appologies for the lack of blogging

Hey everyone, sorry for the lack of blogging. Our life has become a little disjointed as winter sets in. The camper that we've been living in all summer is shut down with no running water or heat. We are sleeping and eating (as best we can with only a microwave to cook with) in our hotel room. Christy's working close to full time at her temp job, and I'm trying to get the house ready to live in. Our computer still resides in our camper which is a bit cold for too much time relaxing in front of the computer. My little fingers get pretty cold pretty quick trying to type emails or blog entries.
We're still waiting on the plumbers to show up. It's a little frustrating as everything is waiting on them. After they finish up, the basement floor will be poured, and after that we can finish closing in the basement, and really get to work on the house. A little frustrating to have to wait on the plumbers for so long. Hopefully they will come this week and we can get everything else moving. It's snowing now, and is quite beautiful. I'll leave you with a picture of a little work I was doing on the front of the house. I was inspired by the house movers with all their hydraulic jacks. I jacked up the front of the house to slip a beam in place to support the floor joists in the front entry way. I was pretty proud of myself.
Joe

Lara O'keefe

Now that our sale has come and gone, I thought I would take a minute and put in a good word for our good friend Lara O'keefe. I had helped Lara with the construction of her new kiln last year and this spring before Christy and I headed north. I was really happy to be able to fly down to North Carolina and help Lara in her first firing. Lara and her husband Jim have been good friends of mine since I first moved down to North Carolina to work for Mark Hewitt. At the time Lara was working for Jugtown Pottery. It's been really great to keep in touch as we both grow and mature as potters.
Lara's new kiln was designed by Will Ruggles, and has a similar firebox set up to Micheal Hunts kiln. Here's a picture of the kiln during the first firing:
That's Ava, Lara's daughter getting a feel for the kiln. Early on in the firing


Here' a picture of the firing right before side stoking started.

The firing seemed to go very well though I didn't have time to stick around and unload the kiln. Lara sent a couple pictures of the results though
Which look pretty great if you ask me.

Lara's on a similar course to Christy and I and is having her first home sale

Saturday, November 29, 10-5

Sunday, November 30, 12-5

Saturday, December 6, 10-5

Sunday, December 7, 12-5

If any of you happen to be in the Pittsboro area I would recomend stopping by and checking it out. I certainly wish I could. If there are any questions drop Lara a line at: okeefepottery@embarqmail.com

Kiln opening

Well we finished our first day of the kiln opening. Everything seemed to go very well for the first sale at Windy Ridge Pottery. We placed ads in several local papers, and put out fliers on local business windows. With no mailing list, or customer base we were not expecting too much though. We were pleasantly surprised though as people kept seeming to find us throughout the day. Hopefully we'll have another successful day today as well.
Joe

Home sweet home

I'm back from my whirlwind trip to North Carolina, where I helped my good friend Lara O'keefe fire her kiln for the first time (I'll post more on this later). Christy stayed home and started to prepare for our first kiln sale, which is this weekend. Things have started to get pretty cold, and she had to shut down the camper while I was away, and find us a new home:It's feels like quite a luxury to have a nice warm bed and shower. Hopefully we'll get the electricity and water hooked up to our new house and be moved in, in the next month or so.
Joe

christy vs.the batteries

So, y'all, the house is officially on its foundation! The movers finished tweaking it into position on the foundation yesterday afternoon as the snow fell (and blew away). It fits! Except for the front entryway, but we can't be bothered with trifling details at this point. I did snap some photos, but I am having trouble loading them onto the computer. Our new camera is very literal--no ambiguous blinking lights here, folks-- and it sent me a last, desperate "CHANGE THE BATTERIES" message before dying as I tried to secretly snap an artsy shot of one of the house movers hunching behind a tree, trying to light his 200th Marlboro of the day in a gale force wind. I cannot figure out how to CHANGE THE BATTERIES, so the photos of the house will have to wait until my genius husband returns from his southeast kiln firing adventures. Pastel lovers, prepare yourselves. The yellow house and pink basement insulation will knock your socks off.
In the meantime, here a few pictures of wall boxes taken by our friend and talented photographer Ris Fleming-Allen. I really like the soft depth of the glaze on the boxes in the top photo.

