The positive side of the busy coin is that I’ve had a bunch of really intense weeks lately and learned and experienced a lot. The negative is not too much downtime in which to decompress, process, and share!

Some people manage to pull together a post a day - and I’ve realized that they do it by keeping it short and sweet. As you probably guessed by my rather image-intense post about materials over temoku, I tend to be thorough. This approach is too time-consuming for the pace of my life of late, so I’m going to try a new approach. One post, every other day, until I am caught up with everything I wanted to share (and that list is growing fast!)

Hope you’ll stay tuned. As a note - I check the comment moderation queue regularly to clean out the spam. So if your comment doesn’t appear, it may have been deleted accidentally - please resubmit it!

Here are forty-two cups and teabowls that I dipped in slip on Wednesday evening, setting out to dry. I’m trying some new things here. Forms that’ve been on my mind for weeks. I’m simultaneously pretty sure I’m crazy and pretty sure I’m not crazy for trying seven new slip recipes at once. And did I mention that they’ll recieve an assortment of new shino recipes and get sent through the next dirty firing?

I think it’ll be great.

Contemplating the wonderful wood+salt-fire results have given me a lot of food for thought. (I know, I know, I haven’t shown you the results yet. Soon, dear readers, soon! Here’s one to tide you over. It’s one of my favorite cups from the firing, and went to its new home this morning.)

Some photos from the early May firing in Galena.

Sunset.

Pre-firing. The woodpiles have an architecture of their own.

Nighttime. We had fun burning this hollow log. It made a fun chimney.

Firebox, middle of the night. The visually detected color is much whiter.

Next morning. We’ve been firing for about twelve hours. Note the depleted wood supply.

Power. The kiln shed is out of frame to the right.

This is what it’s like out there.

Smoking away after a salt stoke.

Creekside.

My contribution to the landscape: a bisqued house.

These are the cups whose boxes were in the kiln at the time. Too pretty not to take a picture.

Freshly stoked kiln.

Spring arrived late this year.