An important gloss firing is currently cooking merrily away, holding a number of test pieces that - hopefully - will result in some great new lines.  Or there could be a catastrophic failure and it's back to the drawing board.  Don't I just love the suspense???  😬

I took some photos of the shelves as I packed the kiln, so I'll briefly go through them one by one.

Not much to see here on the base of the kiln; a handful of black and gold pieces, including some new Egyptian Amulet designs, and a couple in white clay that I'm trialling a new colour scheme for.  The yellow will be touched up with gold rub'n'buff, and the reddish parts should go darkly metallic.  It's a very thick iron oxide mixture that hasn't been wiped back, I'm aiming for a real metallic sheen, but we'll see how it turns out...

Shelf 2 is the glass level, the one that could potentially go badly wrong if I'm unlucky.  These are all miniature bases - that is, bases for miniature figurines such as used in Dungeons & Dragons and  other tabletop games. 
I've tested using glass a little, but not extensively.  My last firing was at 1,250C and the glass mostly worked...  The end result was largely what I was looking for, but I believe the temperature was a bit high 'cause it bubbled over quite a bit before settling back into the recesses.  So I'm hoping that dropping the temperature to 1,200C will be sufficient to prevent that from happening this time.  Otherwise I could lose the lot, and have some messy scraping back to do on the shelves, at least for the blue 'ice sheet' bases that are most likely to leak. 

Here's a close-up of the glass being applied:

It's literally just a matter of sprinkling it on and then brushing it off so that it fills up the cracks.  Some of these ice bases have a snow effect glaze applied, and some are just bare clay.  So we'll see which ones turn out best.

I'm not quite ready to trial glass in the black and white 'Cleric' base in the middle, it's too intricate, so I'm going to do a couple with coloured resin first to get an idea of how the end product will look and whether it's a design worth pursuing. 
The other bases are for Wizards (with the red and purple glass), and necromancers (with the skeleton crawling out of the green glass).  They're designed to be painted after firing, which is why they look a bit bare.

My Wheel of Time shelf...  An *enormous* amount of time went into these, so I'm half wanting to keep this first full set for myself. 

This was my lockdown project, at least the first one.  At the start of the first lockdown back in March I decided to re-read the Wheel of Time series again - all fourteen very large books (I'm midway through #12 now) - and I was inspired to start carving the chapter icons.  On the backs of many of the original carvings I inscribed things like, "Day 28 of coronavirus lockdown, 2020".  Gotta hope they're found by a future archaeologist in a couple of thousand years...  😉

The plan with these is to display them as a mosaic in a box frame, either with people choosing whichever ones they like, or having the tiles grouped by themes.  For example, the dice, the horn, the ruby-hilted dagger, and the fox and serpent symbol (and possibly the ravens) all go together because they relate to a specific character.
If you enjoy fantasy and haven't read the books, I would strongly recommend them.  Particularly as Amazon Prime is apparently filming a live action series.  It has the potential to be very, *very* good (please don't stuff it up!)

The remainder of the Wheel of Time series, and some extra Cleric bases (yes, I know one's unpainted, I'm going to trial a different method with that one, because painting the black lines by hand takes far too long to be practical - nearly an hour per base). 

The other pieces are the first of the smaller sized historical carvings.  I've been producing them in black and gold for a little while - some are currently for sale on eBay - but I wanted to do a coloured set to see how they looked.  It may well be the case that it's just not worth the time spent hand-painting them, but I won't know till I try.  All the colours are expected to darken somewhat in the firing, and black shading from underneath should bleed through to give them a bit more definition.  In theory, at least.

Finally, the last shelf, prominently dotted with the terracotta pinch pots mentioned in the last post.
In between them are some more miniature bases, in particular one that in my head I'm calling 'The floor is lava', because it should fire up to look like an underground volcanic scene.  There's two different types, one with the rocks painted in iron oxide, and the other in a glaze that resembles dark moon-like craters. 

Alongside them are a couple of test pieces that I'm very eager to see how they turn out.  First are some small examples of stained clay.  This is where colour pigment powder is kneaded into the clay body itself to give it a different colour.  I'm trialling some subtle colours (only 5% body stain to 95% white stoneware clay) which I'm hoping to use in an upcoming project. 

Similarly, for the same project, there's a couple of disks of marbled clay hiding in between the other pieces.  This is where I've taken the four different types of clay I use - white, buff (pinkish grey), terracotta (red), and black clay (actually dark brown) - and carefully mixed them together to create a pattern of the different colours. 

