With my second Holiday Home Show coming quickly this weekend… I’m pretty sure I can squeeze in one more glaze kiln before then! Got some bottoms to wax… and then some glazing to do!!! Quick…

It’s a rainy & windy day… perfect for sharing some more photos from my recent soda firing! Lots of pots ready for my HOLIDAY HOME SHOW in two weeks! So now I just need to prep & price them all… as well as setting up all the shelves & decorating my place! The pottery party is in just two weeks!!!

Another night in the studio… and some more stamping done! I had a class demo platter under wraps in my studio that I kinda forgot about. So I was relieved that it was still wet enough to do some stamping on it tonight. One-by-one… by one… by one…

Spending a little time this evening crushing up some of my dried reclaim scraps… trying to make them as small as possible so that they slake down faster in my reclaim bin. Sure, it takes a little effort.. but reclaimed clay is the best! Because it’s FREE!!!

A great combination… an empty soda kiln & my studio cart FULL of glazed & wadded pots. Late Friday night I loaded the kiln with a LOT of pots to be soda-fired on Saturday. My rolling cart has to travel from my second floor studio down to the first floor kiln room… on a very rickety freight elevator. So I always add some “seat belt” straps of masking tape to help keep pots in their place on the trip down!

Backing it up just a little… someone asked what “wadding” is when they say all of the mugs I was glazing and said that I still “needed to add the wadding.” So here’s a quick shot of the bottom of the mugs… similar to every piece put in a soda kiln. The little balls of “wadding” are made of a special clay mixture with alumina hydrate mixed in which makes the clay resistant to the soda atmosphere. The goal is to keep the pots elevated off the kiln shelves so they don’t fuse during the firing while the soda atmosphere in the kiln is “glazing” all of the pots. After firing, these little balls of clay will fall right off.

So now the stamps have their inlaid glazed… and a liner glaze too! The outside stays basically unglazed as the soda-firing process will finish & “glaze” the outsides for me! Now to start wadding all of them…

Filling all of my stamped impressions with a dark tenmoku glaze. And then wiping away the top surface leaving glaze only in the indentations. Sure, it’s a lot of work, but he darker inlaid glaze always seems to make my stamped patterns “pop” more!

Lots of mugs… looks like I’ve got a LOT of glazing to get done tonight!!! ugh… definitely not my favorite part of the process!

Colored flashing slip applied… mugs are done for the night!
Just in time to teach class downstairs tonight. So now they can start drying before they go into my bisque kiln… hurry up, dry… dry… dry!!!