Bricks

I got my test bricks back from Ron the other day. He really gave them a beating in his kiln ( IE. the fire box) . The recipe that I got from Gail Nicholas book did Ok, the other one did not...too flaky. Ron had two also on the bag wall and up in the stack so I suppose more test with the malachite recipe could be done. I think I said before that the bricks I have for this kiln are K-23's and K-26's. The difference, for anyone who does not know is that the higher the number, the harder the brick - naturally the k-26 looked better.
Today I finally got on the phone with Gay Smith who has a soft brick soda kiln and she was wonderful to talk to. I was kind of feeling a bit like I would only have this kiln for a very short time since it is soft brick but she was very encouraging that this was not always the case. She had her last soft brick kiln for 12 years. Granted Gay does not bombard her kiln with soda. She does not throw it in so it does not settles in the fire box/bag wall and she doesn't put a whole lot of soda on her pieces because she uses a lot of glazes. This was so true to what I did as well in grad school and also I might add that I got a lot of flack from the male grad students in my program . They seemed to think that if you put a pot in a salt/soda kiln you needed to always have the orange peel on it. I used this wonderful Strontium base glaze that got these really cool crystals on it and gray patches. The salt, which I did more had one effect and the soda , that I only did a few times had another effect. It was nice to hear someone else who enjoyed the effects salt/soda can have on a glaze and not just the clay body.( Although I do love orange peel on pots)~ At any rate, Gay and I talked about getting a new kind of brick called a K-28 and she did say that her kiln was coated with ITC and she did not have trouble with it as so many other people have. So.. it was very encouraging. I'm going to make more phone calls here and there this week and hopefully order some bricks this week. Hopefully I'll come to some conclusion also about the coating of the bricks also.
This evening I started the throw all the mugs for the special anniversary "project/order" I got for the Cedar Creek 40th anniversary and I'm excited to see what I came up with for that.
This week the kids are going to camp from 9 to 2:30 so once again, I kind of have a trial run of how life will be once school starts the end of this month. ( Of course if one of the girls does not like camp, this trial run could end quickly as it did in the beginning of the summer when I tried the same thing. Luckily when school start, that will be something that they will have to stick out. I'm now at the point of motherhood where I know I can not save them from all there fears.) Oh life.