Roberta12

Hi folks, no new question in the pool so I will pose another. Based on my buying my first new kiln in over 30 years, anything over 4k is a big expense, especially for a retired teacher and hobby potter. So I will ask of you:
QotW: What is your first and second most expensive equipment expense? 
This is a pretty easy question for me, as #1 is the new kiln, the L&L e28m-3 , and #2 is my 30 year old Brent CXC potters wheel. Really in the end, considering the years of use. . . these have been really cheap, even though the original sticker shock is daunting!
 
best,
Pres

In my experience, very few people are affected by the molds in clay. I've spent 8 years in University studios, 3 years in a clay supplier business, and 17 years teaching classes in my own studio, and I've only run into two people that had to drop classes due to mold sensitivity. I've got students with immune deficiency conditions (I don't know the specific conditions) and it doesn't affect them. Mold is unavoidable in the clay itself, short of mixing your own clay every time you go to work with it, which would be very poor clay to work with. And doesn't seem to be the type of mold that causes strong reactions and health issues like you'd get in moldy drywall. If it was we'd all be experiencing health issues every time we opened a bag. I think that testing a bag of clay for specific molds would be useless because the clay body materials are sourced form different places and you would/could get different spores from every batch of raw materials.
The studio itself is a different story. There's no reason it should be any more moldy than any other environment due to the clay itself. If your local studio is musty, I'd first determine if the issue is the clay, or something else like a damp basement, etc. Just using clay in a space shouldn't contribute to the mustiness if the space is dry in the first place, because the mold needs moisture to proliferate. If the smell is from slop buckets or standing water in the sink, those issue can be easily dealt with. However I've got open slop buckets in my studio, and we do not have any oder or mustiness problems from them. If we did, then lids would solve the problem there. 
Personally, I'm allergic to molds in the environment, and my allergies are always a mess in the Spring when it's rainy and in the Fall from leaf molds. The studio environment never sets them off, though.

Load determines stacking.  I know what I can and can't stack, and I know what needs to be in the load.  
r.

Load determines stacking.  I know what I can and can't stack, and I know what needs to be in the load.  
r.

Load determines the stacking. I need what I need when I need it. But if I’m making large serving pieces, I also try and include kiln filler in my production list. You always need kiln filler anyways, and it does help the bowls fire without warping.

I always have a cup of coffee next to my wheel as I'm throwing. Or doing anything really. 

I have a long-standing, very entrenched, habit of not making glaze notes (oh-so-sure I'll remember what went over what or under which, or what all 5 glazes I used were, or which was the low fire fired mid fire that completely washed out-who knows? -not me).  The deeper habit is that I don't care. I lose opportunities to duplicate something that came out really terrific, because I can't remember what I used, but I just fold that into my "serendipity" mindset and move on.  It's not something I want to "fix", but it is a terrible habit and I would warn others not to do it. 

Once again there is no new question in the QotW pool so I will pose one. 
I have been thinking of statements over the last year by potters who figure the size of their pots to the shelf heights they load. This is much different from me as I guess I throw together all sorts of mixed loads. I may have 20 mugs, 4 plates, some pitchers, or some small bowls and some large bowls in one load. However, some people run 50 mugs and a great number of bowls, or other things, not having the variety of forms or sizes and heights that I run. 
My question for the Question of the Week is:  Does your stacking determine the items in the load, or does your load determine the stacking?
 
best,
Pres

I incorporate silence & secrets in my work; sometimes rather than provoking a hint of mystery, it runs the risk of just making no sense to the viewer.  I tend to be more in need of self-gratification than external communication, however, and I need to appreciate that people are not mind readers.  A bit of explanation from the creator can't do any harm!  For the No. 8 Not Broken mask, the print block design is a spin off of "energy" from making a previous mask, No. 7 Primal (pictured below-unfinished, waiting to be refired). Assault survivors are often marked (imprinted: psychologically/physically) by the weapons used on them. Rather than incising the residue of stabbings or burns, I did the edges that way (whacking the clay with an object at hand) to thinly represent one attribute of tribal behavior-domination of one/more over another/others.  
 

