Greetings!
And welcome to another edition of the stubby tales of Marko the Werelynx. Otherwise known as your Friday Street Prophets Group open thread, featuring the usual personal blithering by your fuzzy-headed host and, this week, a continuation of my Tiny Raku Kiln diary from last week. I've been very busy the last couple of weeks and for the last few days entirely without a connection to the internet. I'm back at home for a few days though; back where the broad-band sings. So, as promised last week I've gathered a few photos of some of the pots I fired in my tiny raku kiln...
Sadly, most of the pots turned out like this one. I'd bought a special glaze that was supposed to be particularly good for raku firing, but it didn't turn out to be anything special and so I began experimenting with some of the old glazes that I had laying around. In my disappointment with the special glaze I rushed through a few firings and only at the tail end of the second evening of firing did I finally get some results worth attempting to repeat. I'm sort of a slow learner... or rather, I like to learn how to do things by making lots and lots of dumb mistakes.
What I ended up with was a collection of cracked pots and a couple of treasures-- and I'm eager to get back to my ol' kick wheel and make a couple dozen more pots to experiment on.
Yeah, those are cracked too... sigh, either I'll learn to swap out the shelf the pot rests on in the kiln or I'll learn to wait longer between firings, but putting a cold pot on a red hot kiln shelf ends in disaster.
You can see from this angle that the smoke was adding a bit of color and there's a bit of crazing going on.
The special raku glaze was plain white and was so unremarkably plain that I tried brushing some of my favorite Parisian Blue glaze onto them to liven them up. Sure, they came out of the kiln glowing glossy violet, but the white glaze seemed to drain all the life out of them.
I had better luck with this skull goblet or vase-- or whatever it is...
I heated that one up a second time and smoked it in sawdust and grass for an extra long time and it picked up some really nice metallic tones.
I think my best results finally came about when I gave up entirely on the special raku glaze and just sprayed a bit of dark brown and a few spatters of the Parisian Blue glazes onto a bowl...
The second photo distorts the shape quite a bit, but that's the same bowl in both photos. I was really pleased with the rich red color and I'll probably be trying to reproduce it before the end of the year.
Much of my disastrous impatience stemmed from my desire to create a last minute wedding gift for my brother-in-law who was married last Saturday in Warsaw. Perhaps next week I'll begin a two part diary about my trip to Poland.
In the meantime, thanks for stopping by. I hope you'll all have a great weekend.
This is an open thread. Open to Prophets and non-Prophets to share their news, promote their stuff, and just kick back a bit to relax.