Saturday, November 6, 2010

Round One

I offered a Raku workshop through the Artscenter in Carrboro and today was the firing with the first group. I had enough people sign up that I split the firing into two days. We fired about 50 pieces today, the only casualties were a blown up bowl and one of my greenware sculptures was knocked over and broke. Pretty good for the chaos we had going on.
I got up early, got everything ready and as soon as I was set to go, it started pouring rain. Well, of course it did! So I had to move all the glazing inside and my kitchen was a make shift glaze room.
Best part is that was where all the food was. These workshops come with great food. We had homemade foccacia, unreal! and apple turnovers, pear and almond tart, soup, beautiful salad, wine....... yum!
Lots of hydrogen molecules in the air, made for some spectacular glaze effects. This blue is the same as the copper red in the first photo. FAst pull for the copper, slow pull for the blue, really cool glaze.
Claudia is from Brazil and this was her first Raku. We finally convinced her to trying pulling pieces from the kiln. She did a great job today! I met Maureen through my Raku mentor, Barbara McKenzie and she has moved over from the Claymakers raku firings to do my workshops. We are really happy to have her join the pyromaniacs that take these workshops.
Bridget has been firing with me for a while now and always does some crazy experimental thing, I'm watching her and thinking she is nuts and then these wonderful things come out of the kiln. This glaze is called turtle shell and it really looks like a turtle shell.
and just because firing 50 pieces of Raku with people that have never done it of have only done it a few times wasn't difficult enough, I said "hey, let's do a sawdust firing too" so I babysat a trash can as well as a Raku kiln today. Round two tomorrow......... wine tonight!

3 comments:

Hollis Engley said...

Great theater, eh, Tracey?

ang design said...

super stuff trace, waiting for round 2... im in for the wine tonight :))

Judy Shreve said...

What fun! The food looks (sounds) fabulous too -- and you did get some fabulous pieces fired!

Looking forward to seeing 'round2' --