ALONE AGAIN (NATURALLY?)

The end of the year always seems a chaotic time in the studio, rushed drying, decorating and firing and in the aftermath is usually a total wreck. I went down in the studio this weekend, my first time in almost a week to get a bisque kiln loaded and get things straightened up and put away to find my 20+ year old clock had met its demise and a single, solitary glazed teabowl on slab roller, a staging point for finished pieces to get loaded in to the kiln. Sitting there alone, I had tried every trick in the book to get it in to the last kiln but no amount of rearranging or space sorcery was going to get the job done.

Sitting idle, waiting to be fired, this teabowl is next to the bowl I use to collect excess glaze cleaned off the foot ring and despite appearances, there are actually three glazes on this bowl, two very, very thin layers and a thicker Oribe base glaze. Every now and again, I collect up all the contents of the bowl and mix it thoroughly in to a wet glaze and test it out of which several have worked out to make very cool accent glazes though never repeatable and only in batches of 1000 to 2000grams one of which I used on an earlier version of my Oribe until it was fully depleted. Now that the bisque kiln is loaded, a tiny bit loose I should add, this glazed teabowl should fit in the next glaze firing and not find itself alone again, naturally or otherwise.