Happy Pots From The Soda Kiln
For most potters opening the kiln is like Christmas. Everyone who celebrated the holiday as a kid remembers the excitement of the wrapped package, the anticipation of the great new gift inside of it. Maybe you had hopes of what it would be, maybe it would be a complete surprise. Maybe it would be the best gift ever, maybe it would be a fuzzy pink bunny costume like the poor kid in A Christmas Story received.
You may remember me writing about loading the first soda kiln with the class I’m taking at Callanwolde Fine Arts Center. We opened that like last night and it looked great but I did have a couple pots that didn’t work out as planed. One was a lidded jar that now has a stuck on lid. The other was an oval casserole that caught a drip of some shmutz from the kiln. I may be able to repair those pots so I’ll leave them out of this blog post. I’ll show them to you, and discuss the fixes once they are complete. Cross your fingers for success for those pots.
I did have two steins turn out great. I had painted some color on them with underglaze but the soda bleached out most of the color. This was a bit of a learning experience for me. I think they look great without the color. This is something I need to explore. I may just limit the underglaze to accent colors on some imagery. Of course who knows ever where these experiments will take us.
I really like the way the glaze reacted on this mug. It’s a spearmint glaze which is one of my favorites because it does all sorts of great things in atmospheric firing and in electric. This time it really seems to work perfectly with the dragon since it’s gone from a medium spearmint color all the way to a dark green that looks almost black.
I choose the water blue glaze for this sugar skull mug because I thought the bright color would work well with the bright colors I used to decorate the skull. Most of the underglaze color is gone but the brightness of the water blue glaze has still kept the look and feel that I wanted so I’m really happy with this one.
You may remember me writing about loading the first soda kiln with the class I’m taking at Callanwolde Fine Arts Center. We opened that like last night and it looked great but I did have a couple pots that didn’t work out as planed. One was a lidded jar that now has a stuck on lid. The other was an oval casserole that caught a drip of some shmutz from the kiln. I may be able to repair those pots so I’ll leave them out of this blog post. I’ll show them to you, and discuss the fixes once they are complete. Cross your fingers for success for those pots.
I did have two steins turn out great. I had painted some color on them with underglaze but the soda bleached out most of the color. This was a bit of a learning experience for me. I think they look great without the color. This is something I need to explore. I may just limit the underglaze to accent colors on some imagery. Of course who knows ever where these experiments will take us.
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| Dragon Green Mug |
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| Sugar Skull Stein |
I’ll sand the bottoms, take some good pictures and put these up in my sadly neglected Etsy shop. It could use a few more pots in it.
Check out the gallery page - Future Relics Gallery by Lori Buff
Check out the gallery page - Future Relics Gallery by Lori Buff
those came out super, love the contrast of your drawings juxtaposed with the glazes
ReplyDeleteThanks Linda.
Deletehow utterly perfect!
ReplyDelete