Hi. Happy February 1st! I'm feeling rather good today. The sun is out. It's relatively warm and I just had a very nice firing in my soda kiln. I unloaded late yesterday and shot a very short video of the front of the kiln with the door down. Then this morning I shot a bit more video and I've stitched it together here in a little YouTube video for you all. Have a look. I'll write a few comments down below.
Right. So as you can see a nice firing. I am pleased with the colors of the slips and the varied application of the soda glaze throughout the kiln. The pitchers and bottles were in the back top of the kiln and really got some good color. I had left the top a bit more openly stacked this time which allowed me to spray soda all the way from the front top to the back top of the kiln. I'm finding that I need to leave some open space in this kiln to get the coverage of soda glaze that I want. In my salt kiln I could pack rather tightly. But the soda needs some room.
I am continuing to put more actual glaze on the pots than I ever have. The cobalt blue and copper green glazes are what I'm most interested in. I like them both to a certain degree but not too much of either. I'm finding that I like the color to only go on part of the pot or as a liner. The pots that are completely covered in blue or green do not really interest me so much. So I'll continue to work that out. The pots with panels of texture and panels of color are nice. Also I inlayed some of the stamped dots with glaze this time and I liked that as well.
The Valentine's Day pots will go up in the Etsy shop as soon as I can get them photographed and listed. If you see anything on here you are interested in you can always send me an email.
On the down side I continue to experience some cracking problems around the feet on bowls. I'm pretty irritated with this issue. I feel like it's a problem with the clay I use. I am using Loafer's Glory, which is a white stoneware. It has no grog or mullite or anything like that in it. I love the way my slips look on it. Otherwise I am not attached to it at all. I am pretty sure I'll be testing some new clays this year.
Ok. I'll try and post some more still images later in the week or direct you to the pots on the Etsy page where there will be photos.
