A tale of three chess boards
Ceramic clay chess boards!
First I get slabs of different kinds of clay and slap them together. This happens to be the set of slabs I intend to make up the darker squares on the chess board. The lighter ones were made a month or two ago.
The grey clay on top is actually a very chunky brown clay, invented for making aquaduct pipes. It's got an earthenware firing range, but do I fire it to earthenware? I do not. I push it to cone 10 and get lovely bloating and warping, and the grog starts to melt and look all rough and oozy. You never know what you're going to get. The dark red looking ones are the untested black clays I just got in from Valentines. They're supposed to be black when fired. I have two textures here, rough and super rough. I also have an untested yellow clay, some terra cotta, and some porcelain layers in there. While the black clay boasts that it will not shrink much, the porcelain insists on shrinking more than even regular stoneware. The result is that sometimes the porcelain gets these great cracks in it because it's edges are being held in place by the tough clays. There is a lot of tension built right in by choice of clay bodies here.
Then I cut the slab into a smaller chunk so I can work with it. Seriously, YOU try rolling out 50 pounds of clay in one go. 25 is much easier. But not easy.
Flattened, rolled up, cut into slices.
Slices rolled flat and scored half way through with a pizza cutter. The pizza cutter provides a rolling cut which is supposed to reduce drag and help the corners not warp. They're left like that while I let them dry to leatherhard. Then I separated them and scraped the surface of each and every one to clean up the inter-clay smearing. It just looks better if the porcelain (an iron-free clay) is not covered with iron. And even the black and brown benefit from showing off their distinct qualities.
This stage is going to get vastly easier when I get my slab roller installed in the studio. There's too much variation in thickness by this method. I need to make smaller slabs while I wait for the slab roller, and perhaps use rolling guides. But for now, we'll revel in their differences.
That's only one oddly shaped slab. The further away one is the iron stains on the cloth it was covered with during rolling.
And some clock faces made, for good measure. I have some already, but they're a lighter mix of clays. I like variety, can you tell?
Time to load. They're not bone dry here, but I candled them for ages to slow dry them gently but purposefully.
A tile guy I once bought some equipment from told me to do the first firing flat, and stack them like bricks so they hold each other's edges down. But screw it, these are small, handled roughly, and fairly rustic in nature anyway. A little warping is going to happen no matter what, and kiln space is important. So we're doing it this way this time. It's a learning experience.
Here's an interesting tidbit I picked up once: Commercial tiles, the sort you have in your bathroom, are not made like this. They're actually made of dry clay dust, put into a form and compressed so hard that they stick together in a very tile-like fashion. It's also why they're easy to cut in straight lines. My kind of tile is rolled, so all the little particles in the clays are lined up and working together. They do not want to be cut. They do remember everything that has happened to them as a group. They do want desperately to warp, to tell their stories by remembering the odd shapes they have been on their way to tiledom.
I set the pyrometric cones -- 7, 8, 9, 10. That was optimistic, as it turns out.
I went to a demonstration a while back by the Friths. David Frith said that he bisque fires his huge platters on edge, leaning a bit with their faces down. This gives a low failure rate, he said, and he should know. He pushes his platters hard, handling them a lot when wet, peeling them off their bats, inspecting them, the putting them back down for more shape changing, and generally installing a lot of potential for warpage. He still gets some, but not as much as he perhaps deserves, so the technique seemed worth trying out for myself. My clock faces have a high failure rate because of all that clay tension, and because any flat clay thing is gagging to crack anyway, so I thought I would give his method a go with the smaller ones. Of course it's the big ones that are going to want to crack the very most, but there isn't enough space left at the top to stand them on edge.
Meanwhile, woodwork began.
Dave cut the wood for me, then I sanded and stained it. I'll learn how to use the woodworking tools someday, but this doesn't seem like the right time to do that. I had trouble using the tiny nails he suggested on that hard, hard plywood, so he saved me from a world of frustration and did the terrible tapping for me. Good Dave.
The worst part of having to go out to the clay stack for another bag on a rainy night in the dark... I hate that pop-crunch sound. But not as much as they do. I've since noticed that they really do hang right around the back door of the house at night. What do you think they want?
And then the kiln died. Like a plant, not an animal. Dave is still going to try to figure out if it can be fixed, but after 20 hours, 14 of which the kiln was set to 100%, it only got to 1060C. That's just not enough for the porcelain, and I really wanted to see what happened to the new black and yellow clays at full temperature.
Okay, it's interesting, at least. Not what I want, but interesting. I saved a few tiles out in case I want to remember and try this again on purpose some time. See, those browns? Now that is what the terra cotta and the pipe clay actually want to be. Remember that for later.
A level down, and the clays are darker. Hotter, but not hot enough.
