Mother F*$%er, I'm Ill

On Monday I loaded the gas kiln and an electric kiln.  I fixed up my basin and pitcher with bisque-fix.  I'm hoping it won't un-fix in the gas kiln.  I would consider trying out some cone 6 glazes on it, but I feel bad bumming them off people since we don't have any class cone 6.  On Wednesday I threw a lot, but alas, I was not one with clay.  I prefer to blame the clay, though.  It was way too wet.  It went better once I attained some stiffer clay.  I managed to throw four decent pieces for my last combination vessel, three of which I actually used.  It seems that my vessel is lopsided, which is really bothering me.  I think I would like the form if not for that.  I did not notice any of the individual pieces of it being off, but I guess they were.  I want to make a new one in the same shape so I will be happy with it.  I hate turning in pieces I'm not happy with.  I tested some methods of putting imagery on clay with it.  Today I made two screens for printing on clay.  I need to tweak the method I used for printing on the round, wet vessel.  I think if my screen and image were smaller, and my glaze was thicker it would work nicely.  I think I like the leaves I did on the porcelain cups.  Today I also loaded another bisque kiln so a few more of my pieces would be fired for my BFA crit on Monday.  I got a few more bowls out of the gas kiln today.  I'm pretty happy with them.  I really like all my bowls.  One of them stuck to the patty.  I need to grind it, which I'm not too excited about.  I hate the way the grinder makes the glaze look.  I have been reading a lot more about ways to put imagery on clay.  I am very interested in one process I found in which you make your own decals.  I need to procure some cone 6 glaze for that.  You can fire a piece to cone 6, then apply your decal and fire it to cone 04.  It seems that the decals will not stick to cone 10 glazes.  There was a lot of technical aspects to this that I need to ask Brian about.  I am going to do that this summer.  I also want to play around with some underglaze pencils, perhaps.  This guy at work did some awesome drawings on glass with underglaze pencils.

Today we had "The Illest show the Spacelab has ever seen."  That was fun.  Here are some photos from that show.  Unfortunately the camera seems to have deleted the pictures of my prints and David Jones', which I am a big fan of.  I guess I will try to hit up the Spacelab photo album for those.