Master Remodel Update

Mirrors and pendant lights hung! Walls painted.

Master Remodel

Current state of the master bath remodel. About down to getting the walls ready for texture and paint. The shower will have expose pipes leading to an overhead rainshower. Thinking of using an orangish color from the tile for the wall color. Hopefully this will all be through in the next couple of weeks.

Glaze firing

I did my first glaze firing in almost a year. The results were mixed but at least no disasters. I fired to a top temperature of 2170 with a 15 minute hold and got a cone 7 according to the witness cones. So I guess I overfired. I have been combining a cone 6 clay with a speckled clay about two-thirds to one-third. I had glaze faults and I am guessing the specks are dissolving and not gassing out and the glaze is not healing over due to the overfiring. Some glazes this was a problem and some it wasn't. I'm guessing the top temp next time needs to be lowered and/or I need to discard the speckled clay.

The bottom pictures are of Raw Sienna. I like the way it pools and breaks on texture. I may have applied to thin, but this glaze shows the faults from the overfiring. On a test tile without the specks it showed no glzae faults, so I'm guessing it's the speckled clay causing the problem.

My Summer

Spent the summer doing home improvement. With the help of a friend we replaced the columns on the front of the house. The original columns had rotted at the bottom. Also did my first tile job in the bedroom. I thought it turned out ok for my first attempt, though I did have to fight my perfectionist nature throughout!lol Now I need to paint the house and start on remodeling the bathroom.

I have been asked to do another demo for the art club I mentioned in the last post. Hope I can make them as happy the second time as I did the first.

Thanks to Brandon Phillips for sending me the brush, can't wait to try it out.

My 2nd Demo

Did a demo for the Art Club of McKinney in April. Luckily I didn't make a big mess because, as you can see, they have a lovely meeting room. We had originally scheduled for February but it snowed overnight and left slick roads and thier meeting was canceled. They decided to schedule a night meeting in April for no other purpose than to have me demonstrate. So I had about two hours of time to give an overview of the process and then do some wheel work. They had about 15 people show up and added two new members. Thier May meeting was last week and I heard they were talking about it being one of the best demos they ever had. That made me proud because it was only my second time to do a demo in front of a group like that. While I was extremely nervous, once I got going it seemed to go very smoothly.

Record Texas Snow

All time record for snowfall here in Dallas. Snowed for more than 24 hours and we had about 12 and a half inches. Here are some shots from around the neighborhood. I picked out what I thought were the better shots even though they didn't give a sense of the actual amount of snow that fell. Wish I would have noticed the date stamp was on and turned it off.