Pottery Corner by Crazy Jugs

Hi there! We’re thrilled you found our little corner of the internet where we post our custom made pottery. Check out the latest blog posts below from Sandi and Tim McCormack, the potters of Crazy Jugs. Each piece of pottery is made to order and as always, free shipping within the USA!

Tim McCormack Tim McCormack

Coneheads

Hang around potters for any amount of time and you’ll start hearing a foreign language. Unfamiliar words like ‘vitrification’ and ‘extrusion’ …

Hang around potters for any amount of time and you’ll start hearing a foreign language. Unfamiliar words like ‘vitrification’ and ‘extrusion’ mixed with ‘Bisque’ and ‘glaze’ can make one wonder exactly what it’s like to stand at the altar of a clay god.  So here are a few definitions to help you out.

Raw clay that has been formed and dried is referred to as greenware. No idea why, but I do know that it’s basically dried mud and just as fragile.  You can see the shape and envision the finished product but just don’t mishandle it at all.

Somewhere along the way from clay to greenware, we pass through the land of ‘leather hard’.  It’s a magical time where the piece can be worked, molded, added to, sculpted and modified without cracking. Leather hard is where we attach handles, create faces, trim bottoms, and make final adjustments.

As we move from Leather Hard to greenware, the forces of clay begin to work against the potter. Bottoms that weren’t compressed yield and crack, handles that weren’t attached correctly or dried at a faster rate pop off the main piece and relegate it to recycling. Plates formed perfectly flat begin to warp and misshape. Anything can happen during this time, and for the potter it’s a waiting game and learning curve all rolled into one.

Greenware perfectly dried is ready for firing in a kiln (baking in a really HOT oven)  Once in the kiln, it’s game over for recycling. Your committed. The first firing is called a ‘bisque’ firing.  Some people call it biscuit, but I’m from the south and you just don’t’ mess around with that word, and before you correct me I know that ‘Bisque’ is another name for a soup that has cream in it. I like them both.

So bisque firing takes the piece to a point where there is no more water in the clay. In fact if the piece enters the kiln with water in it and is heated too fast, it explodes rather spectacularly, taking other pieces with it along the ride to the scrap pile.  This is why we program a ‘hold’ into the kiln firing cycle, hovering around 200 degrees (90c)  where the last remnants are evaporated before the piece is fired.

This is where we have a discussion about cones, which is a measurement of how hot a kiln gets before the firing is terminated. Back in the early days of pottery, it was a complete guess by the potter when his wares were ready in a kiln. Often these kilns were fired by wood and later, coal, gas or electricity. In the late 1800’s, research led to a system where components were mixed and melted at certain temperatures. These were formed in the shape of a cone and potters would put several in the kiln and watch them through peepholes. Each cone bends at a specific temperature and potters would put several lower temperature cones in view along with the final goal cone.  As the lower ones bent, they could start the shutdown process of the kiln as it ‘matures’ at an exact temperature for consistency. Today, we still use ‘witness cones’ to prove a kiln’s settings, but firings are largely controlled by computers with thermocouples (basically thermometers) that are calibrated to monitor the firing process.

Each cone has a number and they start at 022 and run all the way to 12+  Think of something with an ‘0’ in front of it as being a negative number. I don’t know why they did it this way, but it’s what we have and potters all use it.  So when you hear ‘I bisque fired it to 05’, that’s potterspeak for “The first time I fired the piece to a temperature of 1870 degrees F” or “ I glaze fired it to cone 5 with a 30 minute soak” means it was fired to 2117 Deg F and kept at that temperature for 30 minutes. In potters shorthand, you’ll see cones referred to as ^6 or ^05 as well.

Back to firing… After bisque firing, the piece is ready for decorating and glaze firing. Bisqueware is extraordinarily porous and will soak up anything with water in it like a sponge. This is where we can paint on underglazes, which are basically different colored clays  and they will become a part of the final product. We also glaze pottery with combinations of clays, colorants and chemicals that will basically bind to the piece as it becomes vitrified, which means completely melted together and resilient in the final firing process.

For our work, the final step is firing to a solid ^5 with a 30 minute preheat and normal cooling. Hopefully this brings a little more meaning to the jargon a potter uses.

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Tim McCormack Tim McCormack

Christmas Sweater

Kiln Openings are like Christmas Presents, Sometimes Like the best gift ever, sometimes like Aunt Edna giving you one of her ‘famous’ sweaters. I’m like a kid on Christmas eve when I have a kiln to open…

Kiln Openings are like Christmas Presents, Sometimes Like the best gift ever, sometimes like Aunt Edna giving you one of her ‘famous’ sweaters.

I’m like a kid on Christmas eve when I have a kiln to open…

I try to ‘peek’ in before it’s time, I watch the temperature S-L-O-W-L-Y creep down to a manageable level, wonder exactly when I can chance opening the lid; Now exactly where did I put my oven mitts?

Ok, so patience is not on my list of virtues when it comes to pottery, and that’s the one thing that pottery demands: time and patience. We often get people who want an order and can’t understand why they can’t get it today. We live in a society where we’ve become accustomed to instant gratification, Amazon the same day, Uber Eats in a few minutes, even the latest movie, Instantly. Yet some things still are no respecter of time, and anything clay falls into this category.  To properly pay homage to the clay, it takes no less than two weeks to complete a piece, and the journey is fraught with hazards.

One misstep during the process and you’ve relegated your piece to the waste pile… and I have a significant one of those. Up until the first firing, a wayward piece of pottery can merely be crushed and recycled, buckets of vaguely distinguishable shards beckon from the back stoop like an antique doll hospital gone wrong. A quick crush, splash of water and vigorous stirring with a mud mixer and we’re off again.  Fire the piece to bisque and it’s all over, somewhere along path through the first firing, you pass the point of no return as internal forces of the clay battle the potter’s skill and one will ultimately win.

Even with a perfect piece, the glaze process is sometimes tricky. You see, potters are never content with the ‘perfect glaze’ of last week. There’s always the striving for a ‘better blue’ or ‘little more green’... problem is that a little more of the component that makes the blue can turn the glaze into the ugliest green you’ve ever seen, and it runs off the piece and onto the kiln shelf like some kind of primordial slime oozing from swamp. Take the chance and put that glaze on a bunch of pieces and they are nothing more than something good for target practice.

So I, the potter wait patiently (not!) as the kiln slowly cools. My grandmother always said that a ‘watched pot never boils’ and I know the corollary to this is a ‘watched kiln never cools’   I hope the wonder and awe of finally opening the kiln after a glaze firing never ceases. It’s something to look forward to, hopefully full of amazing ‘Christmas Gifts’ that I can’t wait to share with everyone, and not too many of Aunt Edna’s sweaters that will become fodder of our next target practice.

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