So it's into the square kiln they go. This kiln is rated to 1200C, which is not really enough, but it's a huge improvement over what the round kiln does these days. I got Dave to reverse wire the controller so that it won't trip as long as the temperature I dial in is LESS than the temperature inside the kiln. That means it won't turn itself off ever. Shocking. Literally. Something about the bricks themselves becoming conductive in this kiln. Yes yes, it's bad for the bricks, and will shorten the life of that kiln, but I want my tiles, and this is the only way I can see to get them done this week. Don't try this at home. Yes, I know, I'm doing it at home, but I have a resident sparky.
I just want them all in there at this point. No longer care about how they're stacked, what happens happens.
Clocks have to go flat in this kiln, too. I'll give the Frith method another go some other time.
Ah, what a difference a few hundred degrees makes. THESE are black tiles. Still too hot to unload, but it heartened me enough to get me through the rest of the work I need to do in the day. Yes yes, I know you like the underfired ones better, but this is my vision. You should be able to make your own just the way you like them with all I've just told you.
And based on this little peek, I went ahead and ordered new clock hands to be sent. Because they're so dark, I got straight red hands, and squiggle hands in gold and silver. Mostly silver. Probably not entirely clever of me, I've only sold three of the clocks from last year. I'm just kissing my money goodbye to become rich in unwanted clocks. But perhaps someday people will see in them what I see in them, and I'll sell enough to cover expenses. At my level, that's all I can really hope for.
I've been putting coats of this waterproof stain stuff on the three boards, figuring I would get them nice and dark, then put a glossy clear coat on to make them more chip-resistant. Super slow motion, like a coat a day, but one was ahead of the others by a day, and, well, it was getting silly. So I finally got around to putting the clear coat on and guess what! It beads up into little droplets on the surface of all that waterproof stain. I DID do a test, and that did not happen. Oh well, one less step. That clear stuff is pretty noxious anyway.
In the mean time, I need to get working! I set up a brown-scale chess board for photos back in January, and it is that which appears in my COS guide image. That, at least, should be on display. So I hauled it out to the tent, and was pleased to see that we got it right, it still fits in the wood we measured out. And room for grout, too.
I flipped each tile over on the work board. These are the backs of the tiles.
Then adhesive. I got a kind made for tiles on wood.
Then the stained wood board upside down over it. I pushed down gently.
The flipped the whole thing over, supporting the work board from underneath.
And removed the work board. I did fuss the little tiles around a bit to get nicer lines after I took the photo. It'll dry overnight and get grouted in the morning. Will I use the blue or the black grout? Probably blue because this is a low-contrast board. Let's keep it all in the same value range, shall we?
Of course this was all done in the near dark because the sun set right about the time I decided to just do this. Later, I went out with a flashlight/torch to see if I had really closed the adhesive bucket all the way. With actual light, I read the side, and it tells me that it could be days or weeks before the adhesive dries. I think they're talking about floors, though. This is small enough to pop into an oven at low heat for a few hours. That's probably a stupid idea, but I imagine I'll be testing it before this is done.
Remember all those clock works I ordered because the clock faces looked so good at first peek? Mistake. They fused together, and broke when pried apart. But I'll make more. The clocky bits will not be wasted.
I thought I might use these for mosaic pieces. Note the rainy background. That has been a nearly constant feature for weeks now. It's got me and everyone else really worn down.
But the tiles came out nice. Some of them stuck together too, but for various reasons, these snap apart pretty well. Except the ones that don't. There are enough.
For the next board, I'll put adhesive over the whole of the wood face first. In retrospect, the individual glop method is probably going to be too weak, and require too much grout.
It's time for a big bad lesson about life, in which the moral of the story is "I am an idiot." I didn't test first. I've tiled before, I knew what to do. Yeah, the container said not to use this blue grout on unglazed tiles, but they meant wimpy store bought tiles. These puppies are vitrified to the core, ain't nuthin' seepin' into these. Well guess what? The grout clung in defiant blueness to every delicious bump and crack I'd taken delight in creating. I was so tired, I didn't know what to do. I tried my super duper heavy duty tile cleaner, meant for the job of removing the residual grout from newly lain tiles. Nope. I freaked out and scrubbed them with straight chlorine bleach. Nope. But as I considered whether I could get away with an artistic "I meant to do that!", the bleach pooled in the grooves and started turning the blue grout that I did want to a sickly yellow.
Here are my lovely assistants. They turned up to keep me calm and working, but I made them do horrid grunt labour. The mother got to paint my giant wooden board, and the daughter sorted my game pieces into baskets by animal. I think it amused them to watch me try to think my way out of the blue grout debacle with a sleepless brain.
Anyway, the answer became clear. I did NOT mean to do that, and I was not going to put it out on display like that. It was good to know that bleach will remove the colour eventually. The answer: oik the tiles out, soak them in a pan of bleach, and reset another day. Reuse the wood part of this board for high contrast tiles. So the prising off began, along with the Violet Beauregard jokes.
And the scraping.
And then there was a miracle. Oh wait, no. And then there was a lot of hard work, and at the end I have three chess boards. Two of them are wet in this photo because I'd just cleaned them. The adhesive I have can double as a grout, and it got its chance to serve both functions. Grey is not my top choice, but my top choice betrayed me by being cooler in my imagination that in real life. And the grey is still better than a lot of colours would have been. I'm okay with it.
