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.

David Malcolm Rose

I saw this artist's work while in Hot Springs, Arkansas in August. Thought I would share his work here. It must take alot of discipline, dedication, and patience to complete these with such detail. Go check out his website. Amazing work.
www.davidmalcolmrose.com/id30.htm

Textured wallpaper

Had errends to do today so I didn't get to complete Michael Kline's assignment today. Scored some texture wall paper at Lowe's for a couple of dollars each on clearence. Normally these are around fifteen to twenty dollars a roll. So I maybe into slab pots in the near future.lol The pattern on the right is by far the best of them, but I can probably find uses for the others though.

Texturing Tool Secrets

The secrets to my recent texturing success are pictured here. lol I think the first one is a hair curler and what I used to texture the bowl in front from the last post. I tried to make mugs with this but wheelhead interference wouldn't let me get all the way to the bottom of the mug. A large blank space is left down there and I couldn't get the combination of texture and non-texture to look right together. Will have to think about that one and see if there is a solution that looks good. The two bowls in the back were textured using the pastry wheel in the middle. The scrap piece of wood was used to texture the bowls three or four posts ago. If anybody tries these let me know how it works for you.

Got out in the studio and got my hands dirty today. Threw a few textured bowls trying to get back into the swing of throwing. Suppose to do a demo next week, only my second one, and need to get in some practice. Used a new "tool" to texture the bowl in front, I am eager to see how it will look once it's glazed. Been enrolled in continueing ed pottery class but that may be coming to a close. Some of the more experienced potters kept signing up because it was like an open studio with access to reduction firings. Now they are requiring us to state a limiting "focus" on one area Instructor has to verify if our work to be fired is consistent with our "focus". So looks like they are trying to kill the CE class because they know no one will stay with that kind of nonsense. If we wanted that we would have signed up for credit classes.

Texas Snow

With all the wintery snow pictures on other blogs, I thought I would show the only snow we've had here in Texas. Snowed Christmas Eve night and christmas morning this is all we had to show for it. Not quite as picturesque as other parts of the country. This is looking from the porch of my parents home at Lake Ray Hubbard. That's me in the Santa suit which I wore to the christmas eve party and then christmas day. Everybody got a kick out of it because it was so out of character for me to do something like that.

New Year

Happy New Year. Sort of neglected this blog, but I hope to change that this year. Here are some quick shots of the bowls I did the texture on. Not real impressed with any of them. Thought a single glaze maybe boring so I dipped the rim in another glaze on a couple and don't think that works either. My favorite is the bottom Celadon bowl.