Oh dear, kiln ware failure, it’s all gone horribly horribly wrong.
You cannot tell until you unpack the kiln. I carefully lifted each shelf and walked very steadily through the garage, the utility, the kitchen and the hall until I got to the dining room where I laid each shelf one at a time on an upturned box on the dining table.
When I got all the way down to the kittens, I had a feeling of dread. As I took the kittens off the wires, most of their little arms and legs just fell off and when I laid them in the tray, so did the heads.
The gargoyles have hooks in their backs for wings, as I picked the bodies off the shelf, the hooks disintegrated, as did every hook in every foot and hand.
Nearly all the wire stringing hooks that took so long to make and were so carefully embedded in the wet clay, just crumbled to dust. This was a mystery because I’d used the same wire successfully in the Egyptians. The babies seemed OK and the new dolls were too but either the placing in the kiln or the coloured slip which I had made had overheated the wires locally, which had died. Some of the eyeballs had scrunched up as if it had got a bit hot and most of the shoe soles were no good either.
Oh dear, what a waste of time and effort, what a spectacular fail.
There isn’t time to pour it all again and clean and fire it twice. I have washed and grit scrubbed the bits that look alright and I have experimentally strung a new doll to see if the hooks would hold up but there will be no gargoyles or kittens at the show.
The problem is the quality of the wire, bought through the big river retailer, arriving from China and purporting to be temperature resistant nichrome wire. I have never had problems with British made wire but cannot find it fine enough to make tiny stringing hooks.
The difficulty is a true miniature problem. As you go smaller the tools and materials have to shrink too but the strength of anything you are going to play with needs to be as good if not better proportionally than in standard twelfth scale.
I will not be appearing with an empty table. I take about a thousand items and was wondering how to fit the new stuff on the table, which singular problem has disappeared to be replaced by about two hundred useless bits of porcelain, lying in sad little heaps on the dining table.
I don’t know many 24th scale specialists; this could be the reason, the smaller you go, the harder it gets, though I last had a failure this spectacular about thirty three years ago, when the OH, trying to be helpful and manly, balanced a hard plastic tool box, with all the dolls to go to a show, on the lip of the boot of the car. It crashed on to the drive and nearly all of the dolls broke.
You may have noticed he got involved this time, commandeering the kitchen for a fortnight when I should have been in there pouring, if I had done it then I’d have found out a fortnight ago and still had time to experiment with bigger, different wire stringing hooks in a new pour.
There’s a moral here somewhere.
I still have to china paint anything that looks as if it might work but after the show I will book a kiln engineer to come and replace the elements and turn the temperature dial up the right way. The last chap put the dial on upside down, causing many years of guess work, which might be critical now.
When I tell you what I do is quite tricky, you may well have wondered how tricky it can be to make a porcelain doll with fourteen bits of porcelain invisibly strung under three inches tall. The proof of the pudding is in the failure.
On the other hand if it were easy, there would be no point in trying.
Months of work, binned.
Depressing.
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