jinian | productive kiln day!

I went down and found a kiln being unloaded by N, who I'd met before. She let me help unload, which turns out to be a lot of fun, since you can see everyone else's pieces before they do. Some sad effects came from the blue-purple glaze, which is very very drippy; none of mine quite reached the kiln floor, but several pieces broke around their bases and N had to scrape big chunks of glaze off the kiln. The appearance of unexpected colors is called "flashing", and we had lots of it, especially pink, which people decided to attribute to recently added copper in one of the glaze mixes. Pretty much everyone was in favor of it.

The finished African-violet pot has more than one problem: the sleeve no longer quite fits since glazing, which I predicted, but also I found out something about clay firing. The bisque firing leaves the clay porous, but high firing, which is used for the default glazes, vitrifies the clay. There do exist low-fire glazes, which must be how I've seen these pots done in the past. One might think that the instructor of one's class would have mentioned this, but fortunately N is knowledgeable enough to at least keep my plants from dying in a misfired pot. I'm sure I can figure out something to do with these pieces. Pencil holder and monkey trap? (TCBC glaze.)

Goofus mug appears! I didn't glaze the rim because I wanted to preserve the look of the drip, but I think that was a bad decision; the clay's pretty rough and unpleasant on the mouth. One can drinnk from the drip part, though. (Clear blue-purple glaze.)

I'm very happy with the third mug/soup bowl. It's glazed with TCBC on the outside and clear blue-purple on the inside. That giant drip almost made it all the way to the bottom, but not quite!

Two small bowls, celadon/white and midnight sparkle glazes. The scratched-up outsides aren't all that noticeable under the glazes I chose, though on this one the scratches went deeper and it looks pretty good. I think I like the smoothness better to touch. (The purple one was my ice-cream bowl last night.)

This plate has a stripe because I dipped each half individually and overlapped them. I wasn't expecting such a strong color effect. Some people used overlapping glazes to amazing effect on the pieces I unloaded today. Sadly, there's a tiny piece of kiln wash embedded in the plate (about 10:30), which makes it Imperfect. I'm keeping it anyway because of how thin, strong, and uncracked it is. I did nice work on this one.

One large and one medium bowl done in the same glazes (pinnell outside and clear blue-purple inside). Really interesting effects where the two meet, and then another strange result in the bottom of the larger bowl, which was only the one glaze so I'm not sure what happened. Neat!