K.I.S.S.

So I'm off on another idea. Not sure how it's going to work out, but I'm going to do a couple of tests and see where it goes. I am disillusioned with the work I've been doing. Way too high of a failure rate and too many results I just don't like. I'm just not willing to invest the time into work that I am so often unhappy with. While I know there is always going to be some uncertainty and risk involved, I at least think I'd like to drive wearing a seat belt. So, I am making an effort to simplify things. This cup is a little washed out in the photo, but gives an idea of where I am heading. When I begin my next round of pots I might try and add some texture of some kind to the outside for the glaze to pick up. Keepin it very simple. Two glazes (this cup is two) Maybe three max if it keeps it simple with a little bumping up. It's been fun trying different things, but too much going on. Don't try and talk me down, cause I'm not coming off the ledge.

You may be sick of this by now, mug test #7

Well it's finally here. My seventh test, what for me is thrilling, and what for you might now be a little old hat. But, see here. My first test was rather disappointing. As was my second and third really. But my last couple of test have been quite inspiring. I pretty much liked all seven of the seven mugs in this last firing. A high success rate for me. Shape of this one-not so great. Design, I like it pretty much.


Gotta compare this next one maybe as well.Like this little guy up here. Really like the black dots against the . . . black. Subtle, but makes it far more interesting I think.
These next two are results using two of the three new white liners I am testing. I am relatively happy with all three, but two give a little pinholing, but I can almost garauntee they won't on this new clay I am testing. so I'm not writing them off yet.



Ahhhh . . . yet another reason why I am looking for another white glaze . . .

I think I have two test firings left for now. One I need to do to test the small batch of white I made up as a result of these last tests. I really don't want to invest an entire kiln load until I know for sure. Also, I made up a larger batch of the new clay I have been testing, and threw about eight mugs and some bowls the other day. I am impressed. So far with the fired color and density, and glaze interaction, and now with its' throwing ability. I can't believe how well it collars in - for five day old clay. Impressive. Well, if you haven't been bored to tears by now, there is still more to come. And if you are bored to tears . . .

Some mugs from test #6

Well hello. Here are just a few cups from my sixth test. Overall I was happy with everything, some more than others. Above is a tumbler that had white slip on the outside. You can see what a difference that makes with my white glaze. Much brighter white and no defects. I wish more of my bisque had slip on it so I wouldn't be having this white issue. I did have three very promising results from my white test the other day however, so hopefully I'll be able to get through my current bisque without any more white issues.

Here is a detail of the blue stripe above. I love what's going on here, and I just love the black, white and blue together.

Here is a cup similar to one I have made before-but that's a good thing. Always good when you know you can repeat something.


Here is the mug that was supposed to have black dots with a black liner, but ended up with stripes. I think the blue is far less overwhelming this way. Well, taking the day off because family is coming, and then tomorrow off because Adam is off on Sundays, so I won't be making much pottery. I do plan on building a new workbench in my studio however as I am badly in need of more counter space, and under-counter storage. Bye for now-

Mug test #5 and grass

So this mug up above is a little blue. A little too blue. I am retesting it with a black liner, but I got a little crazy and did stripes instead of dots on the other one. So I guess I won't really know what this mug looks like with a black liner, will I?

This one above is okay, but something's missing. Maybe it'll grow on me, but the panel seems like a blank canvas. I'm trying to find a balance between boring and simple. The less going on with the pot, the more I usually like it.

I really like the mug above. I think this is the cup that I talked about in my post about cup shapes that I thought looked like it should go have tea and crumpets with it's big, fat, bow handle. Now it's all dressed up for the occasion. An interesting observation. When I glazed the inside, I wiped the drips off. Let the cup dry for a while. When I glazed the outside, I could see that the glaze was absorbing unevenly where I had wiped, and presumably where the cup was more damp. Really shows you how glaze thickness and such a subtle thing can affect the color.

Afternote: When I glazed mug test #6, I saw the same thing happening when I used this glaze combo again. Where I had wiped drips of blue glaze from the outside of the mug, the glaze seems to be repelled. This time I know it's not an issue of the mug being too damp, for I dried it a while in the sun. I think something in the glaze must be sealing the surface somehow, so I will need to be careful when glazing the inside of pots, or maybe light sanding over the spill area might break the surface.

