Doom scrolling

I woke up in a sweat at 4 am Wednesday. Four years ago, I'd gone to bed feeling confident that the presidential election was on track; Hilary was leading. No one took Trump seriously. When I woke early the next day, I checked the news on my tablet.

You know what happened next.

This year, I didn't want to get my hopes up; didn't want to break my heart again. The polls were optimistic, but then, they had been four years past. I checked online on election day to be sure Denise's and my votes had been received (they had), then busied myself in the studio, glazing. Stayed away from the news entirely, reading myself to sleep with one of my comfort reads, Martha Wells' Murderbot Diaries books, specifically Network Effect. (Yes, the irony of reading about a security android who compulsively views entertainment media to cope with the real world did not escape me.) 

Then the cat woke me up at 4 am, and I couldn't get back to sleep.

I tossed a few times, turned several more. Finally, I grabbed the tablet and paged to NPR.org. Biden was leading. I managed to fall asleep again.

Since then, I've been glazing all week, and looking at the news at most once a day. Finally finished everything this afternoon, read the latest on NPR. 

And I can breathe again.

This sucks

A recent Ceramics Monthly suggestions column featured what looked like a neat trick: Dipping pots in glaze using a suction cup.

Specifically, a high-pressure dealie used by auto body shops to pop out dents on car fenders. This sounded ideal for me, specifically for cookie jars. The medium and large size are too big and heavy to dip in the glaze bucket using tongs (the small ones are even right on the edge of too heavy to wrestle out when they're filled with glaze). So I pour glaze into the pot, swirl around, pour out.

Then I need to dip the outside somehow. (The other option, putting it up on some sort of riser in a pan and pouring glaze over it has never given an even, paintable coat.) I can either grab onto the base, dip in mouth first (trapped air keeps from letting more glaze inside), or grab by the rim and dip foot first into the bucket. Either way, I wind up with a 1-2 inch strip that needs to be dipped later (or big finger-marks that need touch-up). There's glaze overlaps and thin spots, and it's just not good.

But this looked like it might work, allowing me to dip the whole jar in mouth-first, holding on by suction to the waxed base. Harbor Freight had two different sizes, 2.5 and 4.5-inch diameters, for $2.99 and $3.99 respectively. At that price, it was worth a shot.

The 4.5-inch cup was too large, but the 2.5-inch seemed a strong contender. (Fortunately, I'd kept the receipt.)

Results were mixed. I had two small and two medium cookie jars. Suction didn't work at all on bare bisque, of course, too porous. With liquid wax resist to seal up the base, it held a little better. Moistening the rubber before using was better yet. I was able to dip all four jars, but two--one each size--let go coming out of the bucket, and I had to grab them and fix glaze scrapes later.

I'm still optimistic. I dipped another pot in hot paraffin, applied the suction cup. It made a really tight seal. I think the liquid wax coat is just too thin to make a proper smooth surface to seal.

The remains of the glaze

More pots from the latest glazing cycle, loading into the kiln Sunday. It's been a busy week at Club Mud, everybody jockeying for space as we prepare for the holiday season. I'd a bunch of dinner plate orders, from three different customers; here's a representative sample.


I once again took on a new pattern: a Northern Saw-Whet Owl, aka the second cutest damn thing in feathers. (I'm sorry, a potoo will always be first.) She wants a tall mug. Being me, I did three, plus a dessert plate, and wound up painting one on a glaze test as well.

The glaze test was because we'd gotten a donation of raw materials from a closing studio. This happens fairly frequently, and our supplies person usually just dumps them into the appropriate bin or bucket. This time, though, she was a little suspicious.

The bag in question was marked "Talc," fifty pounds of fine white powder. The problem is, the talc we usually source from Georgies is a dark grey. It could be fine, different deposit, same composition; but once, it... wasn't.

We'd gotten a bag of white talc from another donor, dumped it in the bin, and I mixed up a 7000-gram batch of my base white glaze. Used it on half of the pots in my next firing, all of which came out brown and matte, rather than cream/white gloss.

As far as we could tell, the material was whiting--calcium carbonate--rather than talc--a magnesium silicate. I had to trash a bunch of pots, was about to throw away the glaze, but Jon though he could use it, so I gave it to him. But you can see why I'm leery of off-color talc.

So I mixed up a 100-gram batch to test. The only thing I had to try it on was a bisqued wall-art tile, and it seemed a shame to leave it undecorated.