Jane Wheeler's Blog 2009 June

high summer

Posted jane -->on 25th Jun 2009

a morning walk to avoid the heat, and it’s already very humid by ten thirty. the hedgerows are zones of� intense life; starting at the bottom, there are a lot of young rabbits, dodging back into their holes under the nettles, and mole hills erupting around them.

the hogweed is taller than me, and different varieties of grass compete, nodding grey-purple plumey heads fuzzing the air with pollen. bumble bees lurch from flower to flower, and butterflies skim past too quickly to be identified. yellowhammer and tit squeak and warble from the dense hedges, laced with honeysuckle and dog rose, white campion arching up to meet them.

through tall banks of umbellifers, red sorrel and ryegrasses, the barley field flows away in the breeze, bleached blonde except where shade and track leaves a green stain.

the wood is dark and mysterious; the thrush rules and his jazzy improvised song echoes from the interior.

it is cool and damp� amongst the trees, too dark for flowers, a refuge from the hot sun for deer and birds. leaving the thrush’s kingdom behind, in the heat only a crow caws from inside the wood.

a field of grass mixed with stray self-seeded wheat has the impressions of many bodies where the deer have lain in it overnight.

summer greens, high grasses, a humid sun, a lark singing above; this morning the shade of the green lane was very welcome.

walking back past a lovely old house, its garden walls a support for roses, like this beautiful bourbon, Madame Isaac Perriere.

down Sharrington road the trees are full of flowers;� the lime with its dangling balls like tiny green cherries, the sycamore and hornbeam hung with green paper lanterns in tiny multiples.

and the bracken is uncurling its last tiny fronds in a paroxysm of greenery, all hazy in the humidity and sunshine.

back in the workshop, one more piece to make to join this clan of lidded jars.

the lids are cut with a knife and the bevel of the cut keeps them snugly in place. the last one made, now a succession of chores must be done … ash sifted and glazes mixed, more clay reclaimed.

the veranda too bursts with flowering growth, I have to keep it cut back or the whole shed would submerge under it.

(3 comments)

runny glaze

Posted jane -->on 23rd Jun 2009

opening up the kiln yesterday morning was a little upsetting, I found I HAD overfired it (let cone 11 bend all the way over) even though the pyro only said 1256 C, as five of the porcelain bottles had stuck to the shelf, and the black copper matt glaze had turned runny.

I have annotated the photo with red arrows pointing to two of the pots with little black pools around their bases. luckily a few taps with a chisel and mallet took them off the shelf in one piece.

the silicon carbide shelf seems to cause this frothing which is very weak and easy to grind off. here is the same pot tidied up somewhat.

the shelf is also damaged and will need the grinder applied.

this is the whole firing assembled on my work table, apart from one of the cone vessels. there are so many of the porcelain bottles it is hard to pick out the best.

the tall pieces with flared tops are all in the David Leach porcelain, it is not as blue-white and translucent as the Audrey Blackman, which I prefer. handling qualities are about the same, pots made in both split when drying for no particular reason, but the split� stayed the same size and glazed over I rather like them.

the textures that I have scored or impressed into the porcelain work much better with my dry barium glaze, and on the AB porcelain it picks up the green shade from the copper volatiles during firing, to give a colour a little like the blue-green of an iceberg. this pattern is from a natural fibre nail-brush stamped over the clay.

I fired two replacements for the black cone vessel which cracked, one with no glaze, and one with glaze inside and outside. there was no problem with either, so I think Valentine’s remark about not glazing the clay was really not justified, and that it was the fact that the inside was unglazed which caused the cracking. I have had a pot do that before, but a very long time ago, when I was still testing a lot of glazes out. here is the glazed one.

the rest of the pictures are here

also I have revamped my soozwhippet site and made links to recent pots and knits on it, which you will find here

the field poppies are starting to flower in my garden; there is a big patch of them where the ground was dug up to replant the fig tree.

the bees seem to like them; here is a bee on its way to take nectar from a poppy head – a little blurred, too fast for the camera.

(1 comment)

another firing

Posted jane -->on 15th Jun 2009

I unpacked saturday’s firing today. first glance was disappointing, I had under reduced in the early stages and then compensated by over reducing through the 1100’s C, and the colours are a little dirtier. however, after handling them under a good light in the workshop and photographing them, I am a lot happier. quite a few of them had the extremadura earth in them, like this one, the last of the paddled bowls, the shallowest, most asymetrical one, which has a veining of cracks.

this three spouted flask was made in the white stoneware clay with the extremadura earth in it, but the most interesting thing about it is the way being fired right next to the gas flame at the front of the kiln has given it an oval of orange-rust on the shoulder.

I had a space at the top of the kiln where the shelf was too close to the top to fit much in, so I popped this plate (I have a stack of them) into the blue version of the mamo mat, the copper/tin glaze and it has come out very well. it even sits quite flat, although it warped.

I hated this when I opened up the kiln, and its mate the slightly smaller no 15, it looked so yellow ochre, but I am really pleased with them now. there is more green at the top than I thought, lots of personality and the� scoring has worked well.

rest of the pots are here

I dropped my good canon digital today and stove in the focusing and zoom part of the lens, but after some wrestling to get it moving with a screwdiver it seems to be working fine again, so not quite a disaster.

