karatsu

It’s Official

The kiln is finished. Yep, you heard right. Done. I can hardly believe it myself.

Cleaning up the front area and getting the concrete in was the last job, and it is done. Now, working on the kiln will consist of playing with the flue dimensions and firing it, something I am looking forward to, and have started getting work ready for the  upcoming October firing.

I pulled the forms off this morning and cleaned up the concrete. The sump form had collapsed under the weight of the concrete, so I didn’t get the nice oval I was aiming for, and I had to go in with a hammer drill and concrete bit to clean out some of the concrete that had encroached into the sump area. It was still not quite cured, so not too difficult to break up.

Though I imagine water will still rise in the mouth of the kiln, it won’t be dirty runoff, and the walls of the stoking area will not be eroding every time we get rain. Once I get my hands on an automatic sump pump, I’ll be able to cover the sump and forget about it. Yay!

Actually, looking at the front area again, if we could think of a way to create a waterproof wall across the front of the kiln, we could have the first kiln heated jacuzzi. In fact, we could probably ‘soak and stoke’, relaxing in the hot tub while simultaneously firing the kiln to cone 13.

We Have Concrete!

The concrete truck delivered 1.6 yards of concrete today, and it was a happy thing. I think this will finally solve  most of the flooding problem when the heavy rains come, though the water will still probably come up from underneath. So, the sump was left in, and an automated pump will be installed. Best of all, no more muddy mess when firing the kiln!

The truck came at 8:30 and we finished up just before 11:00. The forms held up well with just one shifting a bit. The biggest problem was the sump form which started to crumple from the weight. It all turned out ok in the end, though. Just out of paranoia, I put a layer of ceramic fiber between the slab and the front wall of the kiln to insulate the slab. Also, there is a tube installed so the pump hose and plug will be out of sight for the most part.

There was some crete left over, so I was able to put in a bit of  a walkway/work area out the door of the studio. This previously had a step down, which made it very difficult to roll heavy objects like my lathe stand, etc… in and out of the door. Now the step has been eliminated, and a small work area created between the kiln and the studio.

Before and after pics:

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.

Invisible Seated Monks

Ok, so I hadn’t set out to make invisible seated monks, but what I had been working at failed to materialize, and in trying to salvage it, I ended up with these little guys. The first one on the left was a mistake, the rest were sort of on purpose.

What these turned into, at least in my mind, are flower vases. They can stand as is, or with a ring installed, could be hung on the wall. Also, they can be made in various sizes from very small to very large (IT buzzword “scalable”), and will be easy to fire because they stand up by themselves.

I’m kind of interested to see what those cracks will do in the firing.

 

Doodling

Every once in a while, I find myself flipping through some of my old pueblo pottery books and without fail I end up obsessing on this one geometric design motif. I’m not sure what it is supposed to be, but for me it is lightning. I don’t know why, but I really like it. Unfortunately, it doesn’t fit into the Karatsu tradition all that easily. However, starting today I decided to start doodling with this motif until I come up with something suitable to work into my pots.

This last trip to Korea gave me a lot to think about regarding carving and inlay. There were a couple of boxes I’d made a few days back, and these are going to be experiments with inlay and aforementioned motif. The carving is not great, but it’s a start. The way that the slip fills in the rough cuts to create soft curves is very interesting to me, and the feeling of scraping away the surface of the piece to reveal the inlay design is surprisingly satisfying. Since the claybody on these boxes is porcelain, the normally white slip has some benigara (RIO) mixed in to make it red.

This box will probably get fired in a saggar with charcoal and a feldspar/soda ash glaze. Will post pics of the finished piece if it makes it through the firing, and it is not too embarrassing.

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.