Horse Hair and Soda Firing

-
Yesterday I finished my flower holder. I cleaned it up, then burnished it with the back of a metal spoon. Then I painted it with terra sigillata and burnished it with a plastic bag (apparently blue Walmart bags are the best for this, but I made do with a generic grocery bag). It now has a shiny, smooth finish, which is required for horse hair. You can kind of see the shininess in the picture; this piece looks lighter than others I've photographed because it's reflecting more light. The piece will be bisqued and then fired in a raku kiln; it won't have any glaze applied.


Next I started on a small sculpture of a rose, which will hopefully be part of a soda firing that will be done during the last week of classes. Soda firing is accomplished by blowing baking soda or soda ash into a hot kiln; this results in the pieces within essentially being glazed on all their surfaces. The pieces are propped on raw clay in order to prevent their sticking to the kiln shelves.

White and red clay look totally different after being soda fired, so I'm going to alternate colors of clay for each petal of the rose. I'm hoping it will look quite striking. So far I just started making petals out of white clay. The exact type is unknown, as it was recycled clay; all I know is it's white and high fire, as other than clay for raku pieces, all we use is cone 10 clay. The petals will be attached to the large round piece of clay, which will serve as the base.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

"Does it get easier?" Yes, but Also No...

-
Image
Image by Arek Socha from Pixabay It's complicated... "Does it get easier?" I see some form of this question asked a lot in beginner programming groups. I always struggle with how to answer this honestly and clearly, because the truth is not that simple. In some ways it does get easier, but in other ways it is almost always going to be difficult if you are advancing in your career . If you are a programmer and your job is easy for years on end, the most likely explanation is that you're in the kind of dead-end position that people try to avoid, not the kind of position people dream about when they think of becoming a developer. Most likely you are not getting better at being a dev, not working with new tech or solving new kinds of problems, not being given more responsibility, etc. etc. etc. I've seen some pushback from other newbie programmers on the idea that it could remain difficult past the initial learning stage. Notably I have never once seen somebody who...
Read more

How to Land Your First Dev Job: Develop Yourself, Market Yourself

-
Image
Image by magnetme from Pixabay In the coding and tech groups I'm in, I see the same question asked over and over by folks who are just learning to code, finishing up a bootcamp, degree, or other training program, or who have been looking for that first job for awhile and not having any luck: "what do I need to do to get my first dev job?" There's a whole ton of info out there on this topic, but it's scattered all over, so I thought I would gather together the best resources I've come across and share them, along with a bit of context, to try and help everybody struggling with or just plain wondering about this. There are a lot  of things you can do to improve your chances of finding a job and hopefully shorten your job search. They are broadly divided into 2 categories: developing yourself and your skills, and marketing yourself and your skills. Note that you don't need to do everything on this list, nor do you need to do it all at once. This is an "...
Read more

Git. The WHAT and WHY Edition.

-
Image
Lately I've seen a lot of new/aspiring developers talk about difficulties learning git . I was confused at first, because there are approximately a zillion git tutorials out there. But then I started really looking at what people were saying AND what all those tutorials contain. The problem is most tutorials start out with "here are a ton of git commands to memorize", and this is not where people are having problems. People are having problems with "what is git, why should I learn it, and what does it look like to use it in a real-life project?", and those questions are largely not answered in all those millions of tutorials. So at the risk of redundancy, I'm going to attempt to address these questions in Yet Another Article About Git. First, I want to make it clear that if you want to be a programmer, any kind of programmer, you need to know git. You just DO. This is the short version of the answer to "why should I learn it?".  The medium length a...
Read more