churning

I've been meaning to update for six weeks or so, because I bought a churn.

I made a trip to the Pickens jockey lot and found this piece. The price was right, so I picked it up:


I'm not in any way expert on this sort of thing, but my guess is that it's from Georgia. Looks like an Albany slip glaze, so probably 1890s to 1940s (and almost certainly the later end of that range).


There's a pretty large ding out of the rim, and there's some sloppy glazing at the top. There are quite a few minor odditites, but it's in good shape overall. The clay is very soft, almost like eathenware. Reminds me a bit of Lizella clay, since it doesn't seem to be really vitrified.


I bought it because I thought it was pretty cool. I don't think it's particularly collectible, but it's nice to have a piece of semi-local history around the workshop.

ash glaze redux redux: tiles

As promised, here are the tiles from the test glaze batches we fired a week or two ago. These are just four tiles with two of the ash glazes and a new decorative feature:



The first glaze was supposed to be a tobacco spit. I like how it turned out on the Lizella clay -- almost any ash glaze looks good on Lizella. It's got some matte spots and some shiny glassy spots.

The second and third tiles are a new version of our standard ash glaze with a bit of copper added in. The color of the kitchen wall is similar to the runs, and is washing out the tiles a bit. They look good in person. But things looked very very very different when we mixed up a gallon of the stuff. Every kilnload is an adventure.

The final tile has a couple swatches of a metallic-style decoration.

More pictures are coming with the next page update.

ash glaze redux: the magic of baby food jars

One of the dubious benefits having a baby nearby is the vast number of little glass jars that pile up. They look useful, but they're generally not. (I'd make one of those under-shelf old-man nail-and-screw toolboxes, but we've already got a spot for nails and screws and brads and staples and tacks.)

I finally realized that we could use those jars to mix up test glazes. I've got to measure more carefully than usual, since a gram one way or the other can make a huge difference in an ounce or two of glaze. (We cheerfully mix units of measurement.) But I can get a sense of what a glaze might look like before we mix up a couple of gallons.

We ran just a few experiments in our last firing. Several of those were ash glazes. As I said in an earlier post (in which the pictures are now broken), ash glazes can get out of hand easily.

Our new mixes went well, though, and gave us some idea of what we want to mix up. We should have some excellent new colors before too long.

Current pictures are forthcoming, with any luck.

more cullet glass

He's a rock star.

Again, I don't know what this glass will do in the kiln, but I'll be interested to see. In the meantime, I might try and affix some of this stuff to some eyes after firing (though that seems like cheating).

Face Jug of the Month Club

So, I had an interesting idea:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=190282610007

The auction is for a subscription (the only one so far) to my Face Jug of the Month Club. Every month or so, I'll send along a new face jug to the winner. I'll include my usual mix of creepy things and even creepier things. . . .

It'll be fun to see how things turn out.

In the meantime, here are some in-progress jugs:



The crazy shiny eyes are cullet glass, the kind that makes reflective road stripes reflective. I found a pile of it on the way home a few months ago. . . I just wish it would shine that way after firing, but there's no hope.

melting clay for eyes

I spent a pleasant hour or so watching Peter Lenzo work this morning. He is a meticulous glazer.

The devil jug in the post before this one, which I still like after a few months, and which is therefore looking down on me now as I type, has got a melted left eye. I know that it's obvious, but what surprised me is how well it turned out.

To come up with a melting clay, I ran a series of experiments. I started with a base of Highwater Clay's white earthenware and added frit (Ferro 3195) in varying percentages (by weight).

For the electric kiln, cone 6, 80% clay and 20% frit worked best.

So I guessed that for the wood kiln, cone 10, 90% clay and 10% frit would work well. It did, by and large -- it produced the eye in the devil jug below, as well as this guy's eye:



But the same mix also produced this unmelted result:



A mystery.

This blog has been neglected, among the various vagaries of our lives. Fortunately, we don't have any readers.

We're going to put in another wood firing with Michel Bayne in a week or so, but I still haven't had time to make it out to the shop. Today is slipping away, and tomorrow is booked. Such is the way of things.

Included in this post are a couple of my favorite pieces from this year. Note the heavy Peter Lenzo influence. (He's told me I don't need to pay any licensing fees.)

marketing theory and practice

I have a theory that we'd sell more pots if this were a quasiliterate screed.

alkaline glazes: a failed first glaze

When I finally started working with Greg on making pottery, we decided that we should mix up our own glazes. The commercial offerings we'd seen weren't all terribly impressive.

We wanted a variety of colors, but the glaze we most wanted to make was an alkaline glaze -- something that would connect our pottery to the folk tradition that began in South Carolina.

We had some successes later on. . .




. . . but I want to talk about the failures first. They're much more interesting.

We misremembered the first recipe we got -- what we heard was a 3:1 ratio of clay body to lime. Nothing else. For our cone 6 firing.

We didn't know that was a problem at the time.

We did some things right. We weighed everything out very carefully and wrote down exactly what we'd done. We were keen to try the glaze, so we didn't try it out on test tiles. We hadn't even made any test tiles yet. . . .

So the glaze went onto two or three mugs and went into the kiln. We waited out the firing, and anxiously opened it when things had cooled down a bit.

The mugs that had been glazed in our first alkaline glaze looked like sandpaper. They felt like sandpaper. They _behaved_ like sandpaper: the grit would come off, but only if we rubbed vigorously, and it abraded whatever we used to rub the mugs.

We tended to underfire the old kiln just a bit, so we refired the mugs when we got the new kiln. The glaze improved, but the mugs are still unusable -- there are spots that look great, and there are spots that look rough. Like sandpaper.

I'll see if I can get a picture of the mugs to post here. They're still in the barn, as a warning (and because they look pretty cool, as long as they're on a shelf ten feet up).

Greg's African face jug

I've got a great piece of Greg's up on eBay at the moment:


There's a similar piece of African artwork -- a bust -- that Greg used as a model. He shaped the face before he added the upper part of the jug and spot, then added in the finer details to finish the jug.

The glaze is our homemade iron oxide glaze.

I think the piece is amazing -- it's one of my favorites of Greg's, and I'm sad to see it go. It'll make a buyer quite happy, though.