Over Break

I dressed my pieces, the fourteen that I had available to dress at the beginning of break. There are a total of sixteen more in varying stages of dryness in the school studio. One of them is cracking, however, so I may need to make more, but I may need to make many more anyway if they all blow up in the first firing.

Anyway, here is what one looks like. I stuffed it with newspaper, wrapped it in banana peels, tied them on with salt-soaked string, and poked the rose hips in for effect. I have no idea if any of those things will show up at all. We can but wait and see.

Here is batch one:

And batch two:

You will notice that some of them are not stuffed with newspaper, and that is because I forgot that I was going to do that until I'd already wrapped them up so that I could no longer fit the paper in. The purpose of the paper is twofold (HA, fold): it will smoke the insides completely black (at least it's supposed to) and also hopefully provide some support so they don't collapse in on themselves. I think the biggest worry is not the imploding but rather the large burning logs of wood falling and crushing them, but I'll just load them really carefully. Bisque ware is pretty resilient; I don't advise dropping it from a height, but the logs I'm using I think are small enough to not do too much damage. Although the heat of the fire may change that, I don't know. Wait and see is the name of the game at this point.

I also took some newsprint-ish paper that I had lying around and made little packets of salt, table and epsom, that I am going to put around the pieces in the pit, which will hopefully make pleasant flashes on the pieces. But as I say, I don't know. They could all turn out completely black. But that would be an outcome, and I would go with it.