Website

Wuhu! I got a website! An it’s all thanks to Fabio, my most amazing roomie ever. He put a lot of efford into designing and programming it. Ihr findet mich jetzt auch unter www.utapfrengle.de oder unter www.utapfrengle.com

Social Media

Hey everybody, I finally got Instagram, Facebook and Co. You find my Ceramics Facebook profile under https://www.facebook.com/utapfrengleceramics/ and my regular Facebook profile under https://www.facebook.com/uta.pfraggel. My Instagram account is named @utapfrengleceramics (https://www.instagram.com/utapfrengleceramics/). Check it out!

Sgraffitoaddiction

After six days of working in my studio for at least 9 hours a day I was tired. My molds were tired too. I had slipcasted for six days straight, using up about 18 kg of slip that I had to mix in small batches so it wouldn’t settle in the bucket. On the sixth day the molds were so wet, that the clay didn’t release well from them. Therefore I decided to take the seventh day off and do nothing. I now understand why god needed a break after six days of creating ;-P  So with my break ahead of me I am writing this blog entry. Since slipcasting is mostly waiting, I did lots of other things in between filling and releasing molds. Mostly stuff I didn’t like too much, like recycling clay, wedging or mixing glazes. And since I still had a lot of recycle clay left over I threw some more easy cylindrical  mug-shapes and bowls. Since my mom had liked the jungle-mug a lot I wanted to make another one for her birthday which is coming up soon. The bowls I wanted to decorate with the phrase “I’m sorry for what I said when I was hungry”. My hope is that enough people can identify with it and will buy it when I sell them. So today after having cast the last bit of slip there was I sat at my table carving away. The bowls I did finish inbetween casting, but the mugs I had saved for later. I attatched handles in  a few different ways and started carving. The jungle-mug turned out nicely. But since I had so many other mugs and was in the mood for carving I decided to do another door-mug  as a hommage to Kerstin Gier’s book “Dream a little dream” (Silver trilogy). Well what can I say, it was so much fun, that I did several more mugs with doors on them. I like to imagine whom the door would belong to and why it looked this way.

Update

So far everything is going more or less well. I really need to start working on my portfolio though, for which I need to take photographs of stuff that hasn’t been fired yet. The test-plate that I painted with overglaze turned out quite well though. It did wrap a little too, unintentionally. I guess I need to use more tripods underneath it so it’ll be more stable and not wrap/ sink in as much. Also I probably shouldn’t fire them as hot as I did, since the overglaze can only just stand 1230 °C. I was wondering if I could fire it together with the bisqueware though I am not sure if that is hot enough. I’ll probably just try to place the plates on the cooler shelves in the lower part of the kiln. That way I can still fire them the way I did. And maybe I’ll also decrease the hold-time a little to give the plates less time to wrap around the tripods.

2nd Glazefire

Nachdem der Ofen (diesmal mit Ferro-Ringen) geladen war habe ich ihn am folgenden Tag befeuert. Als ich morgens ins Atelier kam hatte er schon 450 Grad und es roch äußerst komisch im ganzen Atelier. Von den Glasuren kann das bei dieser Temperatur eigentlich nicht kommen und jegliche Sulfate hätten schon beim Schrühbrand ausbrennen müssen. Nach einigem Überlegen und einem Telefonat mit Carl Jäger schien es mir am wahrscheinlichsten, dass der Kleber in der Aufglasur bei dieser Temperatur verbrannt ist, da sich der Geruch danach auch gelegt hat. Dennoch muss ich unbedingt die Kita anrufen und fragen, ob ich den Abzug endlich abholen kann. Gesund ist das ja sicher nicht mit den ganzen Gasen die sich da bilden.

