light it up

Not much to say. Loading and bricking the doors up took longer than anticipated, as shelves had to be cut for the loading, and bricks had to be cut for the doors. We didn't have time to cut any wood today, so we'll have to do it tomorrow. Luckily tomorrow should be a pretty slow day as far as stoking is concerned. We're hoping to reach top tempature around noon on Sunday. Then hold top tempature in the front chamber for 7-8 hours, before moving on to the second chamber. Hopefully we'll be all done before midnight.
Joe

Loading day three, almost there

Loading continues on in the second chamber:


As you can see we ended up leaving the saggers out of this firing building a bagwall instead to direct the flame. The saggers were still fairly wet and a couple were starting to crack. We're going to dry them out, reclaim the clay and try again. Chalk it up to a learning experience. Hopefully we'll have them in place by next firing.
We're still loading fairly loosly, and it looks like we have enough pots for two more full stacks exactly like this one. I'm pretty pleased as this should be a good full chamber. My only concern is that the way things worked out the top is going to be stacked tighter than the rest of the chamber. It's not too tight, just in comparison to the rest of the stack it is quite tight. Hopefully this will not lead to a cold top.For some reason pyscologically, compensating for a cold top seems much more laborious than adjusting for a cold floor. It's a new kiln though so who knows how it will play out.
The first stack goes the slowest as we try and figure out which height of shelves work best where, the next two stack will have this same stacking pattern and should go much quicker. We hope to be able to finish loading early tomorrow. Which should give us time to take care of other things, like cutting bricks to fit the doors, and cutting wood.
Joe

Loading day two

With such a narrow front door it's difficult to get a good comprehensive photo of all the pots we have in the first chamber. The first chamber is pretty loosely, but evenly, stacked. It looks like we will have enough pots to fill the second chamber loosely and evenly as well, although it is always difficult to tell when the pots are still on boards in the studio.

The two bisqued pots up front are from local woodfired potter Frank Polizzi ( he doesn't have a web page but you can find him here ) who has been very welcoming and generous to us since we moved here.

Joe

First day of loading

Here are a couple of pictures from our first day of loading. Here is the back stack of pots in the first chamber. It's a fairly short stack as the stack runs into the arch pretty quickly. We're careful not to allow the pots to get too close to the arch as this always seems to lead to cold spots, and may effect the flame path.
Here is the begining of the main stack in the first chamber:This is the main stack. There are two side shelves which will run into the arch at the same spot the side shelves do in back. However the center 2'x3' shelf will run up about 6' tall. The front row of pots is unglazed and will hopefully collect most of the wood ash. Everything else is glazed. Hopefully we can finish loading the first chamber tomorrow, and start on the second chamber Thursday. I always have trouble telling how far the pots will go during the loading process. It always seems to be a roller coaster sometimes thinking that there is no way all these pots are going to make it in the kiln, sometimes convinced that we will certianly run out of pots before we reach the end. I'm quite certain this time though that we don't have enough pots to fill the kiln. I'm just not really sure how far into the second chamber we will make it. My guess right now... the second chamber will be half full. We'll see...
Joe

Loading starts

Well we haven't actually started loading yet... a little lunch first. We spent the morning cutting shelves, since we designed the kiln for 14"x28", we had to cut shelves to make it all fit. Kind of a pain, but I can't really complain about free kiln shelves. I also cut a hand full of bricks to use as posts. Here's the layout for the first chamber:We'll stack larger pots in front of the shelves.
We also fired our stoking plugs yesterday. We managed to blow up two of the plugs in the firing, luckily I had made six of them so we should be alright. They did warp slightly around the handle so the fit is not quite as tight as I would like. They should be fine for the first firing.
Joe

Snow and Saggers

First day of Snow! It came a little earlier than we expected. Christy and I are both hoping that winter holds off a little longer until we can move into our house. Not sure that we've posted a picture of it on our blog, but we are currently living in a 28 foot long travel trailer/camper. It's been perfect for this summer, cheap and fast. It allowed us to start setting the pottery up right away. However it's starting to get a little chilly in the camper. We're counting down the days until we can move into the house.
We finished the last of the pots today and started making saggers. This is the first time either of us have made saggers. We got the Idea from Mark Skudlarek who has a beautiful chambered kiln a couple hours east of us. The idea is to stack Christy's platters as well as my plates in the saggers at the front of the second and third chamber to act as a bag wall to direct the flame path. This first firing we will stack them up as a bag wall, but we will have to leave the saggers empty. It doesn't look like we will have time to make all of the saggers we had hoped. probably just enough to stack up a bag wall for the second chamber. It took us a while to get into a rhythm hand building the saggers. We made eight of these larger saggers (19"x12"x4") this afternoon. Tomorrow we will make smaller square saggers. As well as cut holes in these saggers to allow some atmoshpere to enter the saggers.
Joe

