All items are glaze fired to cone 6 and are either Warm Brown Stoneware from Amaco or Speckled Stoneware by Laguna.

I finally got all the pieces photographed about a week ago and I finished cropping and sizing the photos last night.  Now, as I’m uploading these pictures the kiln is cranked up and bisque firing some of the stuff that I’ve thrown recently.   My wife wanted a set of bowls with handles, I’ve got a set of four mugs, there are some vases and other tall forms and  a few lidded vessels.

nice respirator

I talked my wife into helping and she had a lot of fun….  She took a couple pictures so I could share my experience.  The first thing you want to remember is: Safety First!  I got to wear a new respirator so I didn’t breathe too much of the dust when I was dumping the powder into the water. It’s a good look!

mixing glaze

My wife mixed the water while I slowly dumped the powder .  It got pretty thick, even when I used all the water that the directions called for.  I was supposed to use 1 gallon and 1 pint but added a lot more by the end of the process.  I used my cordless drill and a 1 gallon paint mixer to mix the powder into the water. Even after mixing it with the drill mixer for a while it was still pretty lumpy.

glaze sieve

I put it through an 80 mesh sieve three times.  After letting it sit overnight I mixed it up again with the drill mixer and it was ready to be applied to some bisque ware. I even checked the specific gravity or “density” with a hydrometer.

I’ll have  a full post on the items that I pulled out of the kiln.  The Pam’s Blue that I mixed from powder actually looks different than the pre-mixed pints I’ve used.  Check later to see how!

wheel thrown stoneware

Here is a look at the drying shelf in the clay studio.  I threw a number of pieces in the last week, mostly mugs and bowls.  I used three different kinds of stoneware over the last few days and I’m excited to see what the two new clays do when they are fired and glazed.  I feel like I’m making some small improvements with my wheel throwing technique.  For one thing, I’m getting more efficient.  I also feel like I’m better at pulling handles than I was a year ago.  A couple things that I hope to work on next might include lids and throwing some larger forms.  I can’t wait to bisque fire and then try some of the new glazes I got.

I also worked on my new side project.  There is a new feed on Potterymakinginfo.com called the working artists feed.  It produces the most recent posts from the blogs of ceramic artists and potters.

I gave away a lot of these pieces, especially the mugs, as Christmas gifts. I also gave away a few items from the last load that I fired. I got some positive feedback and haven’t heard of any handles falling off or mugs shattering.

As I was shooting the photos of these pots I experimented with a Circular Polarizer filter.  It was a cheap filter but it was interesting to find out how much I could control the reflection.  On some of the bigger items I took two photos with different Polarizer settings and then combined them in Photoshop to get a pretty good result.  Now I just need to upgrade my gray Walmart fabric to a gradient backdrop so the wrinkles won’t show up behind the pots in the photos.

I decided to finally put up some pictures of the ceramic ware that I finished a couple months ago.  (See the bisque fired pots).  I got around to taking some photos a week or two ago using my homemade photo studio.  I shot everything really quick so some of the pictures aren’t exactly outstanding….  But on with the show!

I have lofty hopes of giving some sort of recap on the past few months in which I have been doing almost everything except updating the blog….  Maybe by Christmas.

Bisque wares ready for glaze

Amaco warm brown stoneware.  Mostly wheel thrown.  Mugs, bowls, jugs, etc.

As you can probably tell by the picture there is a lot of glazing to do in my near future.  Something that you might be able to infer: the new outlet that my brother installed didn’t catch on fire or melt like the old one so the first firing after Operation Upgrade was a success.  The cord to the kiln got a little warm but I turned the fan on and everything went well.  It’s a good thing because my brother (and his wife) are in Beijing getting settled in to their apartment and getting “orientated” to do some teaching.

Well, I better get to work.

Recent pottery drying on the shelf

As you can tell by the picture, I’ve been pretty busy in the clay studio lately.  The past couple weeks I’ve been cranking out some wheel thrown items when I haven’t been in class or on the computer.  I worked on a bunch of different mug forms for a week or two and recently I’ve made some large bowls and jugs/vases.  I really wanted to try some different handle ideas because I feel like handles have been the most neglected part of my arsenal.  I felt I never really mastered pulling handles so I rarely enjoyed or even used the skill.  While I was making all the mugs I decided it was a good time to, in the words of Nike, “just do it.”  After pulling handles for most of the mugs I can tell that I have improved dramatically.  Sometimes I even enjoy it.

On a somewhat related note I added two more shelves to the drying shelves that I already had.  Now I can cram almost twice as much stuff onto the shelves to dry.

My brother and his wife came down a little while ago to hang out with us before they leave.  (At the beginning of August they’ll be in a little place called… China!)  My brother was nice enough to put in another light and switch down in the basement and he replaced my kiln outlet in the garage which overheated the last time I fired.  Sometime this week I hope to start loading the kiln for a bisque fire.

I only wish that I would have made the chuck a little taller because the other vase/bottle that I threw had a neck that was a little long for the chuck.  I got around it by wadding up some of the extra shelf liner to make the chuck thinner in the middle so the shoulder of the pot would have a place to rest.