Exciting day at Windy Ridge!

Today I chopped wood.... but who cares about that when this is going on:That's right the house is making the last 30 feet of it's journey.
That large white truck is called the "winch truck" and pulls the house along a series of wooden rails and rollers. Here is the north side which runs along outside the basement.
You can see in the hydraulic jacks in the picture above that they use to slowly raise the I-beams. They raise the beams just enough to place another row of 6x6's then let the jacks back down and raise the jack up onto the next 6x6 to raise it again. They had to build up quite a bit of frame work in what will be the basement to give a level surface to roll the house across to get it to where it needs to be.
Here is a picture of the house almost centered over the basement.
You can see there are notches in our basement for them to lower the I-beams into. They lower the house down until it is resting on the foundation then slide the I-beams our from under the house. The house is all centered up and they plan on setting it down tomorrow! Pretty great.
Joe

Seconds

I've spent time off and on this last week cleaning the pots and getting them ready to sell. This has been a slow process, as the wads this time require quite a bit of work to remove them and get the surface clean. Unfortunately we have quite a few second quality pots this time. Most are sellable, but it's still annoying. I decided to list all the various causes of seconds for this firing so as to keep a record, and remember what to avoid them next time. While I was at it I took some pictures our various blunders and mishaps to share with all of you.

Bad Wadding Mix-
The wadding mix has caused seconds in numerous ways. It shrank as it fused, so we have some pots that stuck to the shelf. Not surprisingly I've chipped quite a few lids while separating them for the pot below, and damaged quite a few feet on bowls removing the wadding from inside the foot ring. The shrinking/fusing also caused some of Christy's serving pieces to warp in strange ways. Most curiously, though, the wadding has caused some cracks to appear on the bottom of pots. I first saw this on several bowls and scolded myself for poor compression while throwing (something you would think I would have learned by now). However I've since found it on several mugs and this large jar:It always occured right under the wad. Christy also had this problem on some of her tea boxes. Luckily this is an easy one to fix. We'll just avoid feldspathic sand next time.

Dunting cracks during cooling-
We fired the second chamber off of the waste heat from the first chamber until the first chamber fell to 1600 degrees. This was pushing the limit, but the main problem, I think, came from leaving the blow hole open. We probably should have closed it as soon as we finished firing the first chamber. This would have given us more time to fire off of the heat from the first chamber, since no cold air would have been pulled in through the blowhole. However, that wasn't the main problem. The main problem was that after we switched to firing the third chamber (it was empty; we just wanted push the moisture out of the kiln and surrounding ground) and sealed up the first chamber, we opened up the air inlet into the second chamber fire box, thinking the first chamber would cool slowly from there. Because we forgot to close the blow hole, cold air continued to be drawn in through the first chamber, causing dunting towards the back of the first chamber under the blow hole.
Floor bricks foaming
Not much to say here. It's the first time we've fired with them, and they foamed up. Certainly having wads that fused and shrank didn't help the situation. We'll cover the floor with a layer of kiln wash before next firing.
Mortar and Castable falling on pots
I thought we had cleaned the arches pretty well. However, some kiln debris still fell on our pots.


The dreaded white slip flaking
This is by far the most frustrating of all the problems we had this firing. First, we can't really sell these (all the rest of the problems are more aesthetic than functional, so we are simply selling them as seconds) because they are continually shedding glass. The worst thing, though, is that we are some what at a loss as to what caused the problem, much less how to fix the problem. We have used this slip extensively in the past, over numerous clay bodies, and we have never had a problem with it. The flaking happened under several different glazes, at different thicknesses, and it did not happen every time we used it. Our white slip consists of: Tile 6, feldspar, silica, and a little bentonite. If anybody has any insight into this please let us know.