Last day of making pots

Wow, that went way too fast! Today was the last day to start new pots. Tomorrow Christy's family is coming to town. Sunday and Monday we are hoping we can make saggers. I know it's pushing it a little bit to finish making saggers Monday and start loading Tuesday, but we're hoping to stack them up in the second and/or third chamber empty for this firing. We'll start the firing off very slowly as this is the first firing and there is sure to be a lot of mositure that need to be driven out.
So for the last day of throwing I made vases:
After a couple of boards of vases I decieded to make several larger jars:
Not sure if there is time to glaze these for the firing. I might just place them unglazed near the firebox of the first chamber. They'll be like miniture David Stuempfle pots!
Joe

Respectable Business Folks

Joe and I are official members of the Mineral Point Chamber of Commerce! They have a great website, and print an equally nice booklet that seems to be in the hands of nearly every visitor to the area. By turning one room of our house into a gallery space, we hope (in the next few years) to tap into the stream of people who come to the area to shop and eat and look at lovely hillsides speckled with Holsteins. Charley, otherwise known as ZooberDoobs the Poodle, hopes we sell lots of pottery soon so we can fill his bowl with the good stuff!

Stoking plugs

I threw the stoke hole plugs yesterday and on the suggestion of Michael Kline I added a clay handle instead of a metal bolt like I've seen before. Certainly the clay handle is much more aesthetically pleasing. Hopefully they will prove to be durable as well. I had a little bit of a scare as I came into the studio this morning, every single handle had split in half. The plugs are made of a 50/50 mix of EPK and kyanite. They don't really have much in the way of plasticity, and as the handles sagged slightly instead of bending normally like a throwing clay they simply split in two. Luckily they were still fairly soft and I was able to mend them. They are outside drying now and you can see the garbage bag I stuffed in them to keep the handle from sagging any more. Hopefully we can get them dried out and fired this weekend. Joe

Glaze troubles

We borrowed a dehumidifier from Christy's parents. It's really stepped up the pace of drying in the studio. Unfortunately as some of our pots finish drying we've noticed that the glazes don't shrink quite as much as we had thought they did. Why these problems did not show up during all the tests we did is a little bit of a mystery. You can see here a slight cracking of the glaze on the rim of this pitcher.Christy's flat ware got the worst of it, as you can see on the square platter on the left, the glaze has completly fallen off the rim.
It's an easy problem to solve and we've already added 2.5% more bentonite to all the glazes which should solve the problem. Certainly not all of the pots have been affected. Frustrating none the less. For the potters out there apperantly 30% ball clay and 5% bentonite isn't quite enough shrinkage in high ash glazes... who knew?
Joe

some pots and a little kiln work

We are down to the last week of making pots! Though it still seems like the majority of our time is taken up with other projects. I finished these covered jars today:This picture was taken before the last layer of glaze was applied so you can see the decorations. The nearest two have a white slip decoration over which I'll apply the light green ash glaze-- hopefully it'll stay as transparent out of the wood kiln as it did the gas kiln. The back one with the rings and dots gets the black glaze.
I also worked more on the firebox of the first chamber:
The grates are large ceramic I-beams, which among my favorite of all the crazy bricks we found at the same site we got the large blocks. They are separated by two inches of brick standing upright. The idea is that the outside I-beams are fairly permanent as well as the upright bricks. The center bricks I'm planning on removing after every firing. This makes the kiln much easier to get in and out of. I'll probably separate the grates with an alumina/kaolin wadding. The two upper corners I left without grates, as I don't believe I'll be able to stoke there with the angles the way the are. I covered air inlet with bricks so the air is still forced up through the grates where the wood will be. I think I'll cover those bricks with a little bit of fiber insulation, then stucco over the top of that to make sure it stays airtight. I'll finish up with the best shot of the I-beams I could find. I'm pretty proud of them. It was pure luck that I ended up with them as David Stuemple, Jeffrey Dean, and Takuro Shibata were the ones who found them I just happened to get in on the deal. Still... pretty proud

