Building a little raku rocket

                             Last weekend I went to a fabulous raku kiln building workshop
                                          with Stefan Jakob and organised by the CSG.


                                                       What a great experience!

What a patient man Stefan is.
It would have been quite understandable if he had been totally frustrated
by us all trying to get our heads around building his (very clever) little kiln design.
Instead he just explained it as many times as he needed.

If you are a keen potter this is a workshop not to miss.
It is a great little kiln to add to the studio.

                                                   
                                                         We met on Saturday at 9am

                       
                           Stefan talked us through and demonstrated what we would be building

                                       

                                  Then we paired up so as to help each other hold and drill ect.
                                           I teamed up with this lovely lady  Irene Charnas
                         who I later found out lives a few doors down from my son ... small world

                                                       we measured our IKEA bins

                                                                          cut holes

                                                             
                                                              drilled and fitted grates

                                                          
                                                               drilled and fitted flues

Here I am sporting my name tag ..... complete with the phonetic spelling
(for all those who do a double take when they see my unusual name)

It is not 'SAD  HANA', please!
I am a very happy and optimistic person
SAD is not my middle name or my first name ;~P

It is pronounced 'SARD - a - na'
the A in "Sadh" is long and soft and it is said like an "AR" sound
and the H is silent..... easy....  Sardana = Sadhana :)

OK?



So back to kiln building....

          insulated the inside..........made tongs...........and presto.................a cute little raku kit

On Sunday we set all our shiny new kilns out ready to fire

 

 

Stefan demonstrated how he uses his glazes

 

                               Once we had glazed and loaded our work we launched our little rockets
                                           (Do you remember the puppet Mr Squiggle ?
                                      These little kilns remind me of Mr Squiggle's rocket .)

                                                                  reduction materials at the ready

                                                           The chimney changed colour ,
                   the fuel pile got smaller (it only took a milk crate of sticks to fire it to 1,000 degrees).
                   I can see that my back yard will get nicely cleaned up :)
                                                         
                              

             Within the hour the pots were cooked and thrown into the sawdust and dunked in water

                                                                          DONE!

 

                                                      Lots of people had great results

           
                                                              Here are my three...
                              quite happy but would like to aim for more colour next time.

           
                                                    Once we had finished and packed up
                        this mark on the gravel was the only evidence of our exciting weekend.



                               So now I am back to the studio to keep working for our exhibition                                                                          in our blood



  The kiln is glaze firing as we speak.

  Just got a nice delivery of raku clay and glaze materials yesterday...
  Been drawing tooo......
  Need to make more paper....
  Then some printing, collage and stitch.......
  OH....and also still more basketry to do.....
  EEEEEEeeek I must get off this computer!
  It's all systems GOooooooo!


                Don't forget to check out the Mud Colony for other exciting muddy adventures