Patience.

"Patience is a virtue" is the old adage that I did not pay any mind to this morning. My pottery is single fired, meaning that I glaze raw pots without bisque firing first. This brings in the conundrum and graceful dance of putting moisture (in the glaze) back into a drying clay vessel. The walls soak up the wet glaze pretty fast and can become very flexible, very quickly. I make my pots pretty thin and this usually works out just fine. When I put glaze on the inside and the outside of the piece I usually need to wait between glazing the inside and glazing the outside in order to let the walls set back up a bit. I was rushing to get ready to go to the museum for work this morning and thought, "maybe it will be okay if I just go ahead and double dip these mugs now." WRONG!

I arrived home this evening to find the handles collapsed off of the sides of the mugs and sitting in little, sad pools next to the vessel. These are the lessons that keep me humble.

The nice thing about single firing is that when I screw up a pot, it goes back to the pile of scrap clay to be recycled for future use!

Raw Color

 With this nasty weather we have had, I have had to postpone my kiln firing due to the fear of raw pots freezing (overnight and while loading in 20 degree weather), and not being able to get out of the house! If you're reading this from the North, then don't laugh when I say we only got about 4 inches, but also had about 1/2 inch of ice on top of it! I don't care where you live- ice is not fun. For a town, and a state for that matter, that is not terribly well-prepared for winter weather (several counties around us are without salt), our City guys were dutifully out with plows last night and all today!

Raw clay glaze from clay dug at the farm

So I took the extra couple of days when I would be loading to make up some test slips and glazes. I am most excited to test out the clay I pulled from the holes we dug for the barn at the farm. Above is an image of the dried, crushed clay blended with 3134 Frit, in a 50/50 ratio. Bob Armfield recommended giving that a try, and I cannot wait to see the results.

Tests for the raw clay glaze

The color as a raw clay glaze is like fresh pureed pumpkin. Not the pumpkin from a can at the grocery store, but small, fall, pie pumpkin flesh- bright and lush!

Cobalt blue slip

I am always mesmerized by the change of raw materials in the kiln's atmosphere. Above is not a new recipe, but my usual blue cobalt slip. I use cobalt carbonate in my slip, which is bright pink as a raw material. When I paint it on my pots it looks like this:

Cobalt blue painted on a dish

 

And when it comes out of the kiln, it looks like this (usually):

What cobalt blue usually looks like after the kiln firing (painted decoration)

That transition from one color to another never ceases to excite me. In a wood-firing and salt-glazing atmosphere, I really don't have a true notion of what could happen, and whether everything will work out in any planned fashion. I try to do as minimal planning as I can so that I am not terribly disappointed after a firing!

A new slip I am trying is a white slip base with 1% manganese added to it. If you have never seen raw manganese, it is very black and makes this beautiful color when blended with white slip:

Manganese slip

I may have really high hopes, but I am anxious to see whether this color when painted on my pots like this little test vase-

-will turn out anywhere near the color on the inside of the flowers (the purple color) of this German stoneware tankard below.

Tankard with cobalt blue and manganese slip decorations. Image courtesy of Port Tobacco Archaeology Project

Hopefully with warmer weather this weekend I will be able to finish prepping the kiln and get things loaded up next week!

By the way, this is the look my chocolate lab gave me when I asked him if he wanted to come in from the snow this afternoon:

"I'm not done!"