Joe

Fall Art Tour

Mineral Point has a great Fall Art Tour that we hope to be a part of next year. We're heading out to see some art this afternoon with our friend Andy, who is a very talented cheesemaker, as well as good company! With the way the wind is blowing today, we could probably just open an umbrella, hold tight, and end up somewhere interesting (and potentially very far away!)

grates and dampers

We hung the dampers today. The dampers are made of 1/4" steel. In Seagrove I used 1/2" steel and it worked well. Those dampers were smaller though and slide horizontally in the chimney. I did not want to hang 250lbs of steel from the rafter, that and 1/4" steel is about half the price of 1/2". The only concern with thinner steel is the possibility of the dampers warping. They are on pulleys and you can see the brick in the background is being used as a counter weight.
I might go back and change it so both dampers are operated from one side of the kiln, that certainly seems smarter. Hindsight is always 20/20. Luckily they are just bolted to the truss with a U-bolt, so I didn't have to drill through the bottom chord. I'ld hate to move them if I had drilled some holes through the truss for them.
I also cut the grate bricks. The local refractory company didn't have any 18" brick, so I had to purchase a 12"x24"x2.5" super duty tiles. It worked out well though as now we have 12" bricks left over from cutting the tile which we can use as posts when we load the kiln.
I also started to work on the grate system for the first chamber. I'll take pictures of that next time I get a chance to work on it.
We decided to start loading the kiln October 28th. That will give us four days to load. Considering how many pots we have to load it shouldn't really take that long. However since none of the bricks are cut for posts, nor are the blocks cut for the doors (we made the side door sized to fit the filled blocks since they are somewhat insulating, we just need to cut a bunch of half blocks), I'm sure we'll find some way to occupy ourselves if we finish loading early. Back to making pots.
Joe

The House Move!

Today was the big day--0r one of the big days this autumn, anyway! Our house rolled away the Daentl's farm at 9:00 this morning in a procession of police cars, waaaaay too many cable company and electric linemen, moving company vehicles, and a few interested spectators, friends, and people who had the luck to be taking our route. At one intersection we went through where police had people stopped, a woman jumped out of her car and started taking pictures!
Our house is quite low, so although we had three pricey electrical company escorts, they only had to raise one line with their gigantic sticks. We were really impressed with the men of Egge Movers. At one point the side door came open, and the man you can see above in the reflective vest literally ran back and forth from his vehicle to the house to tie it shut again.
The house moved along at quite a clip--we were going about 25 mph most of the time, and we did not stop for any little old stop signs.
After about half an hour, we arrived at our place, where the Egge driver executed an impressive truck-pulling-a-house-on-i-beams turn into the driveway. The house looks a little unattractive from this side because when we tore off the old mudroom, we did not replace the siding. We are still planning to build a new mudroom this fall. Although it was free and a little grubby, it is not actually a burned-out shell as it appears in this photo!
Unfortunately, our cement crew is not as on top of things as the movers are. They have been taking it a bit easy, and plan to pour cement for the basement tomorrow. So the house has to sit in the driveway for a few days, much to the annoyance of the movers, who, as you can imagine, need their truck back. We're excited to have it here, even if it is blocking our driveway. We climbed onto the roof tonight to cover the hole left from the old chimney, and the view was amazing. A panorama of brilliant colors, the distant windmills, and a lovely sunset that could not be captured with 2 megapixels.

