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Rae Reich

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Posts posted by Rae Reich

  1. If you keep a bucket of water and a large car washing sponge nearby and wipe down your clay areas as the dust accumulates and then drop  all the towels into it at the end of the day for a rinse,  you can reduce the amount of dust in the air. 
    also, No Vacuuming!! (Unless you have a wonderful system like Mark C that sends the dust outside. )

  2. Hi, Nancy! Glad you’re back to your project. Technically, I think it’s not the thickness of the walls but the soundness of them that keeps vessels whole under the pressure of the contents. You want to have a consistent thickness and no cracks for good drying and firing. A five foot tall jar might need up to 2” thickness, a two foot jar maybe less than 1”, but that is for strength during construction and firing, not strength against internal pressure, which comes from no cracks or fissures. (Burial was both the preventative and the cure for ancient cracked vessels.)

    There are YouTube videos of coiling large jars. Generally, the coils are about 1”-1 1/2” in diameter - human hand scale. 
    :) 

  3. Maybe I also heard what @Babsis remembering. Back in the 70s I heard of an enterprising itinerant Raku potter with just a wheel and a little propane kiln. He would make tea bowls and fire them immediately to sell immediately to thrilled customers. At the time, it was thought to be a similar method to older Japanese Raku traditions. I think the goal of the old method would be to produce many useful items in a short time. 

  4. @Babs, that’s a difficult question. When I gift a piece to be used that way, I include a box of Floral Clay and have the frog already secured in place. That’s because I prefer to have a piece with multiple uses so I don’t make it permanent. It could be that customers at sales don’t want so many choices - a vase is a vase and can’t be a nut dish! That may be why @Min glues them.  Also precludes lengthy instructions. :) 

  5. 1 hour ago, Callie Beller Diesel said:

    Another firing mitigation tactic you can try is to place test tiles, other small pieces or even lay down extra kiln posts around the rim of the piece. They’ll create a heat sink so the rim/lip cools at a rate closer to the bottom of the plates. If you’ve been making this design in smaller versions, sometimes the larger one will require extra babying. I can vouch for it working on my pieces, and I notice kiln pack can affect things you wouldn’t think are a big deal. In any case, it’s easy to try.

    +1

  6. If it’s really unfired clay it can still be softened with water and you can stick a product like @JohnnyK recommends fairly well. Or you can, wit permission, file down the gnarly edges and smooth it as though it’s a collar, then paint to match. 

    If it is plaster, moisten the area before dabbing on plaster patch. Pins or bamboo skewers might work better than dowels as anchors, pre-drill holes carefully. 

  7. @oldlady’s advice worked well for me when I reconstituted ^06 glazes and  underglazes that had dried up in their jars. The coffee grinder idea is good if you need them faster than patiently waiting several days or longer (except for glazes with suspended crystals like Dalmatian or Tutti Frutti). Passing the re-wetted glaze through a strainer will even out lumps for consistency. 

  8. A 4” square of chamois, or artificial equivalent as for car washing, in my right hand for throwing. It delivers a minimum - just right - amount of water to the pot and can wrap around fingers that could be abraded by the wheel head.

    Needle tool. It’s handy to put the back end of wood-handled needle tool in the pencil sharpener to make a it a reversible drawing/decorating tool. For throwing and handbuilding. 

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