The greenhouse project is plumbed

This may be the most uninteresting picture you'll ever see on a blog and it may even be the most uninteresting blog post too, so I'll keep it short.

We have plumbing!  You can see here on the left a tap with hose attached.  Going up from there is more pipework and you can see a tap at the top centre of the picture.  This one is for the watering system in this end of the greenhouse.  Lower and to the right of the picture you can see through to the other end where the tap with a bit of hose stuck on awaits the watering system in that end of the greenhouse.

That's it.  Plumbing in greenhouse.  Really nothing more to say.

Except how pleasing it is.

Work in progress - 5

Well, not really in progress any more as the lizard vase I've been documenting here is now finished.  Here he is:

It's hard to photograph shiny things but I was very pleased with the vase so couldn't wait to have a go and post the pic here.  I may have another go some time later.

The kiln was packed with pots I'm very happy with, most of which will remain uncovered until the exhibition in a few weeks time, but I'm delighted to share this chap with his loyal followers!

Work in progress - 4

The lizard has survived the first firing.  (Actually, several lizards have, but this is the one everyone has been following.)  The green is perhaps a little pale but it's difficult to get right.  If it is applied too thickly it will run straight down the pot in a spectacular fashion, so it's better to err on the thin side on the whole.

Applying the lustres requires even more imagination than applying glazes because here none of them remotely resemble in the raw stage what they will look like after firing.  Then there are other complications.  I may have written before about the green/purple dilemma.  Basically, green and light green lustres come out as purple and light purple - except when they don't!  What to do?  If the green went green then it would be ideal for this lizard.  But if it went purple then I'm not so sure it would do much for the light green.  It goes purple much, much more often than it goes green, so I decided not to risk it.  Instead, I went for turquoise lustre, which is fairly bluish usually, but perhaps not too far from the light green base.  I like to use gold with the green too.  Finally, wanting to make the chap really lizardy, I used a fair amount of mother-of-pearl lustre.  Below is what he looked like once decorated.

I can't be sure how this will all look, but I can be certain that it won't look anything like it's unfired state.  The kiln is firing as I type.  Tomorrow I will unpack and the vase will be finished and, with any luck, will still be in one undamaged piece.  I'll let you know.

Oatmeal

I believe in the US "oatmeal" is sometimes used in place of the word "porridge".  At least, when watching films or TV I've heard parents tell children to eat their oatmeal and seen a bowl of something looking porridgy.  Anyway, this is definitely a bowl of porridge (with demarara sugar and double cream, since you ask) but it is in a cereal bowl with the glaze/design name of "oatmeal star".  You can just see two tips of a greenish star poking up above the cream, but you can certainly see the overall colour of the pot so if I'm right about the US terminology you could say this is an oatmeal bowl of oatmeal.

As with all of my glazes, this one varies according to exact temperature, which usually means the position in the kiln as well as the temperature I have fired to.  This oatmeal star design had been for many years sold only in The Made In Stroud Shop but in the last couple of years has begun to see the wider world and this particular bowl is the first one owned by me. 

I rarely keep what I consider to be the nicest pots for myself.  I rarely add a new design to my own kitchen collection either.  This is mainly because of storage space in the kitchen and the fact that my pots are quite robust and don't tend to break unless treated badly.  The cereal/soup bowl stacks have a little more room available so when this one came out of the kiln I decided it must be mine.

What I liked was the particular range of colours.  The reduction was really good, in other words there were more than the usual scattering of speckles in the colour, the background colour itself is a soft, well, oatmeal colour, but with slight tinges of light blue where it had caught some extra heat.  Yum.  And so was the porridge.

Work in progress - 3

Remember the lizard?  Well, it's time for him to progress.  Today I'm busy glazing and decorating.  Tomorrow I'm working at Gloucestershire Arts and Crafts Centre all day but then on Tuesday I'll fire the kiln.  So here's the lizard vase, which has survived the glazing process.  This isn't a particularly risky stage but as I've said before, with unevenness on a pot, raw glazing can be just too much of a shock for the clay.  If it is too much, the pot will crack quite drastically, so you can tell when it's happened!

