Horse hair raku

Yesterday was a donkey work day - cleaning studio floor and other messy cleanup, as well as a good amount of garden time. The humidity was fierce. It was like working in a sauna, so the gardening time was done in bits and pieces with rest time in between. Fortunately dinner was leftover lasagna, so I didn't have to spend a lot of time in the kitchen.

I had a very nice early afternoon visit with a fellow potter, Lisa Skeen, who went way out of her way to bring me some tail horse hair to play around with some horsetail raku. Lisa shared that she doesn't use terra sig, but instead has found that using a teflon rib to burnish the pot is a good substitute. I was able to track the rib down at Sheffield Pottery. It's an expensive little tool - $22, but free shipping. Have no idea why a rib is that expensive but if it can do the job when no other will, I guess it's worth it. I've got some terra sig on hand that I made and tested in soda several months ago, so I'll do a side by side test of both. Horse hair raku will be a good fall project. By then I'll have all this cone 6 testing out of the way and have enough pots made for a fall soda firing.

I'm planning an early start in the studio this morning. First I have to get the test tiles out of the bisque kiln, then start weighing, mixing and applying cone 6 glaze tests. It's going to be an all day, probably longer, job just to get this first select group of recipes that Steve Hill uses in his multiple spraying technqiue, along with some of my own revisiosn, done. These will be fired in my tiny test kiln using a manual fire down. The rest of the cone 6 glaze tests along with a few test pots will be done down the line in the bigger electric kilnk where I can program the firing schedule. Some of the glazes Steven is using are cone 10 glazes, and I've spent a lot of time the past several days running some of them through my glaze software. Some look like they'll work in the cone 6 range and others may be iffy, so before I start spending a lot of time spraying pots with these glazes I want to make sure they're going to work at cone 6.