I moved this from the "Studio" area because I believed the content is more about feelings, and perception than process. Even though @LeeU's work is in evolution in the process and use of surface it is also as she describes it an evolution of the mood or feelings her pieces represent during the process. All of this seems to be more about the aspect of creativity and art as often referred to as aesthetics.
 
best,
Pres

Great post @LeeU  Your mask really reaches out and speaks.  I don't know if I am as "thoughtful" as you while making.  And perhaps this sounds a bit silly, but I really do go into a zone and "wait for the muse" to send inspiration.  I love the functional aspect of ceramics but acknowledge the design of shape and size and color and and and and something just vibrates inside when I am working on pots.  Like @oldlady said, I do think of things that will sell, since I am wanting to pay for what I do, but with that in mind I am always putting my own spin on things.  Or the "muse" is doing the spinning!      Thanks @LeeU
Roberta

This reminds of a passage in "Ways of Seeing" by Berger. There's a painting at the bottom of a page with birds flying over a cornfield and no description, the author asks you to have a long look then turn the page. At the top of the next page is the same painting with the passage "this is the last painting Van Gogh painted before he killed himself".  He's trying to prove how now the painting serves to illustrate the sentence. When I first saw your mask I noticed the pressed pattern along side the face and tried to create a dialogue between those two things. After reading your description I can't see it the same way. 
"what was I thinking?' - I always find myself trying to find a balance between what I want to express and how it will be read by others. I honestly don't think that's the ideal way to create but I go back to something with fresh eyes another day and realize even I don't see it as I did the day before. 
I agree with Pres in that "how do I feel...what about myself" way art strikes people. Every viewer is going to bring something different, so best we can hope for is to satisfy our own creative expression.
The masks you've made are loaded with content. I think they exemplify some of the best reasons to make art. It's serving a purpose in the community and creating a dialogue. I know so many events have tried to go online with covid but there's no way to replace an "art opening" event and talking to the artist to hear about the process and intention.

When working with ideas rather than forms, often it is a matter of what if, and why today, or how do I feel, not just about the work, but about myself. I imagine that we will have many artistic expressions over the next few years concerning lockdowns, viruses, masks, and so many other aspects of the pandemic and the way it brought many to their knees>
 
best,
Pres

Well Lee, it deoends on my mood and what is in my mund.
If the piece ends not fulfilling my brain then ut is diced, plant bound or killed ! at whatever stage the discord occurs. Otherwise it tends to grate on me forecer, or whenever I come across it.
I rmember dining at a friends when one of my flawed pieces was staring atf me across yhe room
I quietly bagged it and made another one. Friend didnt like ut as much but I "owned" it, didn't I

We have discussions scattered all over the forums about aesthetics, philosophy, deliberate and unintentional technical flaws, art vs craft, the role of things like 3D printers, paint vs glaze and so forth. What we think when we are creating our pieces is quite interesting, but not discussed a whole lot, it seems.  I hope this is related to Making Work. If it belongs elsewhere I trust the mods will move it!  
Anyway, I was reading bits of discussions about these aspects of making work and was thinking about my own focal points as related to creativity, self-expression, archetypes, metaphors, serendipity (that's a biggie) and other attributes of how I do my thing.
Today's gleanings from the posts that I read had to do with flaws or failed techniques & what can go to market and what really should not see the light of a retail day or even be given to a friend. I laughed at a comment related to a hairline crack. I had just spent the morning gouging into some cracks in a drying piece,  seeing how hard I could work it before loosing what I was going for.  So-the pics are the beginning of the next piece in my Hidden Mask series, No. 8 Not Broken. I use clay to represent certain things in life--sometime very clear, sometimes very obscure. So, what was I thinking? In this case, I was thinking about a battered woman I once knew, who survived severe physical/emotional abuse & trauma, and how she may be cracked, but she is not broken. 
When you make something---what are you thinking?????

I have a shelf that is broken in half on one inch stilts above the holes in my kiln.     The outlet vent is about 50 feet away from one of my neighbors.   No complaints but they have a house full of kids so they probably don't even hear it.   I live at the edge of my town,  fields every where,   at night I can here the  the semi's on the highway that is a half of mile away.   Tanker airplanes warming up  from the airbase that is five miles from where I live.  Try wearing some earplugs  when you work in the studio while firing.   I have had my envirovent for twelve years and barely notice it anymore,  it has turned into white noise.     Denice

That sounds normal to me.  It's just a simple squirrel cage blower, so not the most advanced  blower technology. When they go bad the bearings wear out and they make a lot more noise than that. I couldn't hear it in the video, but if you're getting any additional noise from vibrations in the wall, you could put it on the floor on a piece of foam to isolate it more.