I'm pleased with the end result, but it's been a hard few weeks. Although some of the work couldn't have been done sooner because I didn't have all the clays I wanted, I'll attempt to leave more time to recover from failures next time around. Famous last words.
And unless some new disaster happens overnight, that, my tile loving friend, is the end of the story. I might take photos of them with chess pieces on them in a few days, but that is matter for another post.
First I get slabs of different kinds of clay and slap them together. This happens to be the set of slabs I intend to make up the darker squares on the chess board. The lighter ones were made a month or two ago.
The grey clay on top is actually a very chunky brown clay, invented for making aquaduct pipes. It's got an earthenware firing range, but do I fire it to earthenware? I do not. I push it to cone 10 and get lovely bloating and warping, and the grog starts to melt and look all rough and oozy. You never know what you're going to get. The dark red looking ones are the untested black clays I just got in from Valentines. They're supposed to be black when fired. I have two textures here, rough and super rough. I also have an untested yellow clay, some terra cotta, and some porcelain layers in there. While the black clay boasts that it will not shrink much, the porcelain insists on shrinking more than even regular stoneware. The result is that sometimes the porcelain gets these great cracks in it because it's edges are being held in place by the tough clays. There is a lot of tension built right in by choice of clay bodies here.
Then I cut the slab into a smaller chunk so I can work with it. Seriously, YOU try rolling out 50 pounds of clay in one go. 25 is much easier. But not easy.
Flattened, rolled up, cut into slices.
Slices rolled flat and scored half way through with a pizza cutter. The pizza cutter provides a rolling cut which is supposed to reduce drag and help the corners not warp. They're left like that while I let them dry to leatherhard. Then I separated them and scraped the surface of each and every one to clean up the inter-clay smearing. It just looks better if the porcelain (an iron-free clay) is not covered with iron. And even the black and brown benefit from showing off their distinct qualities.
This stage is going to get vastly easier when I get my slab roller installed in the studio. There's too much variation in thickness by this method. I need to make smaller slabs while I wait for the slab roller, and perhaps use rolling guides. But for now, we'll revel in their differences.
That's only one oddly shaped slab. The further away one is the iron stains on the cloth it was covered with during rolling.
And some clock faces made, for good measure. I have some already, but they're a lighter mix of clays. I like variety, can you tell?
Time to load. They're not bone dry here, but I candled them for ages to slow dry them gently but purposefully.
A tile guy I once bought some equipment from told me to do the first firing flat, and stack them like bricks so they hold each other's edges down. But screw it, these are small, handled roughly, and fairly rustic in nature anyway. A little warping is going to happen no matter what, and kiln space is important. So we're doing it this way this time. It's a learning experience.
Here's an interesting tidbit I picked up once: Commercial tiles, the sort you have in your bathroom, are not made like this. They're actually made of dry clay dust, put into a form and compressed so hard that they stick together in a very tile-like fashion. It's also why they're easy to cut in straight lines. My kind of tile is rolled, so all the little particles in the clays are lined up and working together. They do not want to be cut. They do remember everything that has happened to them as a group. They do want desperately to warp, to tell their stories by remembering the odd shapes they have been on their way to tiledom.
I set the pyrometric cones -- 7, 8, 9, 10. That was optimistic, as it turns out.
I went to a demonstration a while back by the Friths. David Frith said that he bisque fires his huge platters on edge, leaning a bit with their faces down. This gives a low failure rate, he said, and he should know. He pushes his platters hard, handling them a lot when wet, peeling them off their bats, inspecting them, the putting them back down for more shape changing, and generally installing a lot of potential for warpage. He still gets some, but not as much as he perhaps deserves, so the technique seemed worth trying out for myself. My clock faces have a high failure rate because of all that clay tension, and because any flat clay thing is gagging to crack anyway, so I thought I would give his method a go with the smaller ones. Of course it's the big ones that are going to want to crack the very most, but there isn't enough space left at the top to stand them on edge.
Meanwhile, woodwork began.
Dave cut the wood for me, then I sanded and stained it. I'll learn how to use the woodworking tools someday, but this doesn't seem like the right time to do that. I had trouble using the tiny nails he suggested on that hard, hard plywood, so he saved me from a world of frustration and did the terrible tapping for me. Good Dave.
The worst part of having to go out to the clay stack for another bag on a rainy night in the dark... I hate that pop-crunch sound. But not as much as they do. I've since noticed that they really do hang right around the back door of the house at night. What do you think they want?
And then the kiln died. Like a plant, not an animal. Dave is still going to try to figure out if it can be fixed, but after 20 hours, 14 of which the kiln was set to 100%, it only got to 1060C. That's just not enough for the porcelain, and I really wanted to see what happened to the new black and yellow clays at full temperature.
Okay, it's interesting, at least. Not what I want, but