. The cool spots didn’t run enough. Ame-yu (brown glaze applied too thickly as well, which exacerbated the rampant runs. Argh!