A little detail of above cup.
Here's another stripey cup. I obviously like stripes and dots. I didn't put up all of the cups. Too many photos.

Adam and I are not really into lawn maintenance. It just seems like a silly waste of time to me to be out there chopping all the grass off. We mow our front yard occasionally so as not to offend our neighbors delicate sensibilities, but pretty much let the rest go and mow a path where we want, or need to go. The benefit to this is obvious. My backyard is a haven for butterflies, grasshoppers and frogs. When the wind, or Daisy disturbs the grass, I have seen a half dozen butterflies I didn't even know were there, shoot to the sky. You don't usually see that on two inch grass.

Here's a link to a page I was just looking at by Jeffrey Guin at the blog Clean Mud. He made a raku kiln from a garbage can and has very easy to follow instructions. If you're interested in Raku, scroll to the bottom of the page where it starts and follow it up.

New clay and snow

So I'm pretty happy about the results I have here. I am thrilled with the glazes on this clay body. They look great, and amazingly there are no obvious defects. How is this possible? Five glazes and they all look good? On a body I made? This is someone else's life. The clay is this great dark brown with a hint of red. It reminds me of a dark, hard terra-cotta. So, even though I want to plunge right in and mix up a couple thousand pounds, I'm trying to be sane and methodical about it. So instead I mixed up a 20 lb. batch which I should probably go check on soon. Weird. I swore that I would never make my own clay again because I so despised doing it in college, but I have no reservations about doing it now. I think I much prefer this method of making it (slurry and rack vs. dry in clay mixer). So I better design some drying racks and begin construction.

The thing is, unless someone has a better idea, if this 20 lb. test is a go and I go with this body, I have to imagine how much clay I might use before next spring-and make it all before the weather turns cold. I don't know what the weather is like in other areas where people make their own clay, but in the winter here it can be a bit chilly. Like 25 degrees below zero chilly sometimes, but almost consistently below freezing which I don't imagine is very good for drying clay. Especially the last three winters. They've brought a whole other level to cold endurance.

I was a snowboard instructor for one of the really cold years and on top of the mountain, with the wind blowing and the air already in the below zero range, I remember a day that with the wind chill it was 45 degrees below zero. On days like that we all walked around wrapped up like mummies. You could tell who people were by their goggles, snowboards and occasionally special attire. We had this one guy who taught skiing, who when he wasn't teaching wore a pink snowsuit, with a green furry belt. I didn't even know him but liked him immediately. I got frostbite once on just a little bit of the side of my nose, because there was the tiniest leak of air sneaking in between my goggles and face wrap. I could feel this little sliver of air burning my skin as I blasted down the hill at lightening speed, flipping and jumping and ollies to high heaven-oops, sorry, I got caught up in a little fantasy there. It was really cold anyway.

Oooh.
Aaah.

I almost forgot. Here's Daisy Doo. I made her a little cave under my slabroller. I really need the storage space but I'm hoping to give her a safe place to go during the frequent thunderstorms we have-she usually comes over and stands by me shaking violently, which I can stand for about three minutes. Also just her own little pad. Unfortunately her favorite place to lay is wherever I am standing, which isn't usually very practical. I'm making glazes the other day and walking around her and stepping over her for an hour. But I don't mind in a way because she went through this skittish phase, very skittish, and just walking by her or standing up would freak her out and she'd jump to her feet like someone had shot a gun. It was freakin me out a little. She's a weird dog. She's really good natured and always been treated well, so she has no reason to be fearful, but she has this habit of looking at you like she's done something wrong. She hangs her head low and looks up at you through the top of her eyes and keeps darting them to the side. It's hard to get a picture of her because I feel like I'm torturing her.

I just realized this is my 100th post. I think I am supposed to celebrate or something. So I wept some pretend tears of joy. I think I will be a little more festive on my 365 and 1/4 day of posting.

