Wolfville Arbor Day

Almost the end of April, and that means deadlines are looming. One for taxes, which are mostly finished. The other one needs to update his banking info with Rev Can before we can e file and get the whopping $26 return. The other deadline is snow tires need to be swapped before the end of the month because we have studded ones on the truck. I went to see my friendly neighbourhood garage mechanic today after work and gave him a hug to ensure that he would be able to do that for me tomorrow.
Time does speed by when you are forced to spend all day at work. I am into week two now, and I am still holding up OK. Today was Wolfville Arbor Day. A local businessman donated 85 trees to the town to be planted on public and private land. We organised 8 volunteers from the local Katimavik group, 6 second year Horticulture Students from Kingstec and some town gardener volunteers (who we affectionately call the Gorilla Gardeners) to do the work this morning. I think we got about 50 planted, with still another 35 to go into a local park space later on. This is definitely a fun part of the job, we get to talk to homeowners in town that are thrilled to be getting a new tree for free, and we get to have a celebratory barbecue to say thank you to our volunteers after the hard work is done.

Homework

School work is coming to an end. The students are finished their part of the deal and now I have marking to do. I brought it home with me yesterday. It's homework.

I started taking a class last week at the Nova Scotia Centre for Craft and Design. I'm not fond of glazing so I enrolled in a glaze class hoping to pick up some tips or at least become more comfortable with the process. My last glaze kiln was a complete disaster. Of 9 pieces, only 1 is semi passable, and the rest exhibit every problem there is. The most disappointing was a bowl that would have been beautiful except two bits of ceramic stuff cracked off my pyrometer in the kiln and fell into the bowl while it was firing. Bugger.
The glaze class is mostly focused on making and testing glazes, but I figure it can't hurt to force myself to glaze more. It's all practice. I have to make at least 36 test tiles for next class which I did yesterday. It's homework.
I was called back to work at the Town of Wolfville parks dept. starting Monday. That's a week earlier than I thought and now I'm scrambling to find my work clothes and water proof my boots. There were some other things I was hoping to get accomplished before I went back, like rototilling the vegetable garden and getting a new back tire on my motorcycle, but these will have to be relegated to weekends now. They're homework.

Best Laid Plans

I planned to glaze fire another kiln today, and worked hard to get it all ready this morning. Packing a kiln can be tricky, and even more so because the pots I had left to fire were wide and so didn't fit well between the shelf support posts. But after an hour of futzing around, I got it all in, and tried to turn it on. It didn't want to turn on. I wondered if somehow I had tripped a breaker in the panel so I went to check, and that is when I realized that we only had one 50 amp breaker, and it was connected to the other kiln that I used on Friday.
I knew I couldn't use both kilns at once, but I thought it was because there was insufficient power to do this. I was unaware that it was because we can't wire both up at the same time. Ooops. My electrical specialist (aka the Sweetie) is in marking Hell right now trying to get his papers back to his students by last class tomorrow. I considered using the other kiln, but at this point I think I'll just garden instead.

Lots and Lots of Pots

We fired up the large kiln for the first time last week on Friday. I figured I had enough pots lying around waiting to be glazed that I could fill it. It was a bit scary. We we got it out of storage to have a good look, and the electrical wiring seemed a bit dodgy to me. Old, and the insulation looked cracked in places. The other one spent a few days sourcing proper sized wire and a socket to make it alright to use. The plug that came on it was undersized. Some of the kiln brick is a bit crumbly where it had been previously patched and the two lower prongs on the kiln sitter were broken off. Before we put a lot of time and effort to fix it up, I decided we should see if the elements were OK first. They all seemed to work in a test when I candled the kiln for a few hours to drive the damp out, so I loaded it up and had a go. In fact, I had more than enough pots to fill it because as you can see, I have a shortage of proper sized shelves, and so I still have some for another go which I will try to get into the mid sized kiln tomorrow.

All went well. (Read: Nothing blew up or caught fire.) The top part of the kiln was a little hotter than the bottom, and I turned the top elements off and waited an extra 20 minutes for the cone on the bottom shelf to drop before I turned the other switches off completely. With the top element off, the kiln seemed to stay at 2160 F nicely (according to the analog pyrometer) without moving up or down.

On Sunday, I tried to photograph my new pots, but I was unhappy with the results and so spent two days researching how to photograph ceramics. Here are two of the not too terrible photography attempts.
There is just so much to know isn't there? So now I'm off to make a light box, find a gradated (graduated?) background and figure out the white balance on my camera...

Psanky

I learned a new word this weekend, and also a new skill. Did you know that those Ukrainian (and other Easter eggs) were called Psanky? Me neither but now I do. Sounds more naughty when you put it that way doesn't it?
And I learned how to do it, which I always wanted to try. I got the chance this weekend when friend mentioned last week that her family do it as a tradition each Easter, even though they are not Ukrainian or even that religious.
I went at 10 am and 4 and a half hours later this is what I had. I was at least smart enough to decorate the front and back side with different colours so it looks like I made two. This is a craft that takes a long time.