Another kiln harvest

A stoneware vase, glazed with Blue Surf over tenmoku, fired to Cone 8.

I am very pleased with how this came out of the kiln this morning. It’s another in the line of Blue Surf over tenmoku pots. This time, I used a resist to keep the tenmoku off of some areas, then brushed two coats of Blue Surf on top. I love how complex the variations in the surface are.

The next piece is poured pale blue glaze over tenmoku.

The final vase out of the firing today had 3 glazes: tenmoku with a resist, then blue surf, then tiger’s eye, another brush on glaze. It is quite dark and I had a lot of trouble photographing it. This is the best I could do. Apologies for the reflection!

Latest Kiln Load

Here are the results of the latest kiln firing, mid October 2022. The wares were fired to Cone 8 in my electric kiln.

Two of the cups and a small, vertical-edged, bowl were made of black porcelain with a clear glaze. It’s interesting how the result often has a blue tinge.

Several of the pieces were glazed with brushed on Mayco Tiger’s Eye, which is a lovely. Here, it is mostly thin and uneven, which gives an aged effect.

I would describe the jug as ‘dropped and extensively altered’. It was an interesting experiment.

The vase is glazed with tenmoku with celadon chun poured over.

The tile was my first experiment in sgraffito.

The final piece has an Amaco brush on celadon glaze called Aqua. I made the pattern of small indentations using the plastic spoon which came with our smart cooker. The kitchen is a fertile ground for hunting texturing tools!

2/2/22 – Some Pleasing Numeric Patterns

I often spot dates and times which have unusual regularities. I realised earlier this year that the 2nd of February – 2/2/22 – would have some nice ones. These kind of date patterns are almost always contingent on the order in which day, month and year are written in the date format. I associate D/M/Y with the UK and Europe, and M/D/Y with the US, but the picture is more complicated than that – see this Wikipedia article for details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_format_by_country

Here are a few which I find pleasing:

2/2/22

Works for both MDY and DMY date formats.

How about adding a time?

  • 2:22 2/2/22
  • 22:22 2/2/22 – very nice
  • 22:22:22 2/2/22 – adding seconds takes it to the next level

2/22/22 MDY (DMY: 22/2/22)

Without leading zeros, this one has variants for DMY and MDY date formats. We can also add a time as before:

  • 22:22:22 2/22/22
  • 2:22:22 2/22/22

22/02/2022

I really like the mirror symmetry, though, the symmetry is broken in MDY format. Since 2022 isn’t a palindrome, just adding a time doesn’t work – unless you also specify seconds

  • 22/02/2022 02:20:22 – huge!

Now, if only this could have all happened on a ‘2sday’ instead of a Wednesday!

In the Zoo

It’s amazing how much is going on in the natural world. There is a constant life and death tussle. Yesterday, I watched a tiny spider leap on a tiny fly. In the blink of an eye, it leaped onto the fly and off again. Then it wandered away, licking its chops. I’m not sure if the fly was already dead, and the spider didn’t get anything, or if the fly, in a microsecond, ripped a chunk off it and ate it.

This morning I watched a different, bigger, spider (still no more than 3mm long), munching on a fly.

Writing News

In February, I had a short story accepted to the Colored Lens. I think this story came out quite nicely and am looking forward to it coming out, hopefully in the next month or so.

I received an Honorable Mention for my Winter 2020 submission to the Writers of the Future contest.

I’ve been taking courses at One Story for a while now. They have some great instructors, and lively discussion boards. I’m about to finish the latest one, And Then The Space Robots Attack: Blending Genres for Fun & Profit with Manuel Gonzales.

The mental wanderings of Julian Richardson