Post Another Alright, Some Shmatin Glossy Yeah White

So I'm on a quest for white. I dug through some old test tiles to see if I had anything I might be able to use, but no luck. It's frustrating, because I know on a lower iron body many of these would probably be fine. I'm not much of a glaze chemist, so I haven't really spent much time trying to tweak one recipe until I get what I want, although that may be my second route.


I made up eight different tests yesterday. I'll try them out in my next firing and hope for some magic. I have so many recipes compiled, and a lot of the names are really vague. Sometimes I have the source of the recipe so I can just write "Richards yellow" or whatever. But many I don't and so to avoid confusion with all the other Satin Whites, or Glossy Whites (these are not very creative names-who named these? What did they name their children-Small Person?, Little Human? I wasn't exactly creative, but threw the first word that popped into my mind onto the tag. If I were to ever post the recipe publicly for some reason, I would make an effort to locate its origin, and at the very least make sure it was not attributed to me, so I don't see given them nicknames as a problem.

I have:

Alright White
Posts244 White (we know this one!)
Another WSM
Yeah Satin Matt
White Breaking White (take off of Tom Buck's Cream Breaking Red w/no RIO)
Satin Shmatin
Glossy Mossy No Flossy (Glossy Mossy Flossy with no RIO)
Some White Liner (my tribute to a little pig)

Test Mugs #5 is cooling right now. I'm pretty anxious to see this because I have my test clay in there with my glazes. I'm trying not to get my hopes up, but it would be nice if it all went well. I kept a small piece aside and test it every day for plasticity and it's improved tremendously in the two weeks or so since I made it. I can bend the snake with no breaking now.

Wicked awesome test mug #4 results

So, as you can see from my post title I am pretty pleased with these last results. There are still a few issues I need to deal with, but huge potential I think. The blue really looks nice with my palette, and in practice it interfaces well with the other glazes-a huge plus. I got these issues though, you can even see it in this photo above. My white liner glaze blisters unpredictably, or rather maybe too predictably and I am finding the risk of this unacceptable. I am quite certain this is directly related to my clay body. It doesn't behave this way on porcelain, or if I use it over slip. I have a really high iron body and has been difficult finding glazes that co-exist well with it. But it's the best looking and most mature body I have tested. So I need to do something about that.

This cup above is glazed the same way as the one above it. If you click on the picture you might be able to see a nice attribute of this blue however. Where it breaks over edges it shows the dark body, but then fades away from the dark edge into a pale, whitish color, then goes to blue. This gives it a lot of interest I think. I think it probably has to be the right thickness for this to happen. You can see I chose to have a cup of tea in this one.
This matt black and the blue have a real potential together I think. The issue which you can see on the cup below is that I have to be careful not to let the liner glaze become too thick on the rim or I can get shivering. I know this is not a result of the two glazes meeting, because usually it is fine and I have frequently ecountered this issue in the past with the black liner. So, that should be an easy problem to deal with.

So, below is the same glaze combo as way up above, but with the blue as a liner. Unfortunately I got a few pinholes around the inside of the rim. I am first going to approach this as maybe the glaze was too thick because I held it in the cup for several seconds before draining out. So we'll see about that.

Adam gave me an amazing critique this morning. I thought it was very thoughtfully done and very astute/intuitive/perceptive. He was very happy with the mugs and said that he could really see the style and direction that I am going in. He described the work as playful, whimsical and not really "perfect", but in an intentional way. What did he say, something like the work is mature but yet has a child like quality. He said it way better but it really impressed me how thoughtful his critique was. He noticed the blisters and such said he has become really aware of how much more there is to making pottery, than just making the pots. How many issues need to be dealt with etc. He looks at pottery now with a different eye because of what he has learned from living with me, and has become a professional s-crack spotter. I really appreciated his feedback this morning. It was positive yes, but most importantly inspiring.

So I think this blue, if it can stand the test of a few more test firings is going to be a welcome addition to my work. I know I said a few posts back that I was getting rid of blue, but I was glazing a lot of my work in blue allover, and I think my intention now is to just use this to compliment and highlight the cups with a little color sometimes. I can't wait to test these glazes on that test clay. It's bisqueing now. It has this dark brown, reddish quality that I hope might really add to the glazes as it peeks through. AND NO GROG!!!! Oh happy day, to throw with clay with no grog. Okay, bye.

