It's been a little crazy lately-- not much time for blogging.. This semester has been great so far, and I have been keeping up with my classes, work, and studio work pretty well. I guess today is a day where I am letting myself have a true break, for better or for worse. I feel like I have been in the studio every day for the past two weeks or so, and a day off is a good idea. Anyway, I do have at least one photo to show for all of the work I've been doing. I filled a larger kiln with all of my own work for the first time and fired it. There were a few mishaps along the way-- due to a single detail that I apparently overlooked. I forgot to put the cuffs on the burners after I lit both of them, which made it basically impossible for me to give the kiln enough oxygen to cancel out the amount of fuel going into the kiln. I couldn't turn up the blowers without putting out the tips of the burners, so after I put the kiln into body reduction, it just kept getting heavier. I finally realized that I should put the cuffs on, and everything just became so much easier... but I was super embarrassed about how heavy of a reduction I had it in. I was able to re-oxidize the atmosphere at the end with a few tips from a grad student. The whole point of re-oxidizing at the end was to bring out the red color of the iron-rich clay that I used. I got a few decent pieces out of the firing, but there was a glaze combination that just didn't work out. My professors said that it looked under-fired, but there were plenty of other pieces with mature glazed surfaces in the kiln, so I think it must have been something else, unless eutectics caused the glaze combination to be impervious to the normal glaze firing temperature of the two separate glazes... oh well. I just won't glaze with that combination again, even though I have successfully done it before. My professor said that the work I got out of it seemed mostly decent, aside from anything with that glaze combo on it.
The bowls with the bubbly blue glaze on the inside are the ones that didn't work out... and the few of them that had a decent crystallized surface cracked, probably because I chose not to glaze the exteriors of the bowls... oops. I was trying something new.
These bowls on the top shelf turned out decent-- which is ironic because they were a last-minute addition to my kiln load to fill it to the top. I just decided to try some new glazes on them that I had a good idea of how they would turn out.
