Pit Fire!

It's been a wildly busy June with a pit firing at the Oak Ridge Art Center, followed by a full week of Kid's Clay Camp, 2 days of clay demonstrations at the Secret City Festival and now a 2 day Underglaze & Resist Workshop 

coming up this weekend!  

It's been exhausting and absolutely great fun.  

I'll post some photos of the various events beginning with the pit firing which was June 4...  thanks for checking in with me!

Here's my tripod pot with its buffed terra sigilatta surface ready to be
wrapped in newspaper and nestled into the pit.
The pink is a swash of cobalt carbonate.  The green is copper carbonate.
There's Troon, a salt-encrusted Chinese veggie, held in place with some
bamboo leaves which were soaked in salt water and then dried.
That is held in place with thin copper wire.
Inside I've sprinkled some Miracle-Gro and sweet-n-low!
The fine black spirals you see are incised lines I filled with black underglaze
and then scraped the excess black away.  That step was done before the clay was dry.

Here, on the right, is an 'after' shot of the pot in the top photo.
(that's an odd mouthful)

The pot on the left has an incised cat design.  There's a small mouse too, but he's
hard to make out here.  I used a dark blue underglaze this time and am thrilled
that it's visible.  Some of the incised designs are seen only as cut lines since the color
was covered by the pit fire magic.  The rust colored stain you see
on the left side is the result of the salty Troon.