Firing With Friends

My friend Colleen Riley of Eureka Pots has been working on developing some cone 6 glazes to compliment her existing cone 10 soda line of glazes.  Since I had a cone 6 firing planned earlier this week, I invited Colleen to throw some of her tests in with my firing.  She's got some great glazes in the works, and its going to be really difficult for her to narrow it down. 

Colleen reviewing her results

Berry bowls have been on my to do list lately so I had several in this kiln load as well as some mugs.  Ya can never have enough mugs.  

Have a great day.

Relaxing

We received about 8 inches of snow today so it felt like a good evening to enjoy a cup of hot chocolate in my favorite Colleen Riley mug. I picked this one up a few weeks ago during the South Central Minnesota Art Tour.

I got most of my to-do list done today with the exception of shoveling the driveway. I'm hoping it will all melt tomorrow. Tomorrow's got a much shorter list so if need be I can add cleaning the driveway (still hoping it all melts!!)

Now - back to my hot chocolate. Have a great evening.

Colleen & Donovan's Kiln Opening

Kevin and I had a great time last night at Colleen Riley and Donovan Palmquist's kiln opening. After a 54 hour firing last weekend, they opened the kiln to unload hundreds of great pieces by several fantastic artists.

There was a lot of ooohhing and aaahhing as still too hot to touch pieces were unloaded, inspected and admired.

In this photo Donovan is admiring a piece he just unloaded from the first chamber of the kiln.

Their kiln has two ware chambers. In the first chamber, the flames passing through the chamber on their way through the kiln deposit wood ash on the pottery creating wonderful patterns, surfaces and toasty colors. The second chamber is a soda chamber where a combination of soda ingredients are placed in the chamber at peak temperature. These ingredients vaporize and interact with the clay and glazes to create gorgeous flashing, blushes and glassy surfaces. Here's a peek at the soda chamber before unloading.

It sounds like Donovan is planning to start construction on my kiln in the near future. I've done some wood firing in the past, but fairly infrequently and on a small scale. I'm looking forward to construction of a wood fired kiln at the farm/studio and creating a body of work that is very different from what I've been doing recently. I'm sure I'll still do plenty of Cone 6 oxidation work yet, but it will be wonderful to have this additional resource for a different earthy feeling pot. So... another opportunity to practice my patience. Yah!!