Here comes the sun .. soon hopefully!

Summer hasn't quite arrived here and the very poor weather recently has made it impossible to fire my gas/wood kiln outdoors. The BBC is even predicting a frost in parts of England tonight which is pretty unbelievable for this time of year. In the mean time I have fired the electric kiln again, mainly to test some new glaze and slip combinations and a glaze recipe I found in the book Dry Glazes by Jeremy Jernegan. This is a matt copper glaze ( Taffy Matt by V.Cushing ) with a small addition of tin oxide, which is recommended to be fired to cone 10 in a reduction atmosphere. Quite intriguing as the photo of the test tile shows the glaze to be a dark reddish brown where thicker and light green where thin, whereas I would have expected it to be shades of pink where thinner. I will try it in the gas/wood kiln soon, but in oxidation (fired to cone 9) it has come out like this:

Sake cup

Small vase, approx. 2 ins diameter

Quite an attractive glaze, with some subtle variegation even within the grey areas. It highlights the carved areas of a pot in exactly the way I had hoped.

A couple of pieces were fired with the combination of Oribe and dolomite glazes I have used before. It came out really well on this heavily textured vase where the second layer of glaze was poured rather than dipped. Next time I intend to leave more of the green glaze showing as the contrast has worked rather nicely on the underside:

Vase, approx 6 inches tall

Vase, underside

Bowl, height approx. 3 ins

Interesting that on the above bowl the top layer of dolomite was dipped over the rim, but has dropped down over half an inch in the firing. It hasn't done that on the other vase, presumably because the top of the pot is more horizontal..

Another pot glazed with Oribe was this tea bowl, this time layered over a dark iron oxide slip:

Tea bowl, height 3 ins, diameter 4.5 ins

And finally something a little different .. a textured pot, which was initially thrown as a closed form, then laid on its side. The matt copper ash glaze was brushed on, hence the variation in thickness and hue:

Ikebana vase, height approx 4 inches

I feel this vase form could work well for flower arranging.

Thanks for reading!