Day 26... Surprising developments



The special project did not explode in the kiln! Ok, so after 30 years of runing kilns, I know enough to avoid explosions, but with pottery, you just never know.  Once, I had a load of pots, over $1000 worth of yellow ware, and the tiny cone bar in my sitter was too close to the tube assembly and when the cone started to melt it attached itself to the assembly resulting in the switch not flipping off. Well, the kiln was on way too long, you can tell by the color of the heat after a while. You know that it is taking too long to fire, so you check the peephole and say... "Oh my God!", (and that is a prayer),  its overfiring!  There is nothing you can do except shut off the kiln, pray and wait another 8 hours or so to see what the damage is.





In this instance, the clay color had darkened to a lovely Guilden's mustard brown with little iron flecks. I use a clear glaze on my yellow ware and it is applied unusually thin, so none of the glaze ran down and stuck the pot to the kiln shelves. (Thank you God), but in over firing, my mocha tobacco tea designs, the pretty feathering patterns, the fine cobalt lines start to disappear and the white clay background melts into the pot. What you get is not Yellow ware, but some mutant form of pottery that would be ok in the art world of pots, but not ok in the authentic reproduction world of true yellow ware.

I threw most of them in the garbage can. Therapists say it is good to throw things when you are holding inner anger and need to get it out. I took a deep sigh, and threw each one into a metal trash can. The shattering and thuds were somehow satisfying and I went over to the wheel and started replacing the ones in the garbage can by making new ones.



My frog houses... two upset to take photos of theirs.

 Recently, I over fired in the same way, my 2nd time in 30 years, a load of kids pots. I especially hate ruining students pottery. Twenty two kids had made lovely frog houses. We coiled clay on the outside of upturned bowls, added house decorations, windows, doors, chimneys, vines, and 21 grammar school children made frog sculptures on top of their houses. I was impressed. Children are so uninhibited when it comes to art.  You show them what to do and let them go with it. Each frog house was an individual masterpiece!  Here is a photo of mine, that I had previously fired correctly. They were to be a lovely shade of bright green as kids like bright colors. The over firing caused the glaze to run down the pots onto the shelves and darken the glaze to olive green. I had to chip them off with a hammer and chisel and then spent hours filing down sharp edges. Glaze is just a coating of glass, so I had to be careful to get sharp fragments off or the children would cut their fingers.  Six broke. I glued 4 back together. Two had stilts stuck to the bottoms permanently. Two were in small fragments.

I was so disappointed. I wrapped them all up and returned them to the school. I anxiously awaited the children and got them together to tell them what happened. I had brought two coupons for the students whose pottery could not be fixed, "Is it mine?" Hunter asked. "Did mine break?" asked Rachel. When the two were notified, the little boy said. "Cool."

Kids are so resilient and take the outcome of there pottery projects in stride. Just like me they are excited to see how it turned out or like me, they give a sigh and say, "Well, that's not what I expected.". 

Pottery is like that. You make something and it looks one way, then you have to glaze it and you are never sure how it will turn out. Most of the time you are pleasantly surprised... but you just never know.

Fixing an old house is like that.  When I first moved back here at age 24, my kitchen was still a 1960s kitchen. My parents had remodeled it to the times. The cast iron sink was replaced with a new metal York sink with overhead cupboard. Lots of drawers and shelves, something my mom had lived without for 30 years. They put white linoleum with green and brown speckles on the floor. In 1960, linoleum came in sheets about 6 foot wide, so there was a metal strip down the center of the 15x12 kitchen to hold two pieces of linoleum together.  My dad put it directly on top of the floorboards, so by 1978, the linoleum had wear spots corresponding to the uneven edges of the floor.  The woodwork was painted white, I counted 15 layers of paint, Walls had a once white speckled paper, but my dad was a smoker so it looked a little... smoky.  As soon as I moved back I removed the linoleum. My mom said I will get slivers from the wood boards. This was true for a while.

The boards are not original. Sometime around 1900, someone removed the 7 foot fireplace that stood out into the kitchen. The kitchen took up half the downstairs. The base of the chimney and the hearth stone where once inside the room. When they removed the chimney and fireplace, they covered the old wide oak planks with diagonal four inch tongue and groove pine planks. They nailed them in with many, many three inch nails.  I experimented taking off a couple in the corner and also where the hearth had been. If I remove the diagonal planks there will be many nail holes to fill in. But also, what is under the hearth and chimney is a mystery that I have hesitated to find out. I have been here 30 years and the diagonal floor is still there. Someday... I will remove it, but not today.

A good surprise was under the white 4"verticle wainscoting boards that ran around the base of the kitchen. Also put on with many large nails, were two 15 inch horizontal planks that ran along each wall. One small section has a 16" x 28" plank. If anyone knows about our trees today, planks do not come this wide. These came from massive oak trees.  You may look around all our woods today and think, "These are old trees", but not so.  Most of our old growth, primeval trees were cut down by 1900 to use for houses, barns, fences and firewood. The planked walls, newly uncovered, where still coated with a blue and then grey milk based paint. 

I scraped the woodwork and painted it all a sage green. It is on the east, south and west end of the house and is perfect for light. with four large drafty windows, the kitchen is filled with warm light.  I replaced the metal York sink and cupboard, with the 1930 cast iron sink, (my family does not throw things out, the cast iron sink my grampa had replaced the stone sink with in 1930 was in the cellar. The legs are still there.. I couldn't throw them out either!) This time the sink is back without the legs. A friend made a wood cupboard underneath and an old wood cupboard hangs above the cast iron.


The Kitchen 2010...still not done...
with Emily and Rusty dog


The ceiling. Sadly, my dad had knocked down the plaster ceiling, which from photos  I have, does not look too bad. But they wanted a modern house and put up white cardboard squares that had also turned dingy and ugly. Down they came one day with bushels of mouse droppings, nests, fibers, wood shavings and spiders. The exposed beams were not meant to be exposed. They are cross cut. 2 1/2" by 6 1/2" rough beams. The sub flooring above was also rough cut, so I dealt with falling splitters of old wood for the next 10 years while I debated what to do with it. 

The beams were unevenly spaced and rough cut. I could pay an exorbitant amount or get This Old House TV show to re lath and re plaster it like it should be. I could put up plaster board, but that would be uneven. I could put up wood strips and place plaster board between each row of beams. But they would be so irregular.  Finally, I saw a magazine with a planked 1800s ceiling. That was it. I could even do this myself. So now, I have white, five inch planks that look like they were always there. They are tongue and groove keep out the wood chips, mice and dust and I think it looks great.

But there are still wide oak planks hiding under the diagonal floor boards waiting to be exposed. Like a load of pots that you put in the kiln, will I be pleasantly surprised to open it all up or not?

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