Mug test #3

So, here's the girls from the last test all lined up. Again, some decent stuff, some boring stuff, some puzzling stuff and one possible gem.

This cup above could have some possibilities. However, the white glaze tends to blister and pinhole when it feels like it. I try to be patient with it because I kind of like it, but I'm thinking when I run this huge five gallon bucket out it's gonna go. It's hard to see in this image, but I got blistering where the white overlaps the black, and more significantly, on the other side some major shivering. But I like the graphic quality of the black and white for sure.
This mug above is kind of interesting, in that it is glazed ALMOST exactly like the one below, but I don't like this last one as much. I have figured out a few reasons why, but it is interesting to see what a big change, a subtle difference can make.
This cup above is from the last firing, glazed very much like the one above it. I really like this one.
I kind of like this. Except it's kind of boring. It needs a little pizzazz and I just need to figure out what that could be. But it has potential.


This is my favorite girl of the bunch this time. And standing next to her is my little gem. I am looking for a blue I can use that is sort of turquoisy, durable, not ugly, and works on my body (I have a high iron body and glazes often don't like it). So, I'm kind of diggin it. I think I'll use it in my next set of tests and see what happens. I've tested and rejected a lot of blues.

Today was a long day. Those little cute tiny jars kicked my but. I actually still have three of them left to finish. I never got to the mugs at all. But I did throw the beginnings of maybe eight more pots while waiting for everything to firm up. But still, just one of those days when it doesn't seem like I got a lot done. Especially since the pots I finished are about one and a half inches big. Oh well.

Mug test #2 and zero common sense

2nd mug test before (above).

after . . . some good stuff, some not so good stuff. I had a few more successes with this firing. A couple of real bombs, but there are a few pots that I would actually sell without too much embarrassment. I also fired a piece of my test clay. Here I'll post a photo of this, it's kind of wierd. The fired test and the raw clay are almost exactly the same color. I don't think I've ever really seen that. At least I haven't, maybe I'm sheltered. The nice thing is that it is really vitrified. Hard, has a nice ting and a slight sheen. Next I'm going to throw a couple of little test pots from the lump and see what some of my glazes look like on it. I'm researching on how to make my own clay from slip and dry it in frames. I've only used a mixer in school, which I don't want to do again even if I had a free mixer. I hated it. If anyone has any advice on things they've learned about the slurry proccess or building frames, how powerful the drill needs to be or whatever, any help would be greatly appreciated. I did read at St. Earth Pottery site about re-inforcing the frames under the fabric with wire mesh which I thought was brilliant.





During my first test firing the other night, Friday I think, I was lying in bed and I head this strange sound. I would have just chalked it up to the cats but since my grandson was over I got up to check just to be sure there were no boogey men lurking about. Fortunately Adam was deep in sleep and so he was safe. While I'm in the living room I hear the sound again and now I can tell it's coming from the basement and I then knew what it probably was.

I had tried to raw fire a piece, but the piece itself was really still somewhat (okay very) much in the leatherhard stage, and when I opened the lid of the kiln, which was at 600 degrees by this point, There was the cup standing perfectly, except for the bottom which had blown itself into a million fragments, some landing in the bowls of the cups on the same shelf. I really didn't want to stop the firing and if it had been much hotter I probably would have had to, but instead I threw common sense to the wind and pulled the pieces out, dumping the broken fragments from them, pulled the shelves out and dumped those clean and assessed that the bottom layer was fine. There didn't seem to be a bunch of pieces logded into the element channels so I loaded back up and continued on, the kiln chugging away the entire time. This was a little hot as you can imagine and so I had to handle things quickly and set them down before the smoke rising from my gloves turned into intense heat burning my hands. Obviously I would not have done this with a full sized kiln. That would be a wee bit silly.

Mug handles and slip

I handled a bunch of mugs today. It was awful. Sometimes this clay is just not plastic. My handles would just keep breaking in half and I'm quite sure it wasn't my application. Right out of the bag sometimes this clay, although it feels a little slippery and even sometimes has signs of mildew (good things to me as far as clay is concerned) when you do the bend test it breaks right in half. I've had this for at least two months so even if it was fresh when I got it it shouldn't be now.