--c

Not enough time in the day

There never seems to be enough time in the day. I was thinking we would have time to fill at least the first two chambers, if not the third chamber for this first firing. Unfortunately I haven't had many full days of throwing so far. There seems to be so many other things that still need to be done. Today we removed our gate and posts from our driveway to make room for the arrival of the new (to us) house. The house will be here soon, we'll devote another post to that one soon.
I also spent a good hour unloading this from our truck:


I had wanted a hammer mill since we moved here. This probably isn't the best time to be getting one as we enter crunch time to fill the kiln. However the price was right, and we could not really pass it up. This hammer mill has had a full life of crushing corn, it's was sold with the caption "perfect for taking to your next antique tractor show". We're planning on using it to break up rocks, and clays for our glazes. We're hoping we can crush rock down to sand size in this and then put it in the ball mill to reduce the rock to dust for our glazes. We have a couple of rocks right now that interest us. There is what people call a red granite that we've crushed up by hand and fired. It fires into creamy dark glass. I don't think it will take too much work to get a nice glaze out of it. The construction/excavation company in town sells it by the truck load so there's definitely a steady supply if we like it. Also on our land there is quite a bit of sandstone. Which is apparently sedimentary silica. according to my research sometimes sandstone is pure silica, sometimes it contains some feldspar as well. We crushed it by hand, but it didn't melt in our test firing. Must not be too much feldspar. Now that we have the hammer mill we can test to our hearts content this winter. First we have to make some pots. Right after I finish cutting out the masonite bats...
Joe

The kiln gets some finishing touches

We finished up the smoke duct (or collection chamber if you prefer), as well as some other small items on the kiln that we had been putting off. It was a beautiful day out, and we though it would be best to get this work done before it gets too cold.The back row of bricks covers a slot which I plan on using for a passive damper (a space that allows you to let cold air be drawn into the chimney slowing the draft down- for you non potters). The slots are for a pair of active dampers. One for each side. Tomorrow we plan on making pots in the morning then going to Dubuque to look for a couple of large steel plates to use for the dampers. The slots are right under the last rafter, so I'm planning on using pulleys and hanging them from the rafter. Here's a picture of what the smoke duct looked like uncovered:
Sorry this is the best picture I could find. It's hard to see but there is a notch in the center divider and the outer walls, to guide the two dampers. You'll have to take my word for it.
It's really starting to look like a kiln now. All that's left is the grates for the three chambers and cutting some blocks for the doors, oh and making plugs for the stoke holes. Getting pretty close now.
Joe

An Alternate Use for Molds

Miss Priss spent the afternoon relaxing in a spare plaster mold--the ideal recovery spot for a kitty who just had surgery. Her brother didn't seem to notice his "little operation"; he brought in a mouse within hours of returning home! We're hoping one of the cats gets a whiff of the mouse who has been gnawing on something between the outer and inner camper walls...

Tea Boxes

I finished my first run of tea boxes yesterday, and I have five more to finish today. I'm planning to leave these unglazed and load them near the firebox so they get some lovely ash-n-flash. I have some of these boxes for sale at a shop in NC. They weren't selling very well at first. Recalling the pottery shoppers in Seagrove wandering up to the counter at the shop where I worked, waving a bowl or platter and asking what they would do with it, I started calling them "Tea Boxes" instead of "Boxes." Apparently the good citizens of Raleigh do not need regular boxes, but they do need something to hold their tea leaves. I'm expecting my MacArthur Fellowship any minute now. In the meantime, though, I'll get back to work glazing!

christy

Seagrove Politics

I'm not sure how many of you keep up with the all the happenings in Seagrove, but there has been quite a bit of drama there this last year. Tom Grey has written a wonderful essay explaining the situation, you can read that here. Tom's essay is obviously a little biased, but I believe a vast majority of potters in Seagrove are in agreement with him. It's amazing how just a few bad apples can wreck it for the whole comunity. It sounds like things are on the up and up, and the potters are really pulling together to make things better. It's too bad Christy and I aren't there anymore to see it all take place in person.
Joe

make, make, make all day long

One thing that's become apparent as we have started to make pots is that our studio space is very humid. Which is really something we were shooting for when we put our floor in. Our floor is "coarse fines" which is crushed stone (limestone in our case,I believe), from sand size particles down to dust. It packs nicely and seems to hold moisture well. I believe our "coarse fines" had spent some time in the rain before we brought it into our studio space. I still haven't finished the mugs I started Sunday due to the slow drying. In general I like slow drying studios, the pots dry more evenly and there is a large window of time in which you can finish your work. This is just a little excessive. I imagine the humidity will come back down to a more pleasant level soon though, and we might even find ourselves watering the floor by January. As a side note I think the "coarse fines" might end up being a good glaze ingredient with just a little ball milling. We're hoping to do quite a bit more glaze and slip testing after our first firing. For now though we just need to keep at it and make more pots. I'll end the post with a couple of shots of what we've been making. Christy has been making boxes. The lids have yet to be cut off of the actual box in the picture, they need to dry a bit more before that happens. And I've been making some bottle vases. Somewhat of a new shape for me. I was inspired by a picture of a Chinese bottle from the Yuan period that I saw while reading Pioneer Pottery. It's a great book. I found it a little dry when I read it nine years ago, just too technical. Now I find it pretty much indispensable. Really one of the best books, explaining the chemistry behind clay and glazes, the processing of raw material, making of saggers (which we hope to get done sometime here), and apparently inspiration.
Joe

