Cone 6 Wadmore

This next weekend's firing opportunity seems like a great time to explore using wads for a cone 6 firing, lifting the work up off the shelves for better heat convection in a gas kiln.

 700 grams of cone 10 clinker slop, (recycled cone 10 clay).

50 grams Alumina Hydrate...

Saw dust... (add and mix in until the slop becomes wedgable, then wedge-it up, divide it, and wrap up the batch for damp box storage.)

This may or may not go unsaid... apply small wads to the bottom of wear by dipping wads lightly in wood glue thinned with a spot of water.  This is enough wadding for a very liberal application in (2 to 3) 17 cubic foot kiln loads of work.

Expecting the Unexpected

Another kilnload of question marks was fired off Saturday night. Sunday was spent pulling out the work and looking at it without expectation. Not always an easy thing to do, but after last weeks jaw drop, I'm at least expecting the unexpected.

Whoa!

Ahhh, I meant to do that...

That different...

Didn't mean to do that...

Lumpy bumpy...

Subtly cool

Cone 6 SDSU Texture & Crawl Glaze

Here is a real cone 6 gem...

25% Magnesium Carbonate
70% Nepheline Syenite
5% Kentucky Ball Clay (OM4)

This is the basic recipe of the crawl glaze that I've been playing with over the past few months. I found it buried in an old sketchbook scrawled in a corner of a page. It was from 8 or 9 years ago during a time when I didn't have any sort of studio access and was sucking up as much information as I could get my hands on. The recipe is attributed to a October 2000 Ceramics Monthly article on page 49, unfortunately I failed to note who the author was. (Hopefully someone can help me rectify that.)

This glaze is very temperamental and you need to place it in the kiln asap after dipping. The glaze will crack and begin to pull away but not quite fall... unless it's disturbed. It's very sensitive to thickness.The glaze will behave very differently based on what's under or over it.
Here's a link to a February post showing some of my experiments... http://fetishghost.blogspot.com/2009/02/test-yumoni-for-crawling-glaze.html

Experiment and have fun and please share any successes or failures you have.

Crawl and Soda

The morning was spent finally posting a handful of canisters into my Etsy shop.

A little cone 6 crawl...

and a spot of cone 10 soda...

Now I just wish I could find my stride on writing those darn descriptions.

BoneOrchard TeaWare

The studio has been a flurry of activity over the past 3 weeks. Between all of the hours and hours spent blissfully gardening, 28 cubic feet of bisque has been put through the kiln and 17 cubic feet of glaze has gone through as well. Well over half of that work was in prep for an experimental soda firing this weekend at Clay Planet in Santa Rosa, CA. with Matt Brown from Moss Beach Ceramics, (more on that in a later post). Finished works are finally beginning to flow out of the studio again. Most joyously, I’ve been very happy with the new works coming out of the kiln for my BoneOrchard collection of teaware. Here are a few works selected from the last firing that will be available at FetishGhost’s Etsy storefront.