Monday, June 22, 2009

more pots.

Here are the last pots for this making cycle. I made enough pots to fill the kiln in about 2.5 weeks, with no late nights or hectic days. It must be because I'm only teaching one class early in the morning, makes for a more productive day. I designed my new wood kiln so that I could fire every 2 months(2.5 times bigger than the old one, which I fired monthly) but I've come to discover that demand for my "product" has doubled since last year. This next firing will be my 4th in the new kiln since February, hardly once every other month. Geez...guess I need a bigger kiln...again. Though don't look for that any time soon, we plan on staying where we are for the next 3-4 years and hopefully this kiln will last me until we move.

Baking dishes weighted down so they don't curl up.


Stupid blogger. That big guy is a 20# jar.


These are all coated in a white slip that is actually the same color as the clay body when wet...which makes ensuring total coverage a little tricky. It's also the same color as the tile6 slip after bisque...hope I don't screw something up there. I am hoping that the high silica content(25%) in the slip will give the glaze a bit of gloss, it completely mattes out in my kiln right now. My clay body is low in silica but I've had problems with clays that are high in free silica in my kiln, so I'll take a little more work in the surface preparation as opposed to cracked pots. For examples sake here are two pots with the same glaze, same kiln, same temp: lots of free silica, low silica, I like it somewhere in between.
Cheers!

5 comments:

Peter said...

Lovely work Brandon, and I am really glad that there is such a demand for it that your kiln is starting to feel small. Great stuff.

Anonymous said...

Could be your cooling. Fast cooling will make an ash glaze more juicy! We cool our wood kiln to 1500 before clamming up. Have seen a lot of matte ash from the slower cooling before we found out about quick cooling.

Anonymous said...

Love the 20# jar, even sideways. never thought of the brick thing before... so simple

Hollis Engley said...

Great looking pots, Brandon. And no doubt they'll be even better after they're fired.

FetishGhost said...

Fantastic forms, these will be fun to watch go through