Breathe

 Can we just breathe now?
We really did hold our breath on this load and, it paid off, all except the brain damage from lack of oxygen.

The mugs are not only out of the kiln, but, but!, they are packed for shipping.

And, and! we did not kill one another in the process. This is good news. Not one potter was injured either mentally or physically in the unloading or packing of these mugs.
The mugs.
Those mugs.
Those sweet, precious mugs,bless their pea-picking hearts, all made it through the fire.
Deep sigh of relief.
The order was for 80 mugs.
 Of the 90 made 78 made it through the bisque stage.
78 are packed for shipping. (happy face here)

Here was the biggest fear of all the fears we had. We thought that some of these might open up like the people in Alien the movie. You know where the baby births out of the chest kicking and screaming. This is what we imagined could happened to these mugs, that they would crack and split wide open. No more late night horror or science fiction movies for me just being a potter is enough to make one whacky.

With this said and you can tell me later I put this in writting.
I would do this again.
Yep, you heard it here.
We did learn something and I would do this again with enough advanced notice and hopefully not right before Christmas.

As far as the rest of the load goes it was a great firing.
Mark pulled off another good firing and even did a little something different at the end of the fring that he feels helped all the glazes. You will have to get him to explain it to you.

One of the reasons that I feel the kiln fired well was we planned to the T how we were going to load this kiln. I did a blow by blow on paper of what went on each shelf and how many inches each shelf  had to be. Now there was some flex room left in there as the crown pots went taller than I had planned  by 2 1/2 inches. Meaning the 14 inches I had planned needed to be 16 1/2.  But, we have some thinner shelves that helped make up the difference in height.

 Mark made some lamps for this kiln load that came out really gorgeous. The iron reds came out just like we like as did the toasty color of the Spodumune glaze.

Below is a cream and sugar that has all the elements that make me love this glaze.

What is next for us?
Some tiles for me and a  local show coming up for us the week-end of the 17th.and 18th of November. The Celebration of Seagrove Potters is held here in Seagrove at the old cannery for Luck's Beans.

And, we will start on the next kiln load to fire sometime in December.
Need any mugs?


Thanks for being there!
M