Too Hot...

It's been waaaaay too hot to fire the kiln this week so I've been trying to just keep working on pieces to pack into the firing when it finally cools off!  Excessive heat isn't usually something we complain about in San Diego, it's one of the biggest advantages of living here...a 10 degree variation in temperature for pretty much the whole year!  However Friday and Saturday this week surpassed 100 degrees at our place, not something I'm accustomed to while at home!

As a part of my frenzied (despite having over 4 months to prep) Tucson preparations, I've been working on beefing up my button and bead stock so that I have more variety than just pendants.  I'll probably also have a little supply of the cute spoon rest/tea light holders that I made last year around the holidays (just for my open house, they didn't make it to the website). 

Anyone have suggestions for anything else that I should think about making for the show?

I finally ended up tinkering with my application of a few new glazes and wow, did I get amazing results from a few of them!  Check out this metallic finish although the photo doesn't quite do it justice...

...and then a bunch of layered glazes with some neat effects.  There's a layer or two of the base glaze around the hole at the top and on the back then a couple thick layers of the top glaze to interact with the base.  This one was really runny when it interacted with the base...

I don't usually have to deal with glaze drips on my kiln floor since I brush my glaze on rather than dipping but the thickness of the layers caused a bit of a mess this time around with a few pendants...

Luckily I have a kiln shelf lining the bottom of the kiln!  The beads were cooperative, even with thick layers to get the right finish.  I was worried about them having drippy gobs of glaze but they were all fine...

Of course I'm lousy at taking notes when I play around like this which means there's no chance of me replicating anything.  I did learn my lesson since there were a couple of fantastic results that I'll share another time...I made some test tiles to fire along with my next load so I can be a bit more methodical in my results when it comes to the combos.  I don't trust the predictability of the combos so they will definitely always be "grab 'em while you see 'em" pieces rather than something I'll offer to replicate but I'd like to try to use them a bit more frequently to mix things up.

So, any requests for particular items while I'm madly working on new pieces?  More connectors, charms, beads, buttons, links, weird shaped pendants?  My ears are open!