Trees

Art department on left, bookstore on right.

I had to go to the main campus to pick up my parts for the totem pole project, all glazed and fired and everything (I'll post about it later - two parts are still at school).

View from Wood Center bus stop.

We left work early to drive home in the daylight, such as it is. A few hours later our boss wrote to say that we should feel free to do what's necessary to be safe (like leave early). Here's the view of our balcony:

View up the driveway, showing some of the better visibility of tire tracks.

I got everything wired together on Tux's head. The six pins of the Arduino are facing down because they are used to connect it to my laptop via USB. The other things you see are a battery and a buzzer.

Here he is all together with a motion sensor on his head and LEDs on his helmet. The central one is a tri-color LED while the rest are blue.

Abstraction/reproduction

The fourth pottery assignment is to recreate something as realistically as possible, then make another item which is somehow different. I chose to do a yellow-eyed penguin since we enjoyed watching them in New Zealand several years ago:

The big guy is Tux, the Linux penguin, inspired by a photo of Penguin Computing, but the gun mine has comes from the game Spiral Knights. I used the pink/blue slip shown last time and at the lower temperatures used here, I got the pink. It's always a learning adventure!

Then there's the piece of yellow felt with an Arduino Lilypad computer on it. The plan is to put that inside Tux's head and have it control some lights and stuff on the helmet. Time to get to work on that...

I heard there was a request for tree photos. It's a bit dark right now, so I bring you candles instead:

Teapots and slip experiments

This red teapot is for the third assignment:
 

I made holes for the eyes and nostrils - three of the four filled with glaze, but the remaining hole makes it pour quite badly. 
 

On the other hand, this teapot pours better than any of my thrown teapots:

These little plates are experiments to see what colors I get from the slips. The light blue one was advertised as light pink - must be a copper glaze!

Firing disaster

Just to wrap up the adventures of the pseudo-Minoan pot:

 We arrived when the kiln was partially unloaded. They had heard a noise when the top of the kiln was up to temperature. My pot had been on top and it fell into the corner that had been kept clear for the flames to come up.

 Very few pots survived unscathed - the bottom pots didn't get fired hot enough.

 Mine fell onto a cup of my teacher's:

There are also cracks around the base where my early coils weren't smushed together well enough - I got better by the end.

I should add that the pots were "tumble stacked" since they wouldn't have fit with the traditional shelves system. They were separated by "wadding", the tan blobs in the top picture. My teacher has a theory that things fell in part because the wadding was freezing as we were applying it during the loading and it wasn't sticking properly. She then tried to glue them on until the glue froze up. The rest were applied with spit, which would have thawed well before the final collapse - but there was an early collapse in which the upper set of cones fell when the kiln was at about 200F - they took things apart to fix that, but one of the teacher's pots was broken. Ah, who knows.

Large pot project

Here are a couple pictures of my large ceramic pot, pseudo-Minoan:

On Wednesday we loaded all but one of the large pots made by our class. On Thursday, the firing was begun with wood fires:

 View of the upper cones through a peep-hole:

 While I was visiting over my lunch hour, they switched to burning cooking oil. It's a fussy process, trying to control the oil stream by hand:

 You want to have a slow steady stream from each pipe there:

 Unloading this afternoon!

Time to Go Winter

This was a headline in today's paper. It refers to an energy expo in town, but for us it meant changing the tires on the Mazda (need new summer tires next year) and changing the T-shirts in some drawers for long-sleeve tops.

Rob is at work today because there was a power outage. He went in early to get things shut down before 6 AM and now it's going to take a few more hours to get everything turned back on. I could have gone in this time to work on pottery, but there's a knitting meeting around the corner in an hour and Rob is going to get there very late.

It rained a lot recently and some of it came out in our hillside:

 You can get the scale from the meter-high tansies. They're so healthy because the compost pile used to be next to them.

We've also had a lot of wind recently and Rob's efforts to keep the wood covered don't always last long. He covered them again because it's snowing now!

sunrise

I took this picture recently at sunrise:

I was home sick, so this was shortly after Rob had gone in to work. Note the slight light-pillar action and the snow on Ester Dome.

As for my big pot, I didn't get a picture of it as greenware, but it should hopefully be bisqueware by Tuesday when I see it next. The big firing is going to be on Thursday the 25th. The current project is teapots - I'm making a dragon one and yesterday I discovered that making a dragon neck spout with hand-building is a challenge.