A Raku Saturday

The small bowl is mine.... bright orange-red and VERY hot- about 1800 degrees ready to travel to a bucket with newspaper in it. It was a raku day and before the bowl went into the kiln I put glaze on it.

Let me back up first and show you more pics of the process.

Spent most of Saturday at the studio. It was a Raku kinda day. First, I put glaze on one raku piece.

I used a combination of these glazes... (hardly overlapped); the design on the inside middle is superstition raku glaze and the rest is in blue green or turquoise raku glaze.

With raku one paints the glaze on instead of dipping it.

Then they were placed into the raku kiln.And they got very, very warm! Here's a peek of the pieces in the kiln as the pots were heating up. After the kiln reached 1800 degrees the kiln was opened and I used metal tongs to take the bowl to the metal bucket. Even waiting a few seconds turned all the pieces that were once red into various colors... I had heard that was a good thing, so I waited.

That all happened pretty quickly. Once the bowl touched the newspaper which surrounded the edges of the bucket, the newspaper caught fire. The bowl sat on a brick as it cooled with the lid on the bucket.

You can barely see the bowl in there---
To help it cool, I sprayed it with a bit of water. Here are the colors I got.

Not the best pic. I think I didn't put enough glaze on it; so I decided to let it fully cool and then apply some more glaze and re-fire it. I'll have to take a picture of the re-fired bowl... it looks much better now. More vivid colors. Will post that later.

Here's a better pic of it, looking very small next to John and Joe's pots. We also tried a second type of raku- I think it's still called raku. First, I sprayed a copper wash on another bowl. Spraying it helps it to be applied evenly. Then it was fired in the raku kiln just like the other bowl. Then, after it was removed, alcohol was sprayed onto it. Here's John doing that to his pot, which of course, immediately caught on fire. WE don't understand how this all happens yet (as this was our first try at this), but as you can see, some color came. The pot was on a wheel and was rotated too as the alcohol was sprayed on it. It was a great kodak moment too. Then the pot was put in sawdust and turned and turned until it cooled. When I did this, I realized one of my gloves had a small hole and my thumb was burned a little. :(

John looked like he really knew what he was doing.

Here's my bowl getting sprayed with alcohol, along with Becky's two pieces. It was hard to know just how long to spray alcohol onto it before it's time to put it into the bucket full of sawdust and turn it around. So, we just did what we thought was good. Some color on my bowl in this pic below... Here is my bowl again in the bucket.
This is a bit blurry, but this is the pot face down in the sawdust. I haven't taken pics yet of the two finished raku pieces, but will post them tomorrow. Sorry! You can also find more about this type of firing at Bruce Odell's website here.

Meanwhile, a bunch of my slipware came out of the electric kiln. Will post about them tomorrow... I'm so happy with how they turned out!