Stoneware coffee mugs wait for glazing.

When trying different glazes and techniques in pottery, things don’t always work out as intended. Sometimes you get disasters; sometimes you get happy accidents.

Or maybe this was intentional.  Yeah, that’s it: it was intentional!

This plate, from the most recent glaze firing, is an exploration of a curvier more organic design in the pattern and glazes.

The dining table is covered with drying bisqueware pottery that’s been treated with red iron oxide stain prior to glazing.

A drying rack (the dining table) is covered with bisqueware pieces that have been previously thrown, church-keyed, bisque-fired, and treated with red iron oxide stain to accentuate the patterns.  Next step is masking with liquid latex, glazing, and finally glaze firing.

Raku bottle with white crackle glaze.

It’s been about 2 years since the last raku session so this was overdue. Perfect weather, recent retirement, and renewed enthusiasm conspired to make a firing all but inevitable. Results were encouraging and, as always, new things were learned about this tricky and unpredictable technique. Thank you kiln gods!

The last couple weeks of December, 2015 were rather busy catching up with pottery chores including a bisque firing and then a New Year’s Eve glaze firing.

A kiln-load of pottery was fired over the Christmas holiday and it’s nice to note there were no klunkers in the bunch, a good way to end the year.  Several urns and keepsake jars made it through the firing:

A kiln-load of church-keyed bisque-fired pottery has been stained with red iron oxide.  Over the next few days, the pieces will be taped, masked, and glazed in preparation for the glaze firing.

We completed our first glaze firing since a little over two years ago and it’s also the first glaze firing in our Newfield home. New church-key patterns were tried out and old glazes stirred up. Results were encouraging on some fronts and there are opportunities, as always, for tweaking the art and the process.

My newly-renovated Web site includes this blog, for which this is its inaugural post.  It may also be the last post, in which case the title could just as well be “My Last Blog Post” or “My Only Blog Post”.  You see, I do pottery, not blogging.  I haven’t the faintest whisper of interest in blogging. I don’t see the point, I don’t know how to do it, and I don’t care to learn–life is too interesting to spend any significant time writing and managing a blog, of all things.

Given my deeply profound indifference to blogging, you may wonder why I bothered putting up this post at all.  The answer is simple:  I didn’t.  My ghost-writing husband did it.