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!

Some more fruit of the kiln. I’m pleased with this one. 5lb of stoneware clay fired to Cone 10 oxidation in my electric kiln. The glaze is a Mayco brush on called Blue Surf over a single coat of Tenmoku.

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!

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!

My short story, “The Change” appeared in The Colored Lens, Spring 2021. I knew it had been accepted, but only found out yesterday that it had actually been published in April.

I noticed this on the first manned SpaceX flight: the astronauts are wearing Wellington boots!