(22 May, 2005)
First, however, a small note: I have been thinking about
bringing up one of our old pulsed YAG heads, using an etalon
to narrow the bandwidth for reasonable coherence length,
Q-switching it for reasonably brief duration, and jamming
the output through a doubling crystal so I can do some
pulsed holography. The Q-switch will probably have to be
passive; I wonder about coffee (which can apparently
Q-switch ruby, according to one story I’ve heard from
before my time with lasers) or perhaps a thin slice of brown
beer-bottle glass... have to do some testing, I guess, to
see whether either of those has any potential for use as a
saturable absorber at 1064 nm.
Here are two pieces I fired to about Δ 10 today in moderate reduction:
Both of them are glazed with Joss Research “New Blue”. The little bowl warped pretty severely, but the colors are really sweet, and it’s kinda cute despite the warpage, or perhaps partly because of it. The platter is a bit heavy, but them’s the breaks; it worked really well, and I’m quite pleased with it. (Note, however, that it took me 7 months to figure out what I wanted to glaze it with — as you can see from the footring inscription, I threw it last September.)
I have been running low on my “Red Tenmoku”, so I mixed up some 75-25 Magic Brick Clay and unwashed Wood Ash this afternoon. I dipped one test tile in that (not hugely interesting, and very difficult to photograph in artificial light, so I don’t have an image of it here), and then I sieved the stuff and added it to the existing batch of “Neil’s Yard 725”, under the watchful eye of Miss LisaJulie, who then sat in on the firing. Here’s a test tile:
The big blotch of crystal stuff on the back is one
of my usual Rutile washes.
My email address is a@b.com, where a is my first name (jon, only 3 letters, no "h"), and b is joss. My phone number is +1 240 604 4495.