So I was thinking. I'm not thrilled with my handles. They're fine, they don't suck in an obvious way, but a lot of them just are not complimenting the cups. Some look really good and so I was thinking that for my next post I will compare some of the cups and discuss why I think some are successful and why others are not. This will be good for me and hopefully help me figure out what I am after, and hopefully you might enjoy it too.

So I was wondering in my last post about dipping some things into slip but unsure about waxing while the pots were green. I was afraid the wax would trap water and start blistering up. Emily Murphy

responded to my post and said she thought waxing would be fine and it worked great. You may be wondering why I would want to dip my darker stoneware into white slip and I'll tell you. Below you see two test pots glazed with exactly the same glazes outside. The one on the right has been slipped first. It really makes my white pop and my orangy-brown a much brighter orange. I like the one on the left very much. It has a nice earthiness to it, but I also love the brightness of the slipped pot. It makes the pot feel a little more vibrant. I intend to do both and it's nice having the option.

So, stay tuned tomorrow for another episode of One Cup To Handle.

Brette and Nina on the broken bridge to nutabithia

oh Brette, where are we? this doesn't look right at all.

i don't know Nina. we were supposed to be at the golden orange bridge of nutmeg and somehow we've ended up at crap mountain.

how did we get here Brette? did you find a recipe and make up a five gallon bucket without testing it first and then glaze an entire kiln load of pots with it?

of course not Nina-i'm no dumb-shit

then how did we get here Brette?

Nina i can only guess that we've ended up at the mountains of poop because we have spectacularly bad luck and always get the shaft. that and maybe something has changed with my yellow ochre. that is the only thing i can think of, except when i tested again with the old yellow ochre it still didn't look right, which leads me to believe it might be my new batch of clay.


oh brette, what should we do now?

i think we should eat chocolate, drink beer, eat a grilled cheese sandwich and chips and feel sorry for ourselves for now Nina.

i like your style Brette.

Lesson learned

Something's wrong with the glaze on these test pots above


The orange on these pots is how it should be.


I just learned a really valuable lesson. The orangy glaze above is a glaze I have been using. It's orangy when thinner, and creamier as it is thicker. Great versatile glaze. I made up a new batch and as an afterthought decided to test it in my last test firing on the three vertical test tiles above because I had used a new batch of yellow ochre. (I hadn't glazed my little test pots with it thank God). As you can see there is a radical difference here, and not a happy one. Something is very wrong with the glaze which is a drag because I just made about 4 gallons of it.

There is a belief floating around that you should always test a new batch of glaze (even if it is a glaze you have been using for a while) before committing a lot of pots to it and I never do. Once I have done my preliminary tests I trust my measuring and mixing and just remake the batch when it is low and continue on. Due to my own stupidity I screwed up the calibration on my larger scale and I think this test is the end result. I use digital scales-which I love-and am very meticulous. But I think this event has changed my plans. If I had committed an entire large glaze firing using this glaze I would be in some serious emotional pain right now.

So I have ordered a new scale. What I really need to do is just re-calibrate the one I have but the 5 kilogram weight to recalibrate is 42$ plus shipping on a 12 lb. item. I can buy exactly the same scale I have for 35$ with shipping included. The power button on my scale was difficult to turn on sometimes so I just decided to go with a new scale. I am going to do a small test with the old batch of yellow ochre and the new batch of yellow ochre just to be sure it is not that, but I really believe it is the scale.

Take note: randomly pressing buttons together to see if you can figure something out is not as wise as taking the time to read the manual. So huge lesson learned. I will always test new batches of glaze from now on even if I have been using them for years.

Electric and lovin' it

Here are a few test pots from my most recent tests. I am pretty excited about the results. I was looking for a matt black to use, especially on the outside of pots. Also playing around with my glazes and the black oxide washes I tested last firing. Keep in mind all these pots came from my electric kiln so I think it was pretty successful. To me the pots remind me of wood and or soda fired pieces.