The Beach fire!

Yesterday was the last day of ceramics. For our class, we take a few of our pieces down and have a pit fire at the beach. I love interesting firing techniques, especially those in which I have the chance to be involved in every step of the process (such as Raku and Pit fires). I'm no 'in' enough in our ceramics department to be involved with loading the regular weekly bisque or glaze kilns.

Gavin and I made basically nothing but vases this semester in preparation for the wedding. As a result, the pieces for the beach fire were also vases (these will not be making an appearance at the wedding).

After throwing and trimming the pieces, they are polished. Turns out this isn't really my strong suit, but thanks to the company of some cool new people in class this year, I did a much better job of sitting still long enough to do a decent job of it. The pieces are bisque fired separately from the normal kiln fire.

Since I'm on a jobsite, I was able to scrounge up some wood which I loaded and delivered to Doheney State Beach. I didn't take my Nikon because the sand, smoke, and random chemical additives just made the risk too high in my opinion.

My wood.

I somehow failed to photograph loading the pits, but basically the pots are just staked together in the bottom. All kinds of random stuff is put in with them: seaweed, banana peels, copper wires, various copper chemical compounds, etc. The pots are protected with ceramic tile and the fire is built on top of them.

Fire!

This year we had two pits and I put one of our pieces in each. The fire is kept burning for 3 hours or so and then allowed to burn out. The beach closed at nine, so we left the pieces to be picked up the following day.

The Results:




Before

After

This picture really doesn't do them justice. They came out very nice. We also polished them with a smelly orange wood polish to give them a little bit of shine. If I ever get some free time, I'll consider setting up some better lighting to get some more accurate pictures of the colors on the pieces.

Update: I've been busy!

I've been swamped!

Aside from work, we are also in critical wedding planning time. We had our tasting, which went AMAZINGLY, but I don't want to spoil any surprises, so I've opted to skip photos for now. (Quite a difficult decision) Everything was beautiful and tasted delightful. We have all but a few big details locked up and we are shrinking the list of to-dos almost everyday!

We also got our first official wedding present!

One of our friends from our ceramics class made this for us and we love it! He's a quite talented potter and we were both ecstatic. I was going to post a picture of our completed wedding vases, but then realized it wouldn't really be fair to put them next to our awesome new teapot! Ceramics is officially over as of tonight (technically tomorrow morning, I guess). We have a beach fire tonight, which is basically a night when we fire our pots in a big fire pit at the beach. We had a fantastic time last year. Although sadly, Gavin won't be able to make it tonight.

I've been so busy, I haven't even been able to make much progress on my ever growing to read list! I finally gave up on "Snoop" which proved to be not at all what I was expecting. Better luck next time!

I'll do my best to keep things a bit more up to date!

Busy, stressful week!

What a long week! Work, wedding, conflicts, chores... sometimes there's just too much! But, I think it's nothing some relaxing this weekend won't help! I don't have tons of free time this weekend (shocking, I know) but I have some. I'm hoping to get the rest of my garden in. What's there seems to be good so far, but any planting will depend on the weather of course. I like watering my indoor plant, but until stuff starts growing, the outdoor garden is a bit boring. We'll see if I change my mind I guess.

Ceramics was pretty good this week. Our project is coming along quite well. Gavin made some beautiful test colors, now we just need to get them to someone who can actually visual colors and shapes to bring everything together. I'll post some pottery pictures sometime.

In honor of Gavin and my anniversary, I cleaned up the house and decorated for spring! I'm not much of a decorator, but my mom supplied the flowers as an early St David's day gift, so I did the rest. Sadly, I was too tired and busy to cook last night and didn't realize he was away again tonight.

Gavin surprised me with a lovely Tiffany charm. Happy Anniversary, babe!