Friday, April 24, 2009

New Clay




Although we did get quite a few nice pots out of this last firing, we didn't get out nearly as many pots as we put in. We had planned on taking a hiatus on making pots for the next couple of months and getting the gallery up and going and start getting our house livable. However there is nothing worse than a gallery that is only half full, so the new plan is to get the gallery up and going in the next week. Then spend a month making pots and fire, probably just the first chamber early June. So in preperation we mixed up some clay today.


We ended up picking this guy from our test clays in the firing.

It's similar to the clay we used in our first firing. We did switch the feldspar to NephSy and slightly lowered the grog to 7%. It still is slightly sandier than I'm used. We'll give it a cycle and see how we like it. I like that it really seems to show the effects of the wood ash and flame. I also like the fact that it didn't bloat!
We'll I'm off to go work on the gallery. We took out some ads last fall saying our gallery would be open in May. Which gives us about exactly a week. I'll try and get a picture of the progress today, I'm pretty excited I think it will look great. We got a bunch of cherry that my father-in-law had cut down and milled up, and are milling that down for counter tops and shelves.
I'll end with a couple of pictures that I promised of the charring effects that I like so much.
Hmm.... it looks like I somehow added the pictures to the top of the post, and not the bottom... oh well.
take care
Joe

2 comments:

ang design said...

love your bath tub full of clay, looks like milk..and excellent that your cooking up your own clay body..may i ask where do you start with that??

Joe and Christy said...

To be honest Ang, we started with several published reciepes, choose the reciepe that we liked the best, and then have been slowly making adjustments from there.
Joe