Birdhouses into the kiln
Oops, no more time to mix glazes, scratch all the info about glazes I said earlier…
but I did find & buy a cheap-ish glaze set from Mayco meant to show off their newest, prettiest glazes, and mostly all the colors fit into the color schemes I could think of for the birdhouses.
The reason I ran out of time, by the way, is because of this:
It’s actually worse than it looks—each piece crumbled into more pieces as I handled them, as if they were never glaze fired at all. Normally when I fire things a second time w/ glaze to 06, they don’t break like that, so I don’t think the temperature was a problem.
There’s 4 things that might have made this happen, I think;
Some sort of pressure from all the tiny holes made microcracks all within the pieces (make bigger holes instead)
Glaze was dysfunctional (house glaze) and shrunk the clay to a point it created cracks (glaze the outside only)
Used the wrong clay for a low temperature (fire to cone 6)
Kiln spirits decided to bestow bad karma upon me (pray harder)
So I decided to do all of the above hypothetical solutions so whatever problem it actually was is ruled out by elimination.
While thinking about that, I made a sprig mold w/ real black&raspberries, a Danish coin, and my old house key to use as decors—pretty but useless things to collect (as a bower bird does), and used it over & over to make as many as I can, + the snail mold. The berries (cut in half) sort of floated in the plaster as I poured it (I underestimated the floatability of these objects) so I had to push it down before it cured, and then cut out whatever plaster gets in the way. All this fudging of the process made it so I couldn’t really use it as a sprig mold, aside from the coin & key, but I could still press clay into the mold, gut out the inside, and stick them together.
And this is the final step before putting them in the kiln & sewing them all together. I have everything organized in the picture by color, but since I don’t really know what the colors really look like (except the lucky cats I sampled), I think I’ll have to move some colors around, and hopefully I have enough things to adjust.
