
White porcelain pieces now with black slip banding… just waiting for them to set-up
to leatherhard for trimming & some sgraffito carving through the black slipped areas.


Gary Jackson: Fire When Ready Pottery
A Chicago potter’s somewhat slanted view of clay & play |

White porcelain pieces now with black slip banding… just waiting for them to set-up
to leatherhard for trimming & some sgraffito carving through the black slipped areas.



Always feels a little weird to take black slip & paint it on pristine white porcelain…
that is “cherished” as perfectly clean WHITE clay. Now with some black splattered on it.


Playing with porcelain again. Pretty in white… with some sgraffito plans in the making…



Lots of pots later… and almost all of the kiln shelves… the kiln was full. I tried my best to squeeze in as many pots as I could all the way to the top! It’s like a game of TETRIS with pots & shelves. Gotta stack ’em right. Tight… but not too tight. Next to brick up the door, do a little preheat to dry things out and then home for a quick “nap”… for kiln firing started early this morning!

Okay, so the first side of my studio cart is glazed, wadded & loaded.
Time to turn around the cart and start filling the other side with work.
I’ve found that a “full cart” pretty much equals a full soda kiln.
Give or take a few pieces that I might need to glaze as I load?!

Starting off the day by gluing my wads onto the bottoms of the pieces I glazed yesterday… getting them ready for the soda kiln… as well as making room on my work table to glaze the rest of my bisque today!


Spent a lot of time in the studio glazing… painstakingly inlaying tenmoku glaze into the stamped impressions! And then adding a liner glaze getting ready for this weekend’s soda kiln firing! Lots of mugs… and I still have a long ways to go!!!





Getting the glazing & wadding started with mugs… GIDDY-UP!!!



Just loaded my last bisque… had to call it “quits” on making things tonight,
for tomorrow I switch to glazing things!!! Four layers of greenware going into bisque firing. Not packed quite as tight as I would prefer, but it’s the final random pieces that just needed to be fired… including eight kinda freshly made wall vases! Fingers crossed…





Okay, so one last batch tonight… might be a little “damp”… err, okay WET going into the bisque kiln!!! This time it’s a batch of wall pocket vases “racing” and hoping to make it into Saturday’s soda kiln. Nothing like pushing the calendar a bit… “somehow” it will all get done, right?!





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Gary Jackson: Fire When Ready Pottery
Lillstreet Studios ∙ 4401 North Ravenswood, Chicago, Illinois 60640 ∙ 773-307-8664 gary@firewhenreadypottery.com |