Hello everyone.  I'm the guy who put together EuCal.  This Forum is new to me, so I have some catching up to do, but I'll do my best to help out where I can.  No calculator can predict everything.  Testing is always still needed.  When using EuCal, you will find that most glazes will tolerate SOME excess SiO2 and Al2O3 before they start getting opaque.  The recipe posted recently could probably be made slightly more transparent by reducing the EPK and Silica a little bit.

Ha. For some, this glaze chem stuff IS wilderness camping. All. The. Time.

There was a recent thread where glaze eutectics was brought up. Stemming from that was a link to an article by Robert Magnuson in the Feb 2018 Ceramics Monthly which contained a link to a eutectic calculator, "EuCal",  he created. Magnuson discusses an interesting aspect of eutectics, to quote from the article:
"One of the most interesting aspects of eutectics isn’t how they melt, but how they solidify. When a eutectic mixture cools from the molten state, the individual components all stay molten together until they solidify. When they do, a transparent glass is formed. If the molten glaze contains ingredients that are not part of a eutectic, these ingredients may solidify separately while the glass is still liquid, leaving tiny crystals suspended in the glass, producing opacity and other effects in the final glaze. But, if a glaze contains only eutectic mixtures, a transparent glaze will result.
Very few glazes are based around a single eutectic and most incorporate both alkali (R2O) and alkaline earth (RO) oxides. Any combination of the eutectics of Na2O, K2O, and CaO (see left) will result in a transparent glaze. For such a neat trick, it’s surprising you don’t hear about it more often. If you have ever tried to formulate a fully transparent glaze by trial and error, you know it isn’t easy to do—unless you know this trick."
Since the time of that publication Magnuson has updated and revised his EuCal. Version 1.8 added borate eutectics for the alkali fluxes and the latest version, 1.9, added a calcium borate eutectic. This could be very useful as it now brings mid and low range glazes into play with the calculator. There are some provisions, see the read me file linked below.
Given that not everyone has access to the links in the article Jennifer Harnetty asked Magnuson for permission to link the read me file plus the eutectics calculator here to which he very kindly agreed to. I've added the links to the updated version below.
I realize this isn't an area that gets a lot of discussion but perhaps as time goes by as more people get familiar with the calculator it can be utilized as a stand alone piece of software or perhaps in tandem with Stull charts. Lots of food for thought here.
Link to the Feb 2018 article here:  https://ceramicartsnetwork.org/ceramics-monthly/ceramics-monthly-article/Techno-File-Using-Eutectics 
Link to the User File here:  https://ceramicartsnetwork.org/docs/default-source/default-document-library/eucal_1_91_user_guide.pdf?Status=Master&sfvrsn=a5d9b703_5/ EuCal_1_91_User_Guide.pdf
Link to the EuCal here:https://ceramicartsnetwork.org/docs/default-source/default-document-library/eucal_ver1_91.xlsm?Status=Master&sfvrsn=6fc99709_9/EuCal_ver1_91.xlsm
 

Midrange is really all I have known.  And to echo what Min said, I am on the platform for functionality and durability as well.  I love the variety of clays at midrange.  Porcelain (like) stoneware, dark, light, grog, smooth.  I love what it all brings to the table.  
Roberta

^6 for functional work. Low fire for experimenting with alternative firings. I am moving my soluble salts to ^6 in the near future with a glaze. Meanwhile, using a small amount of earthenware for a pit firing coming up in may with friends.
 
Marcia
 

Wow @Pres, you posted this question 21 hours ago and no-one has yet replied......
For me, the answer has to be "both".
I like ^6, but my little kiln doesn't.  The one at the community centre likes ^6, but no-one else does, or needs ^6.  
So, for some purposes, ^04 is fine, the glazes are more plentiful (UK), they come in every colour including special effects.  They suit the users at the community centre, and make my life as the advisor and firing tech much easier.
 
But for mugs, outdoor pots, bonsai pots, casserole dishes, I still want ^6.  Or higher and wood fired.

I have my TC's about 3/8" from the end of the tubes, and I haven't seen any flaking into the kiln yet after about 20 firings. Definitely some flakes visible inside the tubes, though. So far so good.

Why? They work great. I've never had accuracy problems with them. I have several customers who have added them to their Skutt kilns to keep the TCs from shedding all over.