A SECOND VIEW

I ended up getting ahead of myself a bit and started glazing on Sunday, so I loaded Monday afternoon and  fired on Tuesday. Schedules are flexible and when my wife goes in to work on Sunday, I slipped off to the studio to get things started. I unloaded the glaze this afternoon and was pleasantly surprised not a single piece had glaze running off the pot, no stuck feet, no stuck lids, in many ways an ideal firing. The only drawback to a firing that is predominantly one glaze combo is the sameness. Once I started moving pots away from each other and looking at them out in the sunlight, the character of each pot was far more apparent than on two tables filled with saffron and iron red surfaces.

The overglazes, the saffron yellow iron and the iron red are both made from the same base glaze, the only difference is the use of yellow iron oxide in the one and Spanish red iron oxide in the other. However once placed on the alkaline clear and my temmoku, it is obvious how much different they are from each other. Out of the firing, the double gourd vases came out rather well and considering I haven't thrown this form since my arrival in the Mohawk Valley, I think they came out strong with a nice curved rise from the foot. All in all, not a bad firing, lost one test cup and one teabowl out of the entire firing, in baseball this would be batting .990!

Illustrated is the same group, now fired that I used last Friday while they were all still bisque. There is too much light streaming into the studio windows, making for a terrible photo, but I think you get the idea.

"What we anticipate seldom occurs, what we least expected generally happens."

                                                                             Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881)