glazes

We unloaded the final test kiln firing this morning. Final firing because we are glazing everything leather hard and since we've already started making pots, it seems like now would be a good time to mix up some glazes and slips. We decided to start from scratch with our glazes, since some of the materials are new to us, it's a new clay body, and a vast majority of the glazes we used before were used in wood/salt kilns (we're planing on firing salt free). Here are the four glazes that we came up with:
-A simple ash based little greenish grey celedon:
A glazed based on corn ash. People around here have corn stoves, which burn corn kernels. Seems funny to me to be burning a food source, but I guess there is plenty of it... The corn ash has quite a bit of silica in it, we ended up adding a little more silica to get a nice light milky blueish glaze.
A darker more runny ash glaze
and a dark black glaze. We're working on making this less runny without losing the gloss, but this is what we're mixing up for now.

Nothing to fancy, pretty classic glazes. Hopefully there won't be too many unpleasant surprises when these come out of the wood kiln. The only thing that might be a problem is if the glazes crystallize in the slow cooling of the wood kiln. Hard to emulate those conditions in a tiny soft brick test kiln.
Joe

time to start making pots

Christy and I spent yesterday making pots! I hadn't made pots since this March in North Carolina. It felt good to finally get back to making pots after a summer of construction. Here are a couple of dishes that Christy made:She made quite a few more than this, but most of them are in plaster molds scattered around the workshop. I spent yesterday making mugs:
I spent the first part of the day making larger tankards, and the evening making what Christy refers to as "the tinies". I've now got a full day of handling ahead of me.
Joe

Kiln update

I'm happy to report that we're about 90% done on the kiln, as you can see below. Sometime on a nice sunny day next summer we hope to put one last coating on the kiln using the nice local red clay we just got. We had to seal up the kiln to make it air tight for now though so grey was the default color.We built up ledges next to the side stoke holes using the same cob mixture that we used on the front chamber. I got the idea to use cob from Micheal Hunt, to give credit where credit's due. The ledges serve two purposes: firstly we are thinking they might give us a nice place to set down the stoking plug while stoking, we also put them there to route up the air inlet into the second and third chamber fireboxes. Here's a pic of the other side of the kiln where we have yet to build the ledges:
On top of the bricks we placed a galvanized stove pipe then built the cob up around that.
We still need to put one more layer on top of the ledge. Something involving portland cement to make it a little more abrasion resistant. It's a bit of a rainy grey day today, hopefully the weather will clear up sometime latter this week and we will finish the kiln.
For now though we've decided to make pots! We thought that might be a good thing to do since we're hoping to fire the kiln in less than a month. Hopefully we're not too rusty from a summer of construction.
Joe

Clay day at windy ridge

We finally got around to mixing up a batch of clay for the first firing. This is probably something we should have done two weeks ago. Hopefully we'll have some good drying days. For the record it's best not to leave your clay to dry out in the sun. It dries fast but unevenly, but we're in a hurry and didn't get around to covering them. We bought some premixed clay so we can start making pots even if this clay doesn't dry out quickly enough. We're hoping to make several batches of various blends so we can see what they look like in our kiln (all clays seem to look the same coming out of our little gas kiln)We also got a load of local red clay. We had talked to the local construction company and they said they would bring some from one of their local quarries as it's a considered a by-product by them. I don't think we'll be able to use this in our clay body as it has very small particles of limestone in it. A trait that seems to be shared by all clay around here. If anybody knows of a good way to remove small particles of limestone I'm all ears, I imagine the best way is to slake it down and then sieve it. Maybe we'll give that a try in the future. For now though we will ball mill it and use it in slips and glazes.
Joe