Hot stuff

Running out of oil.

Nope, I'm not talking about Peak Oil here. Our oil heater ran out of oil at midnight on February 28. Even if spring has not yet officially arrived, it has been forcibly ushered in to our house. Spring is here, heater's out of oil, time to warm up. Actually, I don't relish the idea of shivering until the weather warms up for real, so we might just order another delivery of heating oil. Till then we are wearing warm clothes, doing lots of laundry, and cooking and baking as much as possible. I have rigged up our (electric!) dryer to vent inside, so we get lots of warm humid air as a reward for keeping up with the laundry. It's surprisingly non-linty, and as a bonus, it smells like clean laundry. The oil heater smelled like diesel fuel, so this is a welcome change. When we're not using the dryer air upstairs, we can vent it to the basement, where my clay studio is. It's pretty cold down there right now.

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It's starting to feel like spring is just around the corner. The statistics aren't necessarily in favor of that notion. All the same, the Canada geese have mostly disappeared, presumably traveling north, and this week has brought us an influx of red-winged blackbirds, with their song that sounds like midsummer. It makes me think of freshly cut hay on a humid day, next to a river.

I am really looking forward to warm weather and working on a nice big vegetable garden. We started a few of our transplants this week. I made our own indoor greenhouse to start our seeds in. It's just a utility shelf with a 4-foot fluorescent fixture hanging from the top shelf, about 10" above the mini-greenhouse thingies, two 40-watt bulbs on the shelf below, and a wrapping of plastic sheeting. Seems warm and bright so far, and a lot less costly than the alternative.

So far we have seeded cauliflower, broccoli, & chard for early season veggies. We also seeded parsley, bell peppers, and hot peppers, since they are supposed to take a very long time to germinate. All of this seeding and planning ahead revolves around the last frost date. We've gotten all kinds of opinions from locals about when that date is, anything from April 15 to June 1. According to worldclimate.com, it's somewhere around April 15. So I'm using May 1 as a working date for setting out things that can be planted after the last frost date, and June 1 for warm ground things like tomatoes. I know I could use cold frames and things like that to get the tomatoes out there sooner, but I am trying to do this with a minimum of expense. I'm doing things like saving wood ashes and eggshells for fertilizer, and saving plastic bottles for use as hot caps.

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I am making slow but steady progress towards kicking off my ceramic tile business. The basement studio is starting to look like a studio instead of an assortment of spare parts. I built a tile press and promptly shattered my test mold on it. I guess that means it's powerful enough... I made 40-some test tiles and little objects and had my first bisque firing last weekend. Everything went well, the kiln fired evenly, and nothing exploded. While the kiln was firing, I started cleaning out the workshop shed that houses it. Yuck! Some 20-years worth of debris, and a dirt floor which has turned to a fine dust that attracts the neighborhood cats. A bonfire took care of the piles of cardboard and wood scraps, but I don't know what I'm going to do with all the other junk, the giant spider colony, and the icky dirt/dust/poo floor. I'd love to pour a concrete floor slab in there, but that's not in the cards right now.

The native clay fired to a deep brown-red, and is surprisingly strong. I was a little disappointed that it didn't come out blue-green, but I am thrilled with everything else about it. So, success brings a whole new set of challenges.The next experiment will be to fire it to cone 6 glaze temperature and see if it is still a clay or if it becomes a glaze. Then I will have to find a place where I can legally dig up a pile of it, and figure out how best to refine it and formulate it. I may need a clay mixer and some other things. I had fun building the tile press, so I'm thinking about building my own clay mixer too. This looks a lot more difficult, and I'm not too sure about these plans, but the retail version compels me to seriously consider the homemade version. In the meantime I think I'll consign my unused pasta machine to the studio (Sorry, Ron).

There are some challenges involved in tile making. One is how to keep the tiles from warping while they are drying. I'm not over that hump yet, so I'll keep experimenting. I am making some drying racks from hardware cloth and hope to have some success with that. Another challenge is to achieve a consistent tile size when the clay shrinks from 8 to 13 percent in the firing process. I can't really start making press molds till I figure out what size to make them. I've started carving some models anyways, since their size can be altered before casting the molds. Rolling big consistent slabs for cutting these correctly sized flat tiles from is a challenge too. I can already tell that my wrists are not up to doing this with a rolling pin all the time, so I have invested in a nice big slab roller. I think this item is worth buying retail (well, I got it on sale), since I need really consistent results from this, with as little effort as possible.

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Today, I'm off to paint the basement floor. This should help keep down the dust in there, and perk it up a little. I want to paint the walls too, but unfortunately we can't do that until we finish the fiber reinforced wall system.