glazes

Shirakawa Porcelain Mine

Took a hike up the mountain today to the now closed Shirakawa Toseki (porcelain stone) mine. This was the base ingredient for Arita’s glazes for hundreds of years. The mine is extensive, but I stayed near the entrance as old mines are not among the safest places on this earth. The passages from the main entrance radiated out in several directions and where light still filtered in, you could see that some of them extended several hundred meters. And that is just what you could see from the light filtering in. Who knows how much farther they go?

In the entrance area, pillars of rock were left to hold up the roof, but there were boulders in several places on the floor, from what looked like recent rock falls. The roof of the cave is probably about 20 feet tall. The expanse of white rock is really stunning to see.

glaze crawling a bit

There was a bit of an issue with crawling over one of my clay bodies, when raw glazed. The guinomi toward the front of the kiln had this problem, but melted enough to look interesting. These bowls at the back just look dangerous. I left them after the last firing, but finally got them out yesterday and had a nice cathartic smash fest.

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.

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.