I’ve spent the last 48 hours rushing to get off an application for an “Emerging Artist” grant. Now, the light box is finished, a first round of work is photographed, and the CD with my images is burned and in the mail.
I’ve only had time to photograph a few of my favorite pieces, and looking through the results, I think I’ll be doing a few more tweaks to the lighting set up. I’m pretty happy with it, but I feel like fussing with it a bit more. Once I have all the information on the new critters up, I’m hoping to put together a howto on building the lighting softbox.
I’ll have my work cut out for me with documenting all of my beasts, though. I’ll need to photograph them, record all the useful info for them, and price them. I’ll also have to decide which to send off to galleries, which to sell myself, and which pieces will be not for sale, reserved to enter into shows. Hopefully, I’ll have all of that worked out by the end of the week. In the mean time, I’ve uploaded some of the photos I shot today.
So we unloaded the kiln yesterday. All in all, it seem like a pretty good firing. It turned out that we hadn’t dropped cone 13 in the far back, like we thought. The cones were only viewable from a very strange angle in the back, and someone misread them. We were only at cone 11 in back, which isn’t bad, but isn’t 13 either. However, we were right about the cones in the front. Cone 13 was completely flat, and cone 14 was starting to bend.
In general, the firing didn’t seem to be hurting from shutting down 15 hours early. The back was much drier than normal, which was ok for everyone who glazes their pieces (I don’t), but resulted in one or two matte blue gray critters. I might refirer those two.
Most of the pieces came out great. I need to now work on cleaning up everything, which should be easy this time, and get photographing. Unfortunately I need to finish rebuilding my lighting set up from scratch before I can do that. Photos of the new work (and the new photographic lighting set up) will be coming soon!
It turns out that the rumors of cone 13 being down in back were true. We decided to shut it down at 4pm. We mixed up the mud (wood ash, clay, and water) and sealed up all the openings. We spent the next three hours reduction cooling. I’ll post more on that soon, because I’m on my way home! It will be very good to be back.
I’m still up at Ken’s studio, and haven’t gone down to the kiln yet today. However, one of the morning shift has just past on some crazy news. Cone 13 is down not only in the middle, but also in the far back. This hotter than we’ve ever gone before. Apparently, they’re struggling to keep the front from taking off even more. Going hotter is hard on the clay. I was about to go split some wood for the night shift, but with these temperatures, we might just shut it down this evening.
Here’s two shots from last night – the kiln at night, and my sidestoking duty station.
The kiln has been above 2000 degrees in both front and back for about a day now. It’s been keeping between 2200 and 2300 in front, and we’ve been fighting to get the back to match that. We’ll gain maybe 100 degrees over the next two days. It’s funny how you spend the first day or two working to keep it slow, and now we might have to fight for every 20 degrees.
For the next few days it will mainly be about what the cones are doing, and what the coal bed is like. Cones measure a combination of heat + time, and give us a better idea of how the pots are doing than just temperature. Last I heard, cone 13 is bending in front, and 10 is down in the middle. Not sure about the far back. The kiln will continue to feel hotter and hotter as we go on.
Flame and smoke from the stack with every stoke now. Also, it is a VERY beautiful day.