Slips and pate

If you love traditional Korean pottery, or if you just love beautifully made, classical porcelain, make a cup of tea and sit down and watch this video. Yi dynasty Korean pots are my favorites and so many of these pots from this 9th generation Korean potter are so much like those pots from the forms and down to the great brushwork.

Got in the studio yesterday to weigh out the last black slip tests, and finish off a few tests tiles I made the day before. My order arrived with the last black Mason stain ,so I have three different black slips batched and on one flat tile.

I poured the slips try to get an idea of how thick they should be. All three were different pouring  - first one too thin, second maybe a bit thin and the last one too thick. I tried to make the last one heavy cream consistency, but obviously heavy cream is thinner than that! 

I went through a couple more slip books that  arrived the other day, and the John Pollex book had a good  hint  about testing slips - when trailed, you should be able to get a long smooth, continuous line. So I'll try that next, after the thin one settle and I can pour off some of the water.

In the 80's I did a technique of applying thickish white slip on plates and platters and then removing some of it with foam stamp designs. It worked very well on shinos and rutile glazes Sometimes I just dipped the stamps in slip and applied them to the pots. I'll have to try that direct stamping on the earthenware, since I still have all those stamps. If it works it would be a simple way to get an over all pattern and certainly less time consuming than sgrafitto. Other than that, my only other slip experiences have been with flashing slips which are applied very, very thin. So I'll have to play with these slips a bit more to find out the right dipping an pouring consistency.   

Because of the impending bad weather, we decided to have Jim's birthday dinner in Ashland two days early. It was a great dinner and we even have a little bit of leftovers, including a couple of the beignets for tonight. Since there isn't much, I decided to make a couple of batches of pate for Jim's birthday at home tomorrow and we'll have a little bit of that as an appetizer tonight.

I spent all morning and into the afternoon making those two batches of the pate. It's very time consuming but well worth the trouble; and best part is, I have plenty leftover for the freezer - a large one to bring to our sons for Thanksgiving and a couple of smaller ones for us besides what we'll have tonight and tomorrow.

The parts for my little Cone 10 test kiln arrived and the teeny tiny allen wrench I need to repair it is missing. I had it taped to the cover of the kiln sitter manual and it seems to have gone walkies. :-( So, as soon as I order some outdoor furniture covers,  I'm off to the hardware store, with the part in hand to see if they have, what must be the smallest allen wrench made!