Preparation

So the last week I emptied my second bisque load. Everything went fine. I found out that I can’t lay down the branches to save space because they will crack. But other than that nothing cracked. I mixed a bunch of glazes that still needed testing, especially the silicon carbide reds I was curious about. So I mixed a couple of variations and tried different grain sizes (4800 and 800). Feet were waxed and glazing began. Thanks to my testtiles I already knew more or less what I was going for. It still took a whole day and some reapplication till I could load the kiln. My iron-red-brown glaze and some others were mixed too thickly and would peel off the pots so I needed to redo them completely. But in the end almost everything fit in the kiln.

Supersaftiges Chia-Kastenbrot

Beim Großputz in der WG-Küche ist uns neulich eine Tüte mit Chiasaat in die Hände gefallen, die seit dem unbenutzt im Regal steht. Denn irgendwie wusste keiner so recht, was man damit anfangen sollte und außerdem hatten wir ja auch Leinsamen im Haus, die ich regelmäßig fürs Brot backen verwende. Da ich aber für einige Wochen eine Low-Carb-Diät gemacht habe ist das Brotbacken auf der Strecke geblieben. Und so hat meine  neue Mitbewohnerin, Meike, vor kurzem ein Chia-Brot gekauft.

2nd Bisque

It’s been exactly a month since I did my last bisque fireing. I have been superbusy throwing, slipcasting and slab-building so I can do a second bisque. Today I drove to my aunts place (by bike!) to load the kiln and candle it for a bit, so the pieces are really dry. Since it rained all day there’s a high humidity in the air and I don’t wanna risk it damaging my pots when I bisque it right away.

Some disappointment and a few nice surprises

After my excursion from Wednesday to Friday I went to my aunts place right away to unload the kiln. Kinda crazy after riding the train for so long already, I know. But I HAD to know how it had turned out. It was already dark when I got there and the thrill of anticipation couldn’t have been bigger. After all it was my first glaze-fireing and who could’ve known what would happen in this black-box???

Even hotter stuff

So yesterday was the kiln fireing. It is still cooling down. But it already has cooled down to 200 °C and even though my plan was to drive home today in the morning I couldn’t. There was still a mold to be made and one to be filled. So I stayed and read the text I had to read for university in my studio between slipcasting and kiln-checking. I just worry a little about my trip to Münster tomorrow since it will start at four in the morning and it’s almost 7 pm now and I didn’t catch a train back to Mainz yet. But I’ll manage somehow I guess. I’ll come back from Münster on Friday, quickly drop off the stuff at home, then head over to the studio till sunday and do nothing that day except resting. By then I’ll at least have earned that day off I think. The past weeks have been crazy busy here at the studio and at university and I barely managed to get one day off, neither during the week or on the weekend. Although I am pretty excited for my trip to Münster and the following one to the Documenta 14 I am also a little worried about taking breaks. So this is why I really should stick to my plan to take the coming sunday off. No waiting on kilns to cool down or glazes that still need to be mixed, no more new mold making (!) and no quicky on the wheel. Because deep down I know that there’s no such thing as quickies in the studio. It all takes time. Time to do and time to dry. I can’t and I shouldn’t rush it, otherwise things will just go bad as I already found out the hard way.
Anyways. Since I didn’t get much freetime lately that also means I increased the number of slipcast porcelain-branches a lot. And since I plan an installation of them it can’t hurt to start off having a couple more of them. Also the mold now has time to dry out over a few days so I will be able to make another load of branches when I come back.
Also I made new testtiles. I already used up most of the ones I had for all the glazes I mixed while the kiln was cooling down. But since I recently read a cool article about copper reds chemically reduced by adding silicon carbide to the glaze, I needed more testtiles. Silicon carbide usually is used as an abrasive and comes in different grain sizes. John Britt mentions using grit 600 or 800 but other sources say the finer the better. So I ordered 800 mesh and 2000 mesh and will test away with that. I’ll also try to mix some foodsafe glazes from the transparent glaze I bought ready made at Carl Jäger and adding colorants to it. They said it was still food safe afterwards and I won’t need much colorant since I plan on getting the look of a celadon.