There's a slight concern that the whole thing could crack and fall to pieces, as the shrinkage rates of the clays are different, but it's worth the risk.
Both the marbled clay and the stained clay will be used in an upcoming series of cosmic-themed pieces, quite different from anything I've produced before, but I've got a couple of designs planned that literally have kept me up at night in excitement.  When my brain gets an idea it wants to run with, it doesn't care if it's silly o'clock in the morning, it's going to tell me alllllll about it. Heh

If only there were more hours in the day!  😊

So, I did a bisque firing on Christmas Day... Not quite as sad as it sounds, I had it all packed up the night before so just popped down to get it started early in the morning, then turned it off sometime between chopping brussel sprouts and putting the potatoes in the oven.  Two very important things cooking that day, although one considerably hotter than the other.  🙂

This was largely a test firing of some new bits and bobs I'm trialling, so I'm pleased to say that it went well.  There's a dozen or so of the first of the miniature bases to come through - a new line that I'm testing out - but more about that later when I have some photos.

I've also got a new clay that I wanted to take for a spin, a high-fire terracotta for the kusamono pots (and another in-the-works project).  Here's a piccy of a handful that came out of the bisque:

They're looking rather orangey at the moment, but I expect that to fade to quite a dark red once they're fully fired.  Haven't decided yet whether I want to put an iron oxide wash over them like I do with the others, I'm going to fire this batch up and see how they look, and go from there. 

Hoping to get the gloss firing going tomorrow, I worked hard over the Christmas weekend to get enough pieces ready for it and I'm *really* eager to see how some things turn  out, especially this:

I don't want to be counting any proverbial chickens before the all-important hatching, so I won't say too much about it in case it turns out to be an unmitigated disaster, but let's just say... The floor could be lava.  😉

Not only am I a sci-fi/fantasy geek, I'm also pretty geeky about ancient history; to the tune of spending five and a half years of my life completing an Archaeology and then Egyptology degree.  History, and mythology in particular, is one of my great loves.

So it's been knocking around in my head for a while that I'd really like to make a series of Egyptian amulets - possibly other cultures at some point in the future too, if people are interested, but the Egyptian ones are particularly well known and there's a heck of a lot to choose from.

Of course there's Ankhs and Eyes of Horus/Ra aplenty out there in New Agey stores, most of them overly stylised in a way makes me cringe a bit to be honest.  But there's *so* many more from ancient times that you never see.  The Egyptians had an amulet for pretty much every situation, and most of them are steeped in rich history and symbolism. 

So I've been working on recreating a decent number of them, and while there's still a way to go before I have the full planned set up and running, I'm starting to get some finished ones through.  Yes, I've made Ankhs and Eyes of Horus - the set wouldn't be complete without them - but I've also carved the lesser known ib (heart/strength), the au (gold/fortune), and the sa (protection), among many others. 

The first set I want to keep for myself as I fully intend to be buried with them - hopefully many long years from now.  But with my archaeological training it gives me a little laugh to think of some future archaeologist unearthing my body, bedecked with Egyptian amulets, and thinking "What the...?"
I'm sure there are other people out there with the same sense of humour as me.  ;-)

Anyways, here are some photos of the progress so far.  Let me know in the comments if you want to know what any of them mean.

I've decided to completely overhaul and redesign my website.
Actually, I decided to do it a couple of years ago, but other projects kept taking priority and procrastination is a fine art.  But I've finally cleared enough of my To-Do list that I can get started.  It had become a bit of a sprawling mess and I very much wanted to simplify it, and maybe look into adding a store directly onto the website (still working out how that's supposed to be set up...).

The biggest change from all this is that I'll be taking off all the tutorials that I had posted.  The Youtube videos will still be accessible, but all the written articles have been revamped, added to, and put into an ebook which is now available instead.  I feel a little bad to be charging for something that was free for so long, but I've kept the price down to the minimum Amazon will allow, and I think it's much more user-friendly in this format.  It has also been updated with new content, photos, and articles.  Updating it all is the main reason it's taken me so long to redesign the website, as it was a fairly big job!
The ebook is available here.

Going forward, I hope to be a bit more active in keeping this section filled with photos and details about the new projects I'm working on.  I've got so many new things I'd like to share...  :)
So make sure to check back from time to time.