Archive for November, 2009

What? Black and Gray Only, No Colors??!!

Thursday, November 12th, 2009

I thought it was just a fluke the first time this happened. I was at a group pit fire last year where I had seven pieces out of a total of thirty some pots in all. Most of my pieces turned out beautifully, so I wasn’t too upset when I noticed that one of them did not have any colors at all — only black and various shades of gray.

three recent black-and-gray pieces

figure 1: three recent black-and-gray pieces

Well, it must have been in a corner where we forgot to sprinkle copper carbonate; and the copper mesh and salted raffia wrapped around the piece must have gotten knocked loose by falling logs too — so I thought to myself, and promptly forgot about the whole thing.

Then I started to do a lot of firings in my little backyard pit, and much to my chagrin, these all-black or black-and-gray rocks also began to crop up a lot more frequently (figure 1 above, and figure 2 below.)

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