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)
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