Under Glazing Over

Whiled away part of the morning and early afternoon at the studio on Thursday.

This is one of the vases that I threw and slipped and carved and bisqued and then let sit on my shelf for...a long, long time. A year? More? Maybe. I don't really know.



That's the back, half finished. I think. And this is the front, less than half-finished:



These will be raku'd, eventually. Maybe.

Between bouts of underglazing, I loaded a bisque kiln and a glaze kiln. Both were very loosely loaded, which goes against my nature and my creed, but I was mostly looking to get my own very small things in.

And here let me say that it sometimes sucks working in a communal-ish studio because kilns are loaded whenever there's enough work. And sometimes they're loaded when there's too much work and your stuff gets left out for weeks and weeks and weeks at a time. That also tends to happen if you make odd-sized stuff as many handbuilders do. I've seen students--the less-pushy ones admittedly--who wait four weeks to get work bisque fired. That is no joking amount of time when you figure that a run of lessons spans six weeks. And the studio director wonders why he has a hard time keeping students. Anyway, not my problem. I know how to load kilns; my stuff gets in when I need it to.

So I guess what I'm saying is that I was feeling a bit self-serving today as I loaded kilns in the cold, shaded kiln shed.

Meh.