A Horse with no Mane

Keturah convinced me to throw some pots so we could do a horse hair firing.  So I threw a few 1 and 2 pound forms, it ended up being about 50 or so pots, 25 of each weight. 

Here are a few of the 2 pounders.

 

After I trimmed them I allowed them to get bone dry, and then rubbed them down with some steel wool to smooth out the rough edges.  I then rubbed them down one at a time with vegetable oil, and then burnished them with the back end of a spoon.  Here are a couple of pictures of the burnishing one static and one action shot.

 

Here’s a group shot of the first batch freshly burnished, you can see our kitchen light reflecting off of the surface of the pots.

 

Here’s a close up of one of the vases.

I then loaded the kiln to the brim with the pots, and fired the kiln up to around cone 010 (1657 f, 902 c), and then let it cool down to about 1100 f.  We then set up a station on the other kiln with a lazy susan, some kiln shelves, and a piece of fire blanket.  After the kiln reached 1100 f we began to take the pots out one by one and lay the horse hair on them, and allowed the hair burn and sizzle on the surface.

  

Here are a few photos of the hair being burned on the surface of the pots.

  

A group shot soon after we finished the last one.

  

A group shot of the pots after we washed them off.

  

After the pots dried we took some wax and polished the burnished surface to bring back some of the shine lost during the firing.  It ended up being about 23 pots that we finished this time around.

Here are a few shots of individual pots, look for these on our Etsy site in a couple of weeks.

Poppin’ and Lockin’

One of our friends gave us a bunch of cucumbers, so we thought we would go ahead and pickle them.  Our cucumber plants haven’t produced very many cucumbers this go round.  I sliced up all the cucumbers, and some jalapenos for the pickling process.  

 

Here is the water bath (back) and the pickling solutions (front).  The pickling solution is 3 cups White Vinegar, 3 cups water, and 3 teaspoons pickling salt.

Here we’ve added the jalapenos, cucumbers, garlic, mustard seeds, and some dill to the jars.  Now we put the lids on and drop them in the water bath for about 5 minutes.

 

Here they are in the water bath, this helps remove excess air which creates the vacuum when they cool.

The finished products, we ended up making 14 jars and two of them didn’t seal so we now have 12 jars of pickles that will be ready in about 3 months (2 months now since I’m slow at writing blogs).  Next project will be to pickle some okra and maybe some green beans.