Sunday, July 3, 2011

My summer report.

Not much happening around here. I haven't made any pots in a couple weeks but I did fire the salt kiln with a bunch of pots from my new clay body. I didn't snap a photo but the results were good. No cracking, before I was having all kinds of cracking with backfilled handles and inside footrings(not s-cracks,) and less warpage with plates. The pots also have a higher ring and feel more dense, though I'll have to fire a test in the redux kiln to confirm that.

Just for kicks I ran a triaxial blend with wood ash, local red clay and granite dust. These are 3 materials I can obtain in abundance for free so I thought I'd see what I can do with them. I've used wood ash regularly for years, I use a bit of red clay in one of my glazes and have never used the granite. I'm not expecting to obtain a usable glaze from this test(though that would be ok) but rather I want to see how these materials interact with each other. So we'll see what happens.


I've also spent some time building a blunging blung-o-matic blunger(patent pending.) It has a mounted motor with mixing shaft and a pump so I don't have to get the slip out by hand. It works well with water...the pump is going to be the weak link...I don't know how well it will handle the slip. I'll let you know in a couple of days.



Happy 4th!


Cheers!

2 comments:

Ron said...

Looks good. Makes mixing a hell of a lot easier!

Joe and Christy said...

Thanks for the update... we're working on a blunger here as well. I've been slacking off on posting, but I'll get it up at some point.

Yeah for testing of local materials as well! I would think there is a good chance of getting some nice glazes out of that mix. The only issue I could see is if there is not enough silica in your red clay... easy enough to fix.
best of luck
Joe