What's one of my favorite things to do on a beautiful day? Raku with my friend and potter extraordinaire, Diane Heart.
Two other potters joined us today and we had a splendid time loading and unloading kilns, getting smoke in our eyes and noses and scrubbing down our finished pots and tiles.
Tiles are interesting to Raku because they want to bend and crack. Of course this isn't anything I want them to do so right away there's a nice little conflict going on. I have to sort of go to the Zen place with this and since this is Raku, that's a pretty good place to be.
These are some of my tiles drying after they've been glazed. I use a white low fire clay and the Raku glazes I used today are copper sand and copper penny with a touch of Higby blue here and there for accent.
I was hoping for black to happen and it did to some degree but on others barely at all. I also had quite a bit of cracking today, more than usual, which was sort of not fun, if you know what I mean.
These 4" tiles will be used in wall pieces put together sort of like tile collages.
Here's the kiln firing its first load and the barrels all stocked with sawdust and newspaper ready for their first load.
Here's me with a face full of smoke as I prepare to put a tile into a barrel full of paper that will light as soon as it touches.
There it goes!!! A cover was put on very quickly after this shot.
After cooling awhile the pots and tiles get put in cool water which shocks them, causes the glazes to really stand up and take notice and then they get scrubbed up a bit to polish them off.
Part of all our potter meetings is a nice pot luck spread and today's was no different. We all had brought garden goodies and Diane's lovely pottery made it all look wonderful.
By the end of the day we all had lots of cool pots and tiles. Even the broken ones were pretty cool in their own ways.
A great way to spend a day, especially if you're a potter!
You can see more Raku shots here on my Flickr site.