Wright Way Pottery

These are older. The green pen blank, nickel blue on yellow/amber blank, and steel blue on brown/black blank were done in 2017. Almost the beginning of my journey. I was at Oakmont shooting S***t signing my chit, 2017, when Mike Kurzawa saw me signing with a fountain pen. He is a FP-Geek too so we became fast friends. 1 month later we had lunch in the mens grill and I showed him the aforementioned pen blanks and his eyes we rolling in his head. Now we are in this together.

My goal for the past six years was to make a fountain pen with crystal glaze on it. I think I would be the first person ever to try such a thing. The onl thing left is two small metal turned pieces that will screw the cap to the body. I have been carving the pen shapes on a wooden lathe which I can work but the metal lathe, different animal. This week is the week. I’m going to a machine shop that my cousin Randy Russell recommended to me. People do often ask me why are my crystals so small. I dont think large crystals would look like they fit on a fountain pen. Hence the small uncrowded crystals. If you have seen all of these in past posts I apologise. I am at the final turn of the race track, so here are some crystal pen high lights.

A few new sculpture vases, kyushu Japanese ceremonial tea pot.

Living in Pittsburgh is nice as a ceramic artist is something I never take for granted. Pittsburgh is home to Standard Ceramics in Carnegie, PA. They produce some of the finest clay varieties in the U.S. The selection of different porcelains is almost mind numbing. Ive been using English Grolleg Porcelain #257 for a long time. This summer i decided to try their Troy Porcelain #437. It is pricier than #257, which is weird because i thought English Grolleg was the “Bees Knees”. #437 is smoother than butter cream. Then 2 weeks ago, becuase i couldn’t help myself i had to try the other cone 10 porcelain #130. definitly not as smooth. I have 12 vases ready to fire. Holding my breath.
Thursday morning at 2 a.m. I decided to do a post-reduction fire. 6 a.m. Friday morning wearing my Scrooge McDuckian night shirt and a Tweed S***t Shooting vest, I did another. It was 10 degrees and snowing. Here are a few of those pieces.

I mentioned i fired last week and I needed to reduce some of the vases in my gas kiln. I have a 60 pound propane tank and it lasted a while. While i was reducing today it ran out of propane. The smart thing to do would be to have a 20 pound grill tank as a backup for situations such as todays. So the point is I didnt get the reduction i was hoping for. Butler Gas ill see you tomorrow. I had mentioned i obtained cobalt acetate and was doing some glazing with it. I hope the pictures do it justice. Its not a bold difference, bu the colours im obtaining are not the harsh, deep, dark blues one sees from cobalt oxide-black. The colour of the crystals and the ground on the orangish vase are a result of cobalt acetate. I did get some colour movment with the blue vase where it has turned red. Once i get my propane tank filled i will be able to further reduce the pieces.

Did a fire on Thursday. Getting back into the swing of firing. Here are some new and old glaze recipes im working on. Some of these will need to be reduced in the gas kiln. Finally found cobalt acetate. Not a very common colorant used in pottery. Im getting crazy beautiful electric-lavender blues. I know of one potter in the world using as a ceramic colorant. My mentor, Jose Maria Marascal. Much more to come later this week.

Here are some pictures from the show on Saturday. Sandy and I did have a great day, and every facet of the show was a great success!

I fired these last night, Wednesday, the 20th, four days before the show. I have 8 , more to fire tonight, Thursday. I am completely out of clay and pieces that can be fired. This was a strategic move for me. I didnt buy anymore clay or make pieces so I wouldn‘t be up all night on Friday the night before the show. I want to be well rested and mentally prepared.

Here are two absolutely stellar axe-head shaped copper reduced crystals both on the same vase. After that are crystals grown at the lowest temperature range. These crystals are often thought of as flower shaped. Lastly are these little nuggets of holiday cheer known as ancillary or secondary crystals.

With time and enough zinc crystals will continue to grow next to one another and shapes commonly know as axe heads will begin to appear. Here are some examples of axe head shaped crystals.

When looking at a 2-3 inch crystal in a Macro-Crystalline glaze we are not looking at a single crystal. A crystal of those dimensions is made up of hundreds of thousands of individual crystals. Zinc-silicate or Willemite has a rhombohedral structure, in a ceramic glaze the crystals are exceedingly longer than wide. This is what gives the crystals their rod or needle like appearance. Here are 2 pictures which show the beginning of crystal growth at its high end temperature. Each of those, what looks like singular rods contain less than 100 individual crystals. In zinc-silicate glazes individual crystals can grow to almost any length, in width they are only about 1/12th the width of a human hair.

Here are a few results of the lite-reduction fire last Thursday. Almost every piece that comes out of the reduction kiln will spend at least a few minutes in the acid bath. Not so much for etching, but mostly to clean off the soot from the un-burnt carbon in the CO2 and CO.