Mermaids, Hula Girls and Glaze Failures...

As most potters know, there is nothing quite as frustrating as opening the lid or unbricking the door of your kiln only to find...dunh,dunh,dunhhh... glaze failures! Instead of being like a kid on Christmas morning with their shiny new gifts, its like a kick in the gut and a horrible sinking feeling about all that work that went into those pieces. Last time I posted I mentioned that about half my load was not so good due to application issues...well, I tried to re-fire them...added another coat or two of the questionable commercial glazes and fired to a true cone 6 instead of cone 5 with a hold...rationale being it might need that little bit of a higher temp to flatten everything back out...but NO DICE. Still dry and still looks like crap...bummer. I am currently looking at a couple new glazes and moving on...oh well, as I have said before, "that's ceramics".

But on the positive side, I did get to work on some of the wall platters that came out nice...decal city baby! Posted here are 3 images of thrown and slab built wall platters made to hang...all are roughly 12 x 12...some softly squared, others thrown, circular platters. The layers are looking good...slipped and carved, under glazes and other glazes, and now my graphic decals are in place...they still need to be fired so cross your fingers and hold your breath.

I shot these pics with my new smarty pants phone...and I used Instagram...man, I love Instagram. I will admit to being a little late to the party but hey, better late than never. Its my first smart phone and it does take some getting used to but like Instagram, there are a lot of cool things to do with it...and I am just getting started.

Hope its starting to feel like Spring in your neck of the woods...decal firing next week...aloha!

Half Way There

Easter Tulips in the kitchen window...

Like our current weather, half way to being decent, that's where I am with my cone 5/6 transition...half way there. I recently fired my first glaze load at Stray Cat Studio and it was about half and half as far as the results went.

 Honestly, I am so pleased with some of my pieces that the rest seem like not too bad for a bad half. Fact is, the bad half has more to do with my brushing application of a couple new commercial glazes that I am using more than anything. I am not used to brushing multiple coats that are obviously needed...I have been a "dipper"for a long time and flashing slips in the wood kiln always needed to be thin.
 The clear glaze and the aqua blue need several generous coats and my application was so thin that those areas were dry, almost underfired-like. So I will be layering on a couple more coats of each and popping those pieces back in the kiln.





Pictured in this post are highlights from the good half....now I need to slap some decals on these fellas. Most will get images but a few are just fine like they are...I'm even going back and forth some about graphics for the "scalloped" bottom mugs. Are the dots of color and scalloped line enough? Hmmmmm, good question...maybe or maybe just something subtle to add to the surface interest....

mixing bowl...

needs to be re-fired...

Finally here is one of the "fail" mugs...it should be fine after a bit more glaze and another go round in the kiln. More to come...