Studio Time: The Return Shelf

The Return Shelf. I dread it like looking into a mirror in the dark, opening a door to a room from which you've heard suspicious noise, or walking down 6th Street at 2 o'clock in the morning. You doubt something great will be there, but you also don't know how awful the surprise could be.

A while back I got my second return... my vessels from the pit fire in Tiburon. This is not such a scary return as a pit fire yields results that exceed expectations 99.9% of the time. And in my case, this was true. The vessels turned out beautifully with generous amounts of blushing red, nebulous white, and metallic black. I was very pleased.

More recently I had some of my 'cut-out' pieces returned to me. The result was disastrous. The clear glaze failed to flux over some of the white underglaze, the Hughs Red failed to mature leaving it a dusty plum color, the grey underglaze ran under the clear losing it's pattern, and the Hopkins White clay body failed to mature leaving it looking like bisque still where it was left raw. Oh, and the poor excuse for a white glaze the studio has to offer crawled over everything, not my pieces alone. The causation of this mess? A poorly fired and poorly functioning kiln.


The Return Shelf was somewhat of a mixed-bag experience as always.