This concludes the tour of first firing errors and mishaps!
Joe

Bagwall damage

For those of you really enjoy slowing down to take in all the damage as you pass the car wreck. A little something for you to rest your eyes on:
Looking at the photo above it's not hard to imagine why the top of the kiln was cool.
Joe

Just another night in the camper...

with frozen pipes, watching an anime with coveralls, long underwear, hats, coats, and a poodle for extra lap insulation!
Christy

commercial break

Christy and I started the blog this spring as a means of keeping friends and family up to date on our progress, and maybe share some technical info with fellow pottery geeks. However Fred Bowling emailed me recently wondering if he could purchase a pitcher from our first firing. I emailed him pictures of several and he ended up choosing this one:I certainly don't intend to turn this blog into some kind of auction house. However I would be happy to email pictures to people and pack up and ship pots if there is an interest. Just thought I would put that out there. You can email me at josephjcole at yahoo dot com (just remove the spaces and fill in the appropriate @ and . symbols). Now back to our regular programing.
Joe

One last page of photos

A couple more pictures of pots:
This one is a wall box. It has a hole in the back so you can hang it on the wall.




This last one is a memorial photo. A really nice serving dish of Christy's that had the dreaded 'white slip incident'. I imagine if you kept picking at it you could have a nice unglazed dish in short order. We'll give this one a full 21 gun salute as she makes her way to the shard pile.
Joe

More pictures.

Yep I got all professional on you. I stepped up to a masonite bat, and plywood wall backdrop. Real nice like.

Pictures!!

I just took a couple of quick pictures to make sure the camera is working alright. Thanks Dad. Here are a couple of pictures of pots from the first firing. I'll post more pictures latter as we sort through them. Maybe even use something other than a dirty glaze bucket for a backdrop.
Joe

We've unloaded the kiln

Welcome to the first Windy Ridge Pottery post in what we'll refer to as the Obama years.

First off I need to say that in my excitement to tell you all about our first firing I forgot to thank all of the people who helped us with the firing. Aaron Weaver, and Krista Loomans also recent imports from the southeast helped quite a bit especially Sunday night. Christy's brother, sister-in-law, and mother came Sunday afternoon and cut and stacked quite a bit of wood which was great, as well as feeding us, and taking some stoking shifts. Also local potter Frank Polizzi loaned us a couple extra shelves and stopped by twice a day during the firing to lend encouragement. Thanks everyone!
Also as a side note, as soon as my Dad found out that our camera was broken he got on the case and we've got a new camera in the mail. Hopefully it will come by latter today, or tomorrow. Lots to take pictures of. Thanks Dad.
So as I don't have a camera yet, I'll wait for the camera to show you the pots. We unloaded last night and we're quite pleased with maybe half the pots. Which is great for the first firing. I would say maybe 70% of the pots are sellable. I'll post pictures as soon as I can.
So here is the most disturbing part of the unloading. At the beginning of the year we knew we would be using a lot of sand, so Christy called maybe a dozen different quarries looking for silica sand. Most of the places only had limestone sand. She eventually found a quarry who had a very light colored sand where they promised it wasn't limestone. We used this sand in our floor, mortar and wadding. Our wadding is almost completely fused together. I'm not sure what the sand is, but it certainly isn't silica. My best guess is that it is crushed sandstone which is sedimentary silica with some feldspar. Sections of the floor where the sand was exposed to the flame showed some signs of fusing together. We haven't seen any signs of our kiln moving though so hopefully the mortar isn't going to start turning into glass. It's going to be a lot of work to clean the pots though as the wadding does not come off easily.
The other most obvious problem is that on a couple of dozen pots the white slip did not adhere to the clay body at all. The glaze and slip flakes off of these pots quite easily, not just on the rim, but everywhere. I'm not sure what causes this, but it will certainly take some looking into.
Some of our floor brick foamed somewhat, which is unfortunate. Also there is one brick in the bag wall that fell which has completely melted. I though the bagwall fell due to poor construction, but one of the bricks melted into nothing but a foamy mess on the bricks below it. This is certainly what cause the bag wall to fall.
This is all the bad news. The good news is the pots. They look really good. The clay body flashed nicely, and most of our glazes look good. As soon as the camera arrives I'll post pictures. Also looking at the kiln as we unloaded it, we could determine easily what caused our cold spots. In the first chamber it was a kiln shelf that got too close to the side wall. In the second chamber the top of the kiln was stacked too tightly, and then the bagwall fell over completely blocking the flame from rising upward.
Joe

