Woodburning, Raku and Safety

Happy Wednesday!  

 

This week in SOHO Girl Talk was a repeat of last week with the second group learning about empathy and judging others, drawing their own "icebergs" and playing "The Big Wind Blows..."  The glaciers and icebergs were as thoughtful and wonderful as last week, but they were as thoughtful as ever! Girl Talk went well and everyone had a good time together.

 Everyone met back up in the fiber studio (SOHO's "home base") to have snack and get ready for their art projects that evening.  SOHO that night had two awesome activities happening: raku and wood burning -- it was a multi-tasking kind of day! The actual active time of raku is fairly short, so the girls and mentors would switch between the courtyard and fiber studio. Before going out to do Raku, the pairs worked together on the designs to burn onto their wood lap desks (remember them from a few weeks back?).  Then our guest teacher for raku, Paul Klasset, came to get us. 

 

Paul is a professional potter and does raku firings for every First Friday Sampler here at VisArts. He also teachers advanced pottery classes - all while creating and selling his own work. He was so nice and happy to be part of SOHO. Everyone came outside in the courtyard behind VisArts where we have 2 outdoor raku kilns. It was pretty cold but everyone was tough! Paul explained some safety rules around Raku since it does involve some VERY hot pottery and fire!

Paul had loaded the kiln with everyone's pieces that we had glazed a few weeks back.  The pots had been firing outside in the kiln while we had started SOHO. As he opened the kiln he explained that he would take the hot pots from the kiln and place each one into its own small, metal trashcan-like container. Then, each person would throw sawdust on top of the pot to create smoke. Evening opening the kiln was exciting because the pots were literally red hot!

 

After that each person would put the lid on top of the smoking trash can.
This combination of cooling quickly and the smoke creates beautiful irridescent colors, unique patterns and crackling on the surface of the pot.   All the girls were brave and went through the process safely.  After the lids are put on, the pots have to sit in the cans for about 15 minutes, so we went to learn the wood burners in the mean time.

 

 Tesni explained safety rules about the wood burners--a lot of safety discussion were had tonight! She also showed them how the tools worked and gave everyone some tips on how to make things go smoothly. If you've never done wood burning, it definitely takes some finesse! Rev Rock came in and told us stories about his experiences with wood burning -- it was a nice surprise to have an expert in the room. Thanks to Rock! (In case you've forgotten, Rock is the wonderful guy who rides to and from AJCES with the girls each week.

Paul came back in and got us so that we could retrieve our pots. He did the heavy lifting and took the pots out of the trashcans for us so that they could cool. Everyone was really excited to find theirs and see how they turned out. Each once is such a surprise! The process is really very magical. Once they had some time to cool, Paul dunked each pot into water to totally cool them. 

 Then the pairs took them inside to scrub and clean them up because there's a lot of soot from all of the burnt sawdust on them when they first come out of their cans. Everyone was really happy with the results of their pots-and there was even some very gracious trading between girls who like some of the other resutls better. Everyone all gave a big thank you to Paul for seeing such a unique process in action. One of the beautiful things about having SOHO at VisArts is the ability to show the women and girls processes that they may not have seen otherwise. Raku definitely falls into this category.

 

For the rest of class the group worked on wood burning their desk.  These didn't get quite finished but everyone had great persistence in experimenting with the different methods that worked for them in creating smooth lines. Everyone will finish their desks in another class.

We are officially halfway through SOHO! Room visits are coming up soon and more talks about make-overs are on the horizon...