Here are the snapshots of the tea bowls as they came out of the kiln on Tuesday. They still need some cleaning up and possibly a few will be re-fired. Since I took these photos with my phone, there’s a bit of distortion of the shapes; the forms all look better in person, but I wanted to get a profile of the organic top edge of the cups.
Because I was short on time and energy, I made a bunch of tea bowls for this kiln - fast, unfussy, and of a size that I was likely to get most into the kiln. I plan to make some larger, more involved pieces for our second firing next month.
Clays are Laguna’s B-Mix for wood and Rocky Mountain’s CM-1. B-Mix is white clay that flashes orange in wood; CM-1 is a red clay that turns warm brown. Additionally, I used clay slip texture on the tea bows, which “catches” ash in the kiln and produces a rich surface. The bowls are all glazed with Dresang shino as a liner, and then splashed on the exterior of the bowls. I also splashed the exteriors with an Oribe glaze, but it was too thin and there’s very little color from it. You can see a bit of red on some of the cups; that’s the Oribe’s copper content in a reduction atmosphere. It also means that the atmosphere of the kiln trended toward reduction.
I’m pretty happy overall; the clay colors are great, and the shapes and textures are nice in the hand. I would have liked more Oribe action, but I’ll increase the thickness of my Oribe glaze and will have better results. There are a few that are kind of crusty and need some finishing and one really nice one has kiln debris (pieces of someone else’s pot) stuck inside of it. <sighs> We’ll see what they look like after I get to work on them.
Once they’re cleaned up, they will be available for sale. I generally charge $29 for tea bowls (chawan or yunomi), but with the high “firing cost” (that is, the cost of the class), I’m likely putting $35 on each of these. They will be available at the Arvada Pop-Up Holiday Market, at ACG Guild’s Holiday Sale at ACC, and at the BCFM Winter Market in Longmont.