Beware the school kiln...and school in general for that matter.

A while back I was asked to make a couple mugs and a canister for someone who was retiring. Good deal; I can do it. Only problem is I don't have time to get a full load put together by the time they need to be done. Solution? Find another firing to jump in on before the deadline. As luck would have it the ceramics teacher at school was generous enough to let me put a few pieces in with her classes stuff. Good deal; I can still get it done. Throw throw throw, decorate decorate, and here we go.

Two mugs ("Retirement coffee is the best kind of coffee."), one and one extra, just in case. The designs are pretty similar, but not exactly the same. I like the movement in the first one better (I don't know that it comes through in the picture too well). The second one just has straight sides; too static. I do like the design on the second one better, though.

The client (my mother in law) took the second one. I hope the recipient was happy with it.

She also requested a canister to store well wishes & such in. I was not very happy with the results, but she thought it looked good. Unfortunately, due to the condition of the shelves in the school's kiln (unwashed, glaze puddles all over), this piece was glazed to the shelf and took some pretty good sized chunks out of the bottom edge when it came off. Thus it was unfit for sale. My mother in law still liked it though, and after I ground the bottom pretty good she decided to keep it for herself.


And for the random child update, we started Noah on cereal the other day. He wasn't too sure what to make of it at first, but after a few minutes he got the hang of things. I guess I have a new commission for some baby dishes coming up.

I should have plenty of time to get that done, though. School just went on semester break for two full weeks. That gives me quite a bit of time to get the banks, ornaments, bowls, serving dishes, oil lamps, etc done that I need to finish. And now I guess baby dishes too.

On a completely different note, someone stole my sketch book the other day! (My wife is laughing about me writing this because she has already been hearing about it since it happened.) It was in my desk at school when I left on a Friday; there was some sort of school function over the weekend, and when I came back Monday my sketchbook was gone. Who the f--- steals a sketchbook?! I can understand why people steal cars or jewelry or whatever; they have something to gain from it. What does someone gain from stealing a sketchbook? It is not like there is some big black market for sketchbooks, is there? GARGH!

Ok, I am done ranting...for now. Until later.

-Rob

Glaze Fire Results

I hadn’t planned on posting on here today, but the weather is less than great, canceling both my roofing plans and my barrel firing plans, so… This morning I did get to unload the glaze firing I did yesterday. I have been having some problems with firing my kiln to cone 6, so this was kind of a test firing.

I never really realized how small my kiln is. I got done unloading and thought, “Wow, there was hardly anything in there!” I knew my kiln wasn’t huge, but man, it is small! Now I’m always going to be self conscious about my kiln size. Actually, between the realization about my limited kiln space and its recent chicanery with glaze firings, this would be a good time to look into hooking up my “new” kiln. (My wife’s cousin recently moved and gave me all of his old pottery equipment, including a kiln and wheel!)


So here are the results. There were a couple of grow pots (planters), some tea bowls, a few mugs and a number of glaze tests. I was fairly pleased with how everything turned out, especially the toasty color of the clear glaze over the tea bowls. The color doesn’t come through too well in this picture, but it is nice…or at least I think so. I still have to go through all the glaze tests, but I think they will yield some good information.

This is one of the mugs that I have been working on. It has a light underglaze wash and clear glaze on it. I have a few more that are textured like this, but I am not sure about finishing them the same way. Would a colored glaze be better? Do I need to do something with the handle? I don’t know. Any comments or suggestions would be more than welcome on this.

And finally, the over firing issue. This load was over fired, but only slightly this time. I set up a witness cone so as I could keep an eye on it throughout the firing, but apparently I didn't watch it quite close enough. After running through the firing schedule for about seven hours the automatic shut off had not dropped on the kiln sitter, but the witness cone was bent so I turned it off. When I unloaded this morning some of the work was slightly warped, but not terribly so. And then there was this…

You can see that the cone is bent slightly more than it should be (at least I think it is), but the bar for the kiln sitter is hardly bent at all! What?! So the question; is there a problem with the kiln sitter or did I somehow get a bad batch of bars? Both puzzling and frustrating.

Oh the Irony-or-This IS a real job!

So I wasn't really planning on posting on here today, but after reading a great post and comments on the blog this artist's life by Whitney Smith I decided I had to, but more on that in a bit. First...



What is wrong with this picture? Nothing much on first inspection; maybe these are some pendants or earrings or something. But then there is that "Oh shit" moment when you realize you just opened the kiln and these are supposed to be the witness cones and kiln sitter bar. I'm not entirely sure what happened, other than the kiln over fired, which made the glaze tests that were in there completely useless. Most everything was scrap except for a few things that didn't have hellacious bloating in the clay or weren't slumped beyond salvaging.

The few things that did come out were actually kind of interesting. These are a few keepers. The three cups in the front and the two blue cups had slip sprayed on them and should have turned out matte, but with the over firing the slips appear to have melted into a satiny glaze. Of course this isn't exactly what they were supposed to look like, but hey, you take what you can get out of something like that. The really ironic part is that I put the witness cones in this time because I was afraid the kiln might have been under firing. I can definitively say that is not a problem. Now if I can just figure what went wrong...

And now for the really great post. Ms. Smith talks about the trials of being a professional artist in her blog, and in this post in particular she talks about the crap we often get from other folks about not having a "real" job. It seems to me that most of the people who look down on being an artist as a profession are people who have a JOB. And by JOB I mean they do not get any sort of satisfaction out of work other than the paycheck at the end of the week. It seems some people think that if you enjoy what you are doing it doesn’t really count as work. Thus artist, who enjoy what they do for a living, don’t really work and do not deserve the same level of respect as people with jobs that do work. Why can’t people understand that being an artist is just as valid an occupation as anything else? Some people choose to be lawyers; some people choose to be plumbers; and some people choose to be artists.