Saturday, August 14, 2010

Biscuit

14 hours, 8 minutes. That's how long it took to fire my first bisque load in the kiln. It took about that long again to cool off enough for me to open it up.
With great apprehension, I opened her up, and here's what I saw.
Success! My pots were bisqued, and none of them exploded. I was so excited I forgot to take pictures of all the shelves before I unloaded them all. I did get a shot of the last level.
I set them all on metal shelves to await glazing.
I have a lot of wall pots, mugs, and my kiln goddess.
I also have some test tiles (in the bowl on the left), and a bunch of pumpkins and pieces of pie (in the other bowl - I'll explain about the pie later).
I also have some stamps and molds I made.
Here's the set up after I unloaded, and before I organized and cleaned up.
I spent the rest of the day making glazes. Seriously. The rest of the day. It took me more than an hour (and more than 2 hours for two of them) for each glaze to add the water and get it through the sieve. So now that I am through the first bisque, I can move on to worrying about whether I mixed the glaze properly, whether it will stay on the pots, whether the kiln will fire the glaze well...

2 comments:

p said...

i FEEL the excitement!!!!!
so cool tracy, thanks for sharing your world, LOVE IT!

Vicki Wenderlich said...

Ah yes, every kiln load without exploding or cracking is a good one! Congrats... and good luck with the rest of the worries!