Time for some pots

Well, it's been a busy week. I got my wheel fixed with out much trouble, and have been making pots this week. My mother has been in town as well and she has been helping us get the house cleaned up. The house had turned into a construction explosion, with tools, electrical bits, pieces, and various scraps of drywall and wood. The house is now spic and span, and all ready to start in on the next project.
In other random news I finished my first bike race since moving to Wisconsin. It went quite a bit better than I would have guess. I think I placed 8th? I didn't get a real head count as we were coming into the last corner. The results and photos will be posted here if anybody is curious (they aren't up yet as of this writing).
It's great to be making pots again. We've decided to go ahead and push the firing back a week so we have three weeks to make pots. I've started off this week making serving bowls, plates and platters. It's always a big moral booster to start with these shapes as they fill the kiln quite quickly. All of a sudden it looks like you are well on your way to a kiln load. Looks can be deceiving though, and we'll see. We would certainly like to fire the first and second chamber. Hopefully we'll have enough pots. Christy has been pretty busy with work and hasn't had much of a chance to make pots.
Here's a plate with a floral decoration that I really like:



Christy has been working on coming up with a nice red slip from local red clay. It ended up taking longer than expected. The clay is very fine grained and shrinks quite a bit. We started with a slip recipe that I've used before 75 clay, 15 feldspar, and 10 silica. The slip crawled all over the place though. After quite a bit of testing we ended up with more feldspar and silica along with substituting some ball clay in for a portion of the red clay. It looked pretty good on the pots Christy got out of the last firing. Hopefully it will prove to be a reliable slip for decorations.... time will tell.

Joe