Deciding how to decorate this vase wasn't easy.  Usually I am pretty clear from the outset what I want a pot to look like.  In this case perhaps there were too many choices for just the one lizard vase in white clay.  What I went for was plain white/grey vase and painting the lizard green.  Other details to both lizard and perhaps vase will be added in the form of lustres later on.

The firing stage is much more hazardous.  There was a time some years ago, with my previous, much smaller kiln, that it was probably a 50/50 chance that lizard dishes came to grief.  I was often on the phone to H, a friend and jeweller, to wail "another two dead lizards" in the weeks leading up to our annual exhibition.

I do still get casualties but in this larger kiln I have a better chance of having the lizard not too close to where the flame jets out from the burner and yet close enough to that side of the kiln to get the steady highest heat to turn the glaze blue if needed.  It's fine tuning.  I had a lovely big fish dish in the kiln the other week but it didn't like the place I put it - too near the burner on the bottom shelf - and the stresses caused it to break apart in three directions.  I think four or five centimetres further away could well have been enough to prevent the break, but it's always hard to judge.

Last week I fired three lizard serving dishes and two butterfly vases, all of which survived.  I can't help thinking this isn't a good omen for this next firing, which will contain two lizard dishes, two fish dishes, two lizard vases and two butterfly vases.  It must be somebody's turn by now.

Wood

Well, do you know, I've been sitting here for about ten minutes trying to work out what I want to say.  And then eventually I realised I don't really want to say much about anything except our firewood.  This may make for a dull post, I suppose.  But it's exciting to me!

First of all, here's the final woodstack by the gate.  See how the pedestrian gate is completely obliterated (not that we use it) and the big gate not able to go all the way open.

Then around the side of the house there was more wood, sawn up but not stored in the woodshed as it was collected during the time we were actually taking dry wood from the shed to burn.  More trunks stacked up against a pile of wood sat beside the blue shed.

The weather has of course been unseasonably warm for a while but M decided at the beginning of the week that it was time to saw wood while we were still being promised warmth and no rain.  He pointed out that he can plumb the greenhouse if it rains and I agreed that getting the wood sawn would be a more than justifiable interruption to the greenhouse.

He has a sawbench but for a large part of the job decided to use the old wooden table we've got parked outside the green shed for just such outdoor work purposes.

And so he set to work.  And was sensible!  Paced himself, came in for breaks without being nagged, drank plenty, had bath every evening.  

Things didn't go entirely smoothly.  At one point quite  a chunk of a wall of stacked logs fell down.  They were sliding for a while, M said, and he was trying to get other walls of logs against them before they fell.  He was all for leaving the lot where it landed and stacking on top but I managed to get him to stop doing that after a short while on the grounds that I would do the re-stacking.  I like stacking logs.  Once I'd got that far, I continued to do the rest of the stacking.  I should say that M was still responsible for most of the stacking.

Anyway.  No more woodstack by the gate.

And none against the wall of the house, though still some left stacked against the blue shed.  Nothing like as much as there was, however.

 

And of course you're dying to see where it all is now, aren't you?

Ta-da!

I'm disappointed with this photo because it really doesn't convey how impressive the woodshed is.  The wood is stacked up to the rafters apart from the bit you see on the left right next to the shed.  This is partly because it has to be further back there to allow for the shed door to open.  If you look at the post for June 16th 2010 you can see how much we had last year.  What you're looking at last year is the view from inside the woodshed pointing towards what you see here on the right.  This time, inside the woodshed consists of wood and just a metre square standing space.

 
Isn't firewood lovely?

And - if you look carefully at the picture of the side of the house sans firewood, you'll see a well-swept, tidy path.  M set about this task all on his own.  I kid you not!  J & J if reading may need to sit down to recover from the shock of their dad not only finishing a task completely but voluntarily wanting to tidy up at the end.  I know I do.

A little bit of alchemy - part 2

The science of glazes is, well, very scientific.  Many years ago I attended a course on glazing with Mike Bailey as a guest tutor.  Mike used to be one of the potters at Bath Potters Supplies, where potters from surrounding counties go not only for materials and equipment but for valuable advice.  Mike was always the one to ask about glazes.  As a tutor he was informative, thorough, inspiring and enthusiastic not only about what he was telling us but about what we were asking him.

