Historical artifacts

Got a nice email recently from Longview, WA, from a woman who attended the University of Oregon, oh two decades ago. Eva sent me a picture of one of her treasures from those days.

It's an incense dragon, and it's an old one. Copper red head over a temmoku body, and that's the Craft Center glaze from a Craft Center firing.

The big gas kiln at Club Mud holds heat much longer than the kiln at the EMU, so iron glazes tend not to have much black. Iron crystallizes during a long, slow cool-down, so a brown/black iron glaze, like a temmoku, comes out mostly brown, instead of black breaking brown on the edges. So this little feller dates back to sometime before 1998, when I moved over to Club Mud.

She says it's been years since she's been in a place where she could burn incense--smoke alarms are everywhere--but still likes his friendly presence in her space. It lives in the bathroom these days, next to a battery-powered candle (again, because smoke alarm). Seems it now has a new function.

I have a lot of people--who apparently can't read signage--ask if the nose-breathing dragons are tooth brush holders. Good to know that the mouthies can also take up the challenge.

Light my fire

In the spirit of "before and after," here's a couple of short video clips. First right after I lit the burners, at the start of the firing; the second, as I wait for the last cones to go down. Cone 8 is completely down, cone 9 nearly. Still need the third cone, 10, to drop. (The last cone is a guard cone, to let me know if I've gone too far. At cone 11, the pictures start sliding off the sides of my pots.)



No song this time, just the music of the fire itself.

Wait, what?

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