(no comment)

pattern, structure

Posted jane -->on 14th Jun 2009

at last a good photo of a painted lady, on the wild valerian at the front of the cottages. it was a big one, a little the worse for wear, they seem to vary in size quite a lot.

apparently it is the most widespread butterfly on the planet,� occurring in north and south America, Europe, Asia and Africa.

after the rain� we’ve had this week everything is growing and flowering like mad; Cake’s Lane is getting quite shaggy.

the dog roses are flowering in the hedges

honeysuckle tendrils weaving� through the bracken with a pretty show of flowers

the hogweed makes a pattern of lace in the roadside verge, but while it is the right scale for the landscape here, in my garden it is too brutal.

it is a very sculptural plant, and I love to have it indoors when the seedheads develop.

here are the last group of porcelain pots, made yesterday, using an old nylon spike type hairbrush to impress and draw abstract patterns.

I hope to get them in a bisque firing early this week and then there will be another glaze firing next weekend or early next week, to finish two more of the black clay cone forms which I need to replace the cracked one for Salthouse.

(1 comment)

new pots

Posted jane -->on 11th Jun 2009

I have been busy using up the bag of Audrey Blackman porcelain, and made a small army of little bottles, using different textures impressed on them, with brushes mostly, and generally getting the feel of working in this medium.

today I made this piece in the David Leach porcelain, which is yellower and probably not as translucent.

I’ll work through this bag of porcelain as well, before I go back to stoneware, or the Extremadura terracotta. which, by the way, I fired some scraps of, in this week’s cone 10-11 firing, and I think it will survive stoneware temperatures, although it has changed in the same way as the terracotta crank does.

this batch of bisque fired pots came out of the kiln on Saturday and a good bunch of them went back in for the glaze firing.

the kiln in its new incarnation fired well, though as I set the bricks on the top of the flue for reduction at 1020 degrees Centigrade and went back to bed for two hours, the early reduction was a little heavier than I had intended. it cooled quite quickly as well. here it is at opening this morning.

you can see patches of black soot – it had got really sooty when I got up again! but no harm done, and the strong oranges from the reduced copper are great on the tall bottle in the front.

there’s an interesting superficial crack, well covered with glaze – it had already started when I glazed the pot – on the side of this one. its deliberate, because I bound together two rather different clays – the craft crank, and the superwhite stoneware on top. the white stoneware shrinks a little more than the crank.

a rather different category of crack occurred on this black� scored cone vessel.

this clay is Valentines black extra textured clay, and I have discovered it is not meant to be glazed. they don’t tell you that though! I rang them and asked for suggestions as to why it had cracked – with several loud bangs, making me jump, and also sent little pieces of black flying around itself as it cooled down. I used the barium glaze on it. I have glazed the smoother textured black with no problems, but not this stuff, the only other piece I have made in it was the tall cone which was in the eight day anagama firing last summer – with no glaze on it. it was for Salthouse, but I do have a similar piece which I can fire with no glaze. it’s a shame as the barium looks good on it.

I also fired two of the paddled bowls, and they have come out really well. they were difficult to handle in the glaze bins, but it’s worth the struggle.

this one I ladled a small quantity of the glaze into and turned it around until it had all been absorbed in the bottom, that’s why it has the extra texture there.

this has the barium glaze and then another layer of the shino over it, which gives the lavender� grey with the orange veining. I was expecting the shino to flake , but the barium probably wasn’t thick enough. the lavender colour was a surprise too. I painted a wax resist in the centre of the inside and put some shino inside as well, but no flaking there either.

another surprise was that the crack on this porcelain bottle got no worse. this is the copper matt glaze in its black version, and I think its rather elegant on the porcelain. I don’t think I like the coloured glazes so much, they are too pinkey-mauvey for me, although pretty in their own way. the barium is probably the best bet on this stuff. the shino is rather horrible. you can see all the photos of the pots in this firing here� here

the Audrey Blackman porcelain is very beautiful, you can see the translucency on the edges of the neck on this bottle.

(no comment)

painted ladies

Posted jane -->on 2nd Jun 2009

compared to neighbouring villages a mile or two nearer the coast, the migrating painted lady butterflies have largely ignored Bale. I have seen one on the bean field near the wood, three in Cake’s Lane, one at the top end of Clip Street, and one in my garden. yet eighty in two hours have been counted on a path two miles away.� they are pretty flighty and not easy to photograph; my only butterfly photo so far this year is of a female orange tip feeding on some self-sown rape.

as it is female it doesn’t have the orange tips to its wings.

perhaps the solitary painted lady in my garden had spotted this, the one thistle-type flower which is out. it is a hard head, I have a lot of clumps of it, but the rest are still tightly budded.

the ox-eye daisies are out, along with buttercups, yellow rattle and sorrel.

one of the prettiest flowers, I think, is the common plantain.

I have been fairly busy making bottles, I� made twelve in the reconstituted red clay, and then realised that this shape would work in porcelain, of which I have two bags lurking under my work table. I am trying the Audrey Blackman, which is very white and transulcent, but is more liable to crack than some less white types.

it’s nice to work on a smaller more delicate scale for a change. two have big cracks though, and probably will not survive; my experience of porcelain is that once it does this, it goes on unwinding and opening out more the higher it is fired.

I have been having fun with a bit of texture on some; this one is marked with a small nail-scrubbing brush.

I will have to work out my glazing policy with these pieces – shiny or matt? opaque or transparent? how much do I want to use the translucency and purity of porcelain, in contrast to my usual crusty style? I do have an opportunity to fire some work in an anagama and in a wood-fired soda firing later this summer, and I think that putting in a few porcelain pieces would be very interesting.

(3 comments)

high summer

runny glaze

another firing

pattern, structure

new pots

painted ladies

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