As I have mentioned before, much of what I know about potting I have learned from Douglas Phillips (on whose glazing course Mike was the visiting tutor) and because he uses the once-fire or raw glaze method, so do I.  This means that instead of firing pots first so that they are 'cooked', (called 'biscuit' firing and the pots are then biscuit ware) before glazing and then re-firing to a higher temperature, I glaze the bone-dry pots and then fire once.  This saves fuel, naturally, and time.  Why would one do any different? Well, there are disadvantages to raw glazing.  The glazes are often very different from other glazes because they need to contain a certain percentage of clay in order for the glaze to 'fit' the pots.  When glazing unfired pots, any unevenness in the pot can create a stress when the water from the glaze is quickly absorbed into the pot.  You can easily imagine that in a thin section the clay becomes saturated (and therefore swells) while in a thicker section it does so much less.  So you can get pots cracking when you glaze them because of this.  Or when you fire them.

Then, there's the glaze recipes themselves.  The best way I can think of to explain this to those who know nothing is to liken a glaze recipe to a cake recipe.

You want to make a cake.  You have in mind a sponge.  You know roughly the proportions of fat, sugar, eggs and flour.  If that were a glaze recipe, though, then this classification by ingredient would be very primitive.  No, what you are required to judge is the correctly proportions (correct, mind you, not rough) of protein, fat, carbohydrate, vitamins, minerals, water and fibre.

So, you find out how much fat there is in an egg.  Add that to the fat in the butter.  7 grams out.  Use a little less butter.  But butter contains a little protein and now you have disrupted the exact amount of protein you need.  Reduce the eggs by one and now you have far too little protein.  Oh well, let's make it into a walnut sponge.  Walnuts have protein in.  Yes, but they also have fat, which you had too much of in the first place.  Somewhere here is a balance of the number of walnuts and eggs and fat and then you can adjust the quantities of sugar and flour so that the proportions are right.  You are probably getting the idea now :)  Anyway, Mike Bailey taught us how to calculate these properties of the glaze using triaxial graphs.  It involved a lot of maths and I found it fascinating and hugely enjoyable.  Now I look at it all and I'm aware of two things - a) I've forgotten a lot of it through disuse because of lack of time, and b) I'm still fascinated with this kind of process.  You'll have gathered from previous posts that lack of time generally wins hereabouts.

Your regular potter, though, doesn't usually bother with all of this.  There are glaze recipe books.  Other people have done the science and then used the glazes and proved their worth, just as in cooking.  If you're no cook, you can buy premixed glaze ingredients where you just add water, just like packs of scone mix or sponge mix.  There's room for all of this in the wonderful world of pottery.

If you're a raw glazer, though, you are a specialist.  There are very few recipe books for raw glazes.  In fact, I don't actually know of any.  You will, though, find glazes in general books which either state that they can be used for raw glazes or look promising because of what you already know you need to include.  You can try these.  Most of them will not work for raw glazing.  Or, you can rely on the generosity of other potters to pass on their recipes.

I use two recipes dictated to us on courses at Ridge Pottery year after year.  The other two glazes I have adapted from one of Douglas' original glazes by playing around with the triaxial graph method, having read around the topic of the sort of colours I was trying to produce.

Only four glazes?  But we've seen many more than four colours on your pots!

Well spotted.  You have indeed.  And that's the alchemy.  Remember all those factors in the firing process.  Well, add that to four glazes combined with two different clays, a couple of coloured slips and some decorating glazes and you get the picture.

I expect you're a bit bored with all this technical stuff now.  Me, I could go on for ages.  Writing about things in this way gets me back in touch with aspects of the work that I sometimes neglect.  I'll spare your feelings, though, and stop here.  You've seen the photo at the top of this post.  You may remember there was a photo of some glazed pots in the previous alchemy post.  Well, they were the same pots.  Just to illustrate that what you see before the pots are fired often bears little resemblance to what they look like afterwards, here are the two pictures together.

Magic, isn't it?