Kiln Disaster

Here are a couple of photos of the kiln disaster. It was a copper red firing and the bottom octagonal shelf just melted with all the weight on it. This first photo is before anything was unstacked, and you can see that the bottom shelf appears to be missing. It's in there somewhere.

This next one is of a piece of that bottom shelf. Hard to believe it was rated for cone 10, but I have fired those shelves to cone 10 many times, just not with so much weight on them.

This final photo is also of that bottom shelf, the largest piece of all the ones I chipped out. It's stuck to the kiln post, and there is major glaze running.

The shelves above the copper reds were fairly OK. The pots all need to be refired, but they did not collapse as they might have. There is lots of pinholing on the glazes, but I have seen worse come out beautiful in a second firing.

I fired the kiln yesterday to red heat just to make sure the patching was dry -- it has been a month -- and the new target brick, a 12 x 12 x 1 inch slab of alumina, would be able to withstand a burner about 10 inches away and not crack.

The alumina slab came from a friend and it weighs 22 pounds. When I picked up the package I was really surprised by the weight. I was expecting maybe 8 pounds. I've not unstacked it yet so don't know whether the slab is OK.

Graduate School -- USF -- 1971

I went to graduate school in Ceramics at the University of South Florida in Tampa and since NCECA is in Tampa/St Pete this year, I just had some slides scanned. Both of these slides are of my work at the end of the first year, which would be the early summer of 1971. We had to display our first year's works to see whether we would be accepted to continue and this was my setup. Casual. The whole place was casual. But effective as all the professors came out to see it, and I was allowed to continue.

USF was a very new college at that time and the view you see here is long gone, with buildings everywhere. Almost all of the professors were under 35 years old, so it was a young place and very stimulating. New, progressive, confrontational. We had people like James Rosenquist and Robert Rauschenberg making work down the hall from us in the GraphicStudio, and the place was teeming with energy.

I'm not sure how these pieces relate to my current work; I had only been interested in Ceramics for 3 years at the time, and so these were some of my early pieces. This was also before I decided to become a potter so I was not trying to make pots. Pots were not looked upon as a valid direction for a graduate student at USF. I had shelves in my studio and kept black plastic over them and made pots on the side all my way through grad school. Fired them on the weekends. So I really had two bodies of work going at the time and the professors knew about the pots, did not seem to mind much, but they never saw them.

Night Firing

This is a picture of a firing that we did just before our Holiday Show. It's just getting dark and the kiln is very hot at this point. I wish I could say that every thing turned out well, but it did not. One of the bottom shelves warped badly and the whole stack fell. We had to chip a lot of stuff out of the kiln and then repair the brick with a castable refractory, and, as of now, I have not fired it again while waiting for the refractory to dry completely, but it's ready to go now and I hope to fire it soon.

Dinner Plates

Well it's not all porcelain around here these days. At our Holiday Show people kept asking for dinner plates and here is the first half of them. I made 25 altogether, including ones for our home that Anne asked for. Never hurts to order when everyone else is ordering.

While I love to make porcelain, I also love to make pots that people can use every day. A mug that someone might cherish gives me great satisfaction, and I love to see lots of pots all lined up neatly, ready for the next step, whatever that is. There were also orders for bowls and I got all of them in except for 4 hiding on the table in the photo below. They are lined up in a square, but even 4 makes me happy. It's 25F here in North Florida this morning and the large electric in the photo, Papa Bear, is firing to go off around noon. We are going for heat today.

Here is what the plates will look like when they are fired, well, except that they will be plates instead of pie plates. I use two different matte glazes and then spray an ash like glaze in the interstices of the glazing process. Each piece is glazed with many layers which require handling the pots several times before stacking them into the large gas kiln, where they are reduction fired to cone 10, around 2350F.

I do have to say that these pie plates bake incredible pies. Anne makes an apple pie every Thanksgiving and a cherry pie every Christmas and the pies are always wonderful and crusts are always perfect. They are a bit larger than the traditional pie, but, what the heck, it just means more pie. Yum.

Owen and Nadia

The other days some folks came out to choose a present for a friend and their two kids each got a little sample of clay to play with. I was just amazed by the little pieces that they fashioned. Owen made this little dog and Nadia made the standing figure. I find both of the figures humorous and gesturally wonderful.

I'm not sure whether Owen meant for the dog to have his leg up, or if the piece just dried that way, but, as you can see, he is definitely a male.

The pieces got loaded into the bisque kiln this afternoon and they will be fired tonight. I found myself being much more careful with these pieces than with my own as I do want them to come out successfully.

Happy New Year 2011

Well here is me making the first pot of 2011, a small bowl in a set of 8 which will be used for pasta. I usually don't make dinner plates but several people wanted from 2 to 6 plates and the total I am making is 25. I don't think I've ever made 25 dinner plates at one time so this is a nice project. There are also several sandwich plates, bowls, and even a spoon rest to make.

The shop is quite disorganized at the moment and I hope to get some real work done on that tomorrow. There is 33 years of accumulated stuff laying around and it's time to begin to cull the stuff I will never use again. There are thousands of test tiles that could be digitized and turned into a wall or thrown away. Boxes and boxes.

Something weird is happening in my hand and I think it might be a Dupuytren's Contracture. It is like someone stuck a needle into my hand going up the little finger and there is a hard something inside the hand. It is beginning to pull the finger towards the hand.

Please Don't Burn the Koran

I know it has been over one year since I have posted anything and I have had some stuff to say but have felt too lazy to say it, but something is happening in Gainesville, FL, my home town, that is receiving international attention, and it is not the good kind.

There is a small church of less than 30 people and the pastor is planning to burn copies of the Koran next Saturday, September 11. People all over the world are protesting. There have been protests in Indonesia and Afganistan, and the main problem is, that these people probably think all Americans feel as this man does. America is burning the Koran, not some quacky pastor in some small church.

This is such an act of disrespect to the billions of people who read and love the Koran, that it is hard for me to find the words to express my outrage. But this affects us all, really everyone in the whole world. It's an act of disrespect to everyone in the whole world. It is heartbreaking.

I have found that almost all of us in the pottery community are very spiritual by nature, and whether or not we are religious, we respect others and their right to pursue their spirituality as they choose. And we work with our personal energies as a way of life. An understatement.

I ask you to go to this website and sign the petition. It takes less than a minute and your comments will be delivered to this man on September 10.

www.thepetitionsite.com/1/PleaseDontBurnTheKoran/

Thank you everyone and I promise to begin to post again.

John