dria 🇨🇦
@dria
Deb Richardson - Former Mozillian, current Red Hatter, originator of Linuxchix and the Mozilla Developer Network among other open sourcey shenanigans. Also pretty deeply into pottery, boardgaming, and reading.
Picked up some comics today, and also some game nerd stuff (Terraforming Mars: The Dice Game is very, very good -- we prefer it to the original on a bunch of levels).
Finished the test tiles before bed. These will dry over the next day or two and then I'll do a bisque firing.
I did finally get the float to work -- had to reformulate it to work with my materials, but it's so so nice.
Ok, actually did the thing i said i was going to do. Threw a bunch of bottomless cylinders to practice that skill and, as a bonus, make a buttload of test tiles for future glaze experiments. 14 pictured, and did 6 more after this. That's a full bag of clay and should make ~200 tiles. I am muddy.
Confirming the value of newsletters, I preordered 2 books because of @blackwells.bsky.social 's latest. Somehow Blackwells is in the UK but offers free shipping to Canada? I've ordered a bunch of stuff from them and would love to visit someday. (It's a very old bookshop.)
Narrowing down my camping book selection. This is always so hard. I've read Calculation of Vol 1 already, but kinda want to read it again before Vol 2, so those are def on the list (Vol 1 is *so* great). Station X is non-fic about Bletchley Park, which I super want to read. Ugh. Need more vacation.
Did a bisque firing in the kiln overnight and unloaded this afternoon. Lookit all my lil bowls! Those are going to be used for glaze testing. Also little plates, some random red clay things for testing bisque slips (exciting!), and some butter keepers.
Gonna re-read these just to make myself feel better about my life (I write and edit for a living).
Here's the Stull's map of the glazes. Pretty cool stuff. Hopefully some of them work? (They should, but glazes are bonkers in terms of the number of variables involved.) I'm also beat.
Fired the kiln overnight, but it's still too hot to unload. Trimmed the butter bells (pic 1), and made some little plates (pic 2). Yay! I have so much stuff to glaze, good lord. Must get some glazes nailed down, which I'll work on this week.
Messed up my pristinely clean wheel by attempting some butter bells. Learned a ton, got to use my calipers for the first time, and can prooobably save them all with some judicious trimming (some of the inner parts are taller than the outer parts because i had no idea how much clay to use at first).
Photographic evidence that I do, in fact, occasionally clean my wheel. Much easier when the weather's nice (ie: not winter) because I can take the splash pan, tools, buckets, etc. outside and just hose it all down. Bisque firing tonight or tomorrow, then back into glaze-test town for a while. #pots
Not pictured, the ludicrous number of Kindle books I've amassed over the years, and the growing collection of Audible books. (I don't love Amazon, but this is an investment I can't walk away from at this point.) (That's how they getcha.)
Posting a random shelfie. I've read many of these, but most are my TBR. I need more time to read, y'all.
Skill building kind of pottery day. Threw 2 very thick bowls that will become bisque molds, then finally tried throwing off the hump (which is basically putting a big ol hunk of clay on the wheel and using just the very top section to make little things). Went middlingly well. Learned a ton.
Our local bakery is just insanely great. I went early and managed to get the last bag of the japenese milk bread and i'm so excited about it.
In other news, we finally have some actual spring weather, so the urge to clean everything and tidy up the gardens is strong. (Comic panel from Hyperbole and a Half readingatrecess.com/tag/clean-al...)
Kiln's open! Here's before and after pix. Super fun. Lots of good stuff, a couple of failures (none of my floats actually floated, alas), but I have some solid recipes to use and build on from here. FUN! If there's interest I'll post close ups of some later, so let me know if you'd like to see. 🪴
Finished firing 4 hours ago and still waaaaaay too hot to open. Should be able to open after coffee in the morning.
Ok, got up a little later than planned, but hey it's Sunday! Kiln loaded and firing, started just after 7:30am so it should finish around 2pm. Fast cone 6 firing, so it will go up to 1222c over 6.5 hours then shut off and cool naturally. Should be cool enough to unload tomorrow morning.
Batched some glaze tests today -- 18 variants, 8 recipes, a few colour experiments. 2 will be used for a line blend to test various amounts of titanium dioxide. All are testing recipes I had to reformulate because my original kaolin source is no longer available. Next I have to make test tiles.
The coolest thing about pottery is that it's one of our oldest technologies, and the artefacts often stick around for a long, long time. smarthistory.org/octopus-vase/