After

Have I mentioned how much I love working with porcelain! Porcelain compels you to slow down and take care at every step. Compels you to learn the processes involved and understand the medium. The dramatic change from liquid to a solid glass-like object is beauty! What a pleasure!

Cleaning Soft fired greenware

After cooling overnight I started wet cleaning the parts by submerging them in water and sanding away all the seams and imperfections. Be very careful when handling the sfgw because you might lose some details...like a finger. Yes I broke a finger. Thought I was careful but not careful enough. The sfgw is almost glass like at this stage and so delicate.

Loading the kiln

Ready for a soft fire to cone 018.

I'm playing with porcelain clay while the kiln does it's magic. I'm experimenting and trying to make some fun objects...we'll see how they come out.

Drying Time

All molds have been cast, holes drilled, openings are cut and smoothed. The parts are very delicate at this stage almost chalk like so I'm waiting until they are soft fired before I clean them and remove the seams. Once everything is bone dry I can soft fire to a cone 018. Soon!

Test Fire

For the test fire I added kiln wash to the shelves, loaded all the shelves and fired to cone 04. Not too hard...

Casting tiny parts.

So far so good.

A Success!

Three pours one success. The head and chest wouldn't drain properly and collapsed in the mold. I think the problem is with the drain hole being too small. I opened the holes a bit and will pour again tomorrow.

The torso came out nice!