Well, baby bear (otherwise known as my new kiln) is chugging away on her maiden firing.  Empty kiln today, just so I can get an idea of the time frame I’m looking at, but then tomorrow she’ll have some company. 

Since she’s parked right next to my big kiln down in the garage, I thought I’d post a side by side comparison.

Now you can understand why it takes so long between firings.  The dimensions of the large kiln are 23″ across by 28.5″ deep.    Baby kiln is 8″x8″x6.5″.   Here’s another comparison photo for you:

Keep in mind that that kiln shelf is about 10″ off the floor of the kiln.  How may pendants do you think it would fire????

I’m tickled that I can actually fire today.  I’ve been having some “issues” with electronic equipment lately.  You notice that the picture quality above isn’t great??  My camera took a short fall on Christmas, but it was enough so that it won’t power on.  I borrowed a camera from my mother, but it doesn’t seem to have macro.  I’ll have to fumble along using my handycam for pictures, so the quality will suffer.  Sigh… My laptop also seems to be quite sluggish as well, so that will need some tlc too. 

Well, I’m off to track the temp in the kiln.  Be good, and go Pats!

  Look what Santa brought me for Christmas!!!  It will be a lot easier filling a kiln that’s 8″x8″x6.75″. If Pete’s home tomorrow, I’ll do the initial test firing tomorrow, then maybe load it the next day!

I would have taken a picture of the actual kiln I received, but my camera (aka Humpty Dumpty) took a spill yesterday, and now won’t turn on.  At least I got a few pictures of Isaac opening some presents.  Very funny–after the first few “soft” packages, he figured out that they were clothes, and didn’t bother opening the rest.   How soon they figure it out!  After we opened presents at home, we headed down to my parents’ house.  He dug right in to the presents, said, “oooh, wow!” with each present he opened.  We ate, then ate some more.  Finally at about 7 pm last night, he walked along, put on his winter hat, and said, “bye bye” to everyone, blowing kisses.  I guess he was done!

Hope everyone had a happy holiday!

Well, at least we’re guaranteed a white Christmas.  Snow on Friday, then it was supposed to be just cloudy on Saturday, but we had snow showers all day.  I woke up yesterday morning (Sunday) to great big snowflakes falling.  And they kept falling.  All day.  The wind kicked up in the afternoon, so we have major drifts to contend with.  Hoping that we’ll get plowed out at some point today.  I was in bed all afternoon and evening with a migraine.  Couldn’t sleep till late, so basically I laid in bed like a zombie all day.  Isaac decided he really wanted me, so every fifteen minutes or so he’d screech for me.  He was hoarse by the end of the day.  And I was considering crawling into a snow banking.

The birdhouse from the last post is on the corner of the deck in this picture.  Can you find it?  I think it’s still there…

There’s a grill in this picture:

Planning on a bisque firing tomorrow, if I can get into the garage.  If not, then a lot of the add-on presents are not getting done. 

Are we having fun yet??? 

We still don’t have power.  We lost it early friday morning at 2:30, and I don’t anticipate getting it back for another day or so.  The line workers have been busting their butts to get stuff up and running (17 hours on, 7 hours off, plus crews from New Brunswick, Michigan, and elsewhere), so I’m definitely not complaining.  Our generator powers up pretty much the whole house on very little gas (yay it’s 1.71 right now and not 4.50)–we just don’t run the washer or dryer.  Yes, I am running out of clothes.  Notice the ice buildup on the birdhouse.  About 1″.  And how about the view from our deck, overlooking the garage.  There is but one light burning on that mountain at night. 

It was so gorgeous when the sun came out on Friday.  And when I got up late at night to tend the generator, I didn’t even have to use a flashlight, since the full moon was so bright.  It looked like special effects, it was so gorgeous.  Anyway, here are some pictures.

But I did manage to get a present made the other day.  This necklace has carnelian beads, cultured pearls, and small metallic seed beads, besides the ceramic pendant.  The toggle clasp is copper. I’ve been holding onto those pearls for months, and I had an epiphany the other day as to what I wanted to do with them.  This is one of my victorian round pendants that I have available in my etsy shop, Winchell Clayworks. 

Keep your fingers crossed that we get power soon.  No power=no kiln.  I have a slew of stuff to fire for my shop and wanted to list for last minute shoppers, but I fear that I’ve now missed the boat.  So much for momentum.

   So I’ll just stick to a couple of photos of stuff I’ve completed in the last day.  My christmas ornament mold worked; as you can see, I need to refine the mold somewhat so that the detail is crisper, but I’m quite pleased.  It came out of the mold in one piece, after all (kudos to the video/book Handmade Tiles–will blog more about it tomorrow). 

 
The other pix is of some pieces drying on the plasterboard.  I’m getting better at streamlining production; it’s so easy to have an idea pop into your head and stray off course.  These pieces haven’t had the edges cleaned up yet, as I finished them last night.  So close to a firing!!!

  Here’s how the mold came out.  I still need to do some cleaning up of plaster around the edges, and also there are some scraps of clay left in the mold.  It is still quite damp, so it will be a few days before it’s useable.  All the raised areas in the mold will be recessed on the ornament: all the better for glaze pooling. 

Today I was puttering around in the garage with Isaac when I came across a box of kiln stilts that I hadn’t seen yet (having been given a lot of ceramics stuff, I still haven’t waded my way through it all).  They’re all little, about pendant sized.  Nice to know I have about a thousand of them on hand

I don’t think I ever told the story of my journey with ceramics.  I was at work one day when Pete called and asked if I wanted a bunch of ceramic molds.  Um, I guess.  He was amping about it, and they were free.  How many could there be, right???  Well, they filled a snowmobile trailer.  I think at the time I must have been either hugely pregnant or Isaac must have been a newborn, b/c I didn’t have to do any loading or unloading.  They also gave us a ton of kiln furniture (which can add up to a lot of money if you buy it outright).

Ok, we’ve got a million molds.  What about a kiln?  We just missed getting a kiln from the mold people by about 3 weeks. I had seen them come up every now and then in the classifieds, so I wasn’t sweating it.   Pete happened to mention it to a woman he works with, and she said she had TWO and did we want to take them?  Cheap!  One was in pretty bad shape (but has a kiln sitter on it that looks to be in good condition, so I want Pete to save it for me); the other kiln was in premo condition.  And big.  Like if I slip I could end up with my feet waving in the air–and since Pete’s deaf I could be there awhile.

So we ordered some slip, had a ton of glazes given to us by yet another person who was giving up ceramics (Pete gets around at work), and started to play.  I had thrown some pottery on the wheel in high school and I’ve done some handbuilding, but I’ve pretty much taught myself through books and the web.  Because of tendonitis and/or carpal tunnel, I don’t think I’d be able to work on the pottery wheel much, even though I love it.  I can’t really remember how I came to make pendants, but here I am.  And when people say that opening the kiln is like opening presents on Christmas, they aren’t kidding.  Sometimes you get underwear and socks, and other times you get really cool stuff.  You never know….

got a chance to make some jewelry out of my own ceramic pieces.  These earrings are available in my etsy shop: http://dwinchelldesigns.etsy.com   I’m running a special on shipping now till Christmas:  Free domestic shipping on orders over $15.  

I created a chickadee ornament this weekend, and today it was finally dry enough to create the mold.  I had bought some silicone baking dishes at Mardens last week, and they work great for pouring my plaster molds.  Pops right out, nice round edges.  I think I better get some gloves for mixing the plaster, though, b/c I suspect that the next time I do it my hands are going to react to the plaster. 

Off to make some ornaments for the kids.