All kinds of stuff...

Well the weather has definitely taken a turn, it was 30 this morning with a "high" in the low to mid 40's. The chill has definitely set it. We actually saw flurries twice last week but nothing enough to stick, here's hoping. According to some sources we're overdue for a big storm this winter... it has been 5 years since we've actually seen any snow. I'm kind of hoping we have another storm like in 2000, one that shuts everything down. Its kind of exciting (for a while) and reminds me of winters up home in NY... and then the fun part.. after a few days it all melts away! :)

I saw this linked to WRAL.com and thought it was pretty funny.

This week I got some of my stuff back from the fused glass class... and I have already worn a couple pair of the earrings. I'll be taking a fused glass class and a fused glass ornament class in a couple weeks so there is more to come. Yay!




I also did Raku for the first time... it was a class at the studio. If you aren't familiar with Raku its kind of messy but really cool. You fire ceramic pieces in a gas fired kiln fast (in 45 minutes or so) to about 1900 degrees and then take them out with tongs and put them into buckets packed with newspaper, cardboard, pine straw and other things like that and cover them after they flame up so the pieces smolder in there for a while. You use special raku glazes and after they have smoldered for a while, take the tongs and move them from the buckets to a water bath to cool them down. After the bath comes the messy part, you take them to the sink with a kitchen scrubby and scrub all the gunk off of them from being in the fires. I had one piece split in the kiln and one broke in half in my hands while scrubbing but everything else survived.

These are some of my pieces from the firing... they are all small textured footy bowls.




This is a mug, also from the raku firing. It was disproportionate so I didn't plan on using it for a mug, so it seemed a good idea to use for raku. Believe it or not that is all one kind of glaze, it jsut came out in different colors from the process.




We have a craft show in 2 weeks so I'm working on some new pieces for that as well.. the kiln is running a high fire load right now actually, trying to fix the ugly mustard yellow pieces back to that beautiful blue that I loved. I don't know if it will work but its worth a try. I low fire for 4+ hours to about 1915 degrees and high fire for 8+ hours to about 2230 degrees. My kiln is programmable so you set it up using the temperature you want to get to in the end in a formula based on hours you want to run and how many degrees you expect it to go up in each hour or "segment" of the firing.

I fired some other pieces earlier this week, some worked, some uh.. had minor issues. This bowl had structural issues underneath from the start so I wasn't really surprised that it broke... I'm going to give it so someone at the studio who does mosaics so she can smash it up for her pieces. The picture of it came out pretty amusing, Skye's devil dog eyes glaring through the bottom like some footage from ghost hunters.