Opening a glaze kiln is in my opinion better than christmas morning...or can be. Unfortunately this morning I may have preferred christmas to opening the kiln to find bowls that pin holed (when the glaze bubbled it didn't quite re melt and therefore left little holes in the glaze), glaze that dripped off leaving the pot exposed, and glaze that ran down and stuck to the shelf so that when lifted the bottom pops off. When I arrived at school the kiln was still to hot to open, and because most of my focus this week is glazing I decided to return to a project I started two weeks ago. The clay tree started out as something to mess around with but today I got really excited about it. I also spent my day with Sara Hensel who is doing basketry and after her suggestion made a little owl that goes in a hole in the tree. Heres what the tree and owl look like:

I'm crossing my fingers that it somehow comes out of the kiln in one piece, but it seems fairly doubtful. After finishing my tree the kiln was cool enough (I thought) so unload, so I opened it and found what I described above. It turns out the kiln was not quite cool enough because I spent the rest of the day listening to the tinging of glaze cracking. Literally, when I left at 4:00 pm I was still being serenaded by tings...I have no idea how that is possible. Although my first batch of glazing wasn't entirely successful, I learned from it and am optimistic about the tests I put into the kiln this afternoon. The problem with pin holing is that the glaze didn't melt at a low enough temperature. Because my original test of the same glaze did not have pin holing I am hoping that I somehow messed up when mixing the larger batch, so to test I mixed up a new test that I will get out tomorrow. While mixing that glaze I also made more turquoise and tested a new bluish purple glaze. After mixing glazes I painted my swallow nests with iron oxide (black not red) mixed with water which will leave them looking matt black. This is a technique that Hsin-Yi Huang, an artist at Thurman Street Studios uses. Here is Hsin-Yi's website if you want to see some of her work: http://www.hsinyihuang.com/. At the end of today I loaded the swallow nests and lots of glaze tests (some of which also on the red clay body) into the kiln so that they will be out tomorrow and I can glaze as much as possible before leaving for an ornithology trip on Friday. The other major thing I did today was that Sara and I talked to Sue and decided on a place in the library to have our art show. We are hoping to set up Wednesday and have an opening from 5-6 pm. Tomorrow we're working on invitations and nailing down the final details.