Splitting Thursday

The rain held off for around 12 hours - just long enough to get some wood preparation done. Andy came over + we spent the day sawing, carting and splitting waterlogged wood.

We are doing a joint firing next up and making it a longer one (three days and two nights) so need much more wood. Half of this is Andy's and it comes with a fantastic selection of mushrooms. Andy seemed to know which the edible ones were (some looked very much like oyster mushrooms) but we didn't risk it.

This is the nightshift stack + is finished. we have about half of the other wood done and piled up in the dry (no nice neat images to show you I'm afraid - not my style). Next week should see it all prepared and we can just hope for a dry spell to stop the mushroom taking over.

New exciting rocks

The grinding is all done and I have photographed all the successful pieces from my last wood firing. Having survived a truly tenacious cold that struck me down during the Oxford Fair, I have been able to start going through the work - checking codes and assessing what worked and where in the kiln.

This is glazed with one of the new rocks I tried out. It is a pink microgranite from Cumbria. I have been using a pink granite with a very coarse crystal structure from the same area, which gives very stiff glazes that can give a stunning soft chun blue in the wood kiln. From the geology reports I have read I was expecting this small crystal granite to behave in the same way but it is actually very different. It's much more fluid and gives a pale green rather than grey/blue. This piece was in a cooler spot in the kiln with thickly applied glaze and a good hit of ash during the firing.