New pots, fresh from the kiln. E.a.ceramics

Today is pottery time again. A few days ago, just before Christmas we finished firing the second batch of stuff and I am going to show you the result here on Steemit for the first time on social media.

It is a huge relief when you open the kiln and your babies look up to you and they look healthy and just how you imagined they would look like.
Well that is almost never the case. It was not at this time either. There are just to many variables on the way, especially if you are a beginner like we are. But, hey, when should we experiment and make mistakes if not now?! Never would be ideal but I am afraid that is not possible.
There are so many stages in making a pot and so many things that can go wrong.

First you start with making the pot on the wheel or by hand. After that you wait for it to dry a little bit, let`s say a day, to become leather hard so you can trim and give it the final form. If you are a beginner, it is very easy to mess it up at this point. If you survive trimming then you wait another couple of days so it gets bone dry ready for the first firing called Bisque Firing. This is the shorter firing up to a lower temperature, somewhere around 1000 degrees Celsius. Hopefully everything stays in one shape without any cracks.
The following day you can do the Glaze Fire which is the real deal. This is when most things can go wrong. You have to decide about the color, how to apply them, make sure there are no drips otherwise it will get stuck to the kiln shelf and you will break it at removal. This time you have to fire up to 1250 degrees Celsius and the whole process takes 24 hours including cooling down.

So as you can see there are plenty of possibilities to screw up. We did too. The most annoying thing is that it is not easy to figure out why the things turned out how they were supposed to. Why did the glaze drip? Why did they come out so amorphous? Why did it crack? Why did this color turn out like this?

However, overall we are very happy with the result (at least I am, do not ask my girlfriend), there are some really nice things on the shelves now, we learnt a lot and we are ready for the next firing to tackle some new challenges and make even better pots.