First firing summary

We finished up our first firing last night about 10:30 pm. I'll come right out and say it, I think our kiln is going to be great. The kiln seemed pretty responsive, in our 48 hour firing we never opened our damper past half open, we left it a majority of the time at a third open. So I'm sure in the future if we want to fire a load of glazed pots we could do so in 20 hours. Of course the fact that I think the kiln is going to be great doesn't necessarily mean that the first firing was great.
I'll give a short overview, then maybe mention the good points and bad points. I hope I don't bore anybody, and I apologize our digital camera broke last night. So this will be a text only post, which is unfortunate as I don't consider myself much of a wordsmith.
We started a small fire Friday night, I stayed up till 2am then headed on in. Christy started it back up the next morning around 5am, held 200 degrees for a couple of hours then started slowly pushing the temperature up. We kept the flames underneath the grates slowly raising the temperature. This is where we ran into our first problem. The way the grate supports are stacked up they create a 18" wide trough the length of the firebox. This ended up being too small a space for all the embers while we were stoking underneath the grates. We ended up having to move to stoking above the grate around 1000 degrees. I would have liked to not stoke on top of the grates until 1300-1400 degrees, but this should be fixable for the next firing, as the grate supports are not mortared in place. I think I can stack them in a checkered pattern to allow the ember to spill out to the sides. We reached 1800 degrees Sunday morning and started reducing. We kept it in what seemed to be a fairly heavy reduction (first firings always seems like a guess as to what reduction you are achieving) all the way up until cone ten started to move at the front of the chamber early afternoon. We then switched to holding the temperature letting cone ten in the front of the chamber slowly fall. This period seemed to be almost oxidizing. We held that temperature and worked on evening out the temperature in the middle of the chamber: top to bottom, left to right (the middle cones were 7-8). We held that temperature for maybe five hours, then pushed cone ten down in the middle (also pushing back into reduction). We had one cold spot in the first chamber which we could not figure out, cone 9 was as good as we could get. We closed down the stoking in the first chamber, and started on the second chamber. The second chamber seemed to move very well. We had cone 10 moving on the floor and cone 9 getting soft on top. Then our bagwall fell over. Bummer. Luckily it's fall was stopped by the arch so nothing got broken. We built our bag wall very quickly out of broken half bricks and arch bricks mortared together figuring it only had to last one firing. Unfortunately it only last 80% of one firing. We got cone ten down on the floor, and cone 9 at a half on top, but with the bag wall resting against the arch we decided to call it a night.
Wow, anybody still reading this? I'll end it quickly, the firing was very good for a first firing. The pace was relaxed, the kiln was responsive, and I'm excited to unload. Excited for the next firing as well, maybe March. We'll see if we can sell enough pots to be able to afford to keep making them full time. Christy's starting a temp job till Christmas, and I'm going to try and figure out how to sell some pots.
Joe

Firing

Hey everyone,
Christy's stoking and I'm in getting a quick bite to eat. Here are a few pictures. One of Christy stoking, one of the side of the kiln all sealed up and ready for action (I always like the way kilns look best when they are all sealed up and ready to go), and the last picture is of the chimney in reduction. Oops looks like I got them backwards, I'm sure you can figure it out though. Things are going well, full report later.
Joe