making and breaking...

 

Another good studio day.... todays plan was to make some more vessels in the form of the bunny bowl which you may remember back when i was trying those lazer decals, it really is my favourite piece from the bunch and kept it for my kitchen collection.. I now have some screens ready to do some printing directly onto the work and will be happy to see bunny again in black and white..

 and just because i had some time up my sleeve after throwing this afternoon i thought i'll get a lil destructive with my kiln!! I always intended to replace the hot face and since the kiln had been struggling to get to temp. I discussed it with combustion engineer extraordinaire keith, we decided that the heat loss from the kiln needed addressing and try replacing the hotface in the kiln...

so i started to peel away the top layer and some of it just fell off after removing the buttons and some of it seemed fused together so out with the scraper!!

It is quite amazing peeling away the layers of someone elses work revealing that some cement and possibly sodium silicate had been used to hold the layers together..quite a bit of patching also, I'm removing all of the old buttons now and replacing with my small ones.. Also considering right now if i should redo the whole thing as the inside layers are all over the place and none of the layers wrap around they meet in the corners and have shrunk away after many firings, I would have overlapped the layers to avoid this..

I could of course leave the inside layers and do a new hot face and also do an outer layer to the kiln itself, any thoughts anyone?? Also interesting the under layer has a blue tinge which could be from the metals burnt off from the glazes...hmmmm