Post #746791 by danlovestikis on Sat, Jul 11, 2015 3:38 PM

It's the weekend and I've seen on facebook lots of photos of those who are attending Tiki Kon in Portland. What a fun time they are all having.

I'm all done with my summer Enchanted Tiki Hut mug.

The inspiration for the mug is the tiki on the left.

When it was out of the kiln I decided that it needed black in the drum slit for I enameled it and baked it.

All done.

It always feels good to finish a project.

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More catch up photos.

We went to Tropical Days at the Cancer Society Thrift Shop. Dan wanted to hula but they only laughed.

They danced while we shopped.

Dan lucked out and found some new lounging shorts!

A different day we went to Alpha Fired arts and bought all the glaze for the Sacramento Crawl mug. Now it's set in "ceramic" and I won't be able to change my mind.

Our fridge after 20 years bit the dust. Our new one was delivered by a Hawaiian hula dancer. No Kidding!

He showed his tattoos and I showed him my mugs. Dan just wore his batman shorts.

Guess who wants this mug? KKB. I painted all the faces white with 2 layers of glaze and let them dry overnight.

Here are all the remaining projects waiting for the next step.

The next day I painted all the eyes and mouths.

The next day I did two layers of clear over every face.

This is the eyeball mug, they needed clear too.

The next day I loaded the bottom level and

then the top level. I couldn't fit everything into the kiln so a second batch will be done.

Two days later I opened the lid. I notice that a mug had fallen over and was leaning on two other mugs. Horrors! During firing they would have fused together.

When I reached into the kiln I found that it hadn't fallen until the mugs were cool. None had even gotten a chip. Perfect!

Looking at the bottom shelf I could see some horrible problems. More on that coming.

I still had a few that needed to be glazed so I got to it.

Soon the kiln room was filling up. The hot kiln helped to dry them faster.

Here comes the ceramic defects. Another runny nose. It's summer there should be this problem.

That's not a small run either. The last one that happened to I turned it into the Phantom of the Opera Bob.

The next was a test glaze for one of the Sacramento Crawl mugs. The glaze just crawled away leaving all these skips on the inside. The outside was fine.

The lid and

the body of the HUGE Maori jar had glaze skips everywhere on the outside.

The worst part was this glaze was supposed to be more green than brown.

The inside was fine.

Now it was time to fix the problems. First I added more runs to the face of Torch Bob.

I used a completely different glaze to cover the inside of the mug. But first I scrubbed all the skipped areas in case I'd missed dust when scrubbing this mug. Maybe I forgot to wash the inside.

The I choose a new glaze and

coated the whole jar

with a CY yellow glaze. I hope it works. This piece is for a show at XIEM.

After a few hours in the hot wind they were all ready to fire.

Two days later I opened the kiln.

I found one mug that had a skip. I will fire it with the Sacramento Crawl mugs. Next up will be all the photos I took as I unloaded two full kiln loads. Was my HUGE jar repaired? More soon. Cheers, Wendy