crawling and running glazes

a daily chore – outside the kiln shed are my four tubs of potatoes; they need a bucket of water each. they have grown enormous and no doubt when the potatoes are ready they will all be ready at once.

I opened the kiln this morning rather expecting an over-fire – but cone eleven had actually fallen over halfway rather than melted quickly as I had thought, so the temperature was fine. the pyrometer said 1260 C, but with a reduction  firing the actual temperature that the cones – and therefore the glazes – react to can vary by several tens of degrees.

peering in while the pots are too hot to take out, things look interesting.

what I wasn’t expecting was the violent behaviour of my crawling shino. I did put it on quite thickly – the weather was hot, and the glaze thick and warm, staying in suspension.  it has thrown itself off this pot and onto the kiln shelf.

and on the underside of the some of the porcelain bowls it is hanging on by its teeth. the colour is interesting on the porcelain – brownish blackish tinges, whereas it goes a normal shino orangey-red on the stoneware.

a couple of the porcelain bowls got too hot and the glaze ran down the foot. I had to use the grinder to tidy them up.

where the kiln was cooler the same glaze is matt; I am pleased with this one, the matt glaze suits it.

and where it is hotter it melts more and the oxides burn off to an extent, leaving a paler glaze with lovely crystallisation patterns as on these spoons, which are rather distorted, as I made them quite thin.

here the copper/tin/dolomite glaze, related to the ones above, has also lost some of its copper, and what is left has a tendency to be pink, over the porcelain layers on this jar. I mended my flue chimney with clay, and had soot and smoke coming out of the front of the kiln; it seemed like heavy reduction. I also fired with a slightly higher pressure than usual, just to see how it would go. the firing finished in good time, and I think the results are good. there are plenty of greens and oranges, and there is some nice blue streaking over the stoneware, and the porcelain, from the version of the tin/dolomite glaze with cobalt and copper.

this little pot went in for its third firing – it was one of the failed saggar pieces. walking at Morston today the cracked and powdery mud reminded me of this glaze.

and here is one of the watering cans – it has some blue breaks, but mainly the green and orange still comes to the fore.

there are a lot of pieces I like in this firing, it’s hard to pick a favourite. so I won’t. but I’ll end with this porcelain stem bowl, glazed with the crawling shino, for a really good texture, a better version of something I was trying to do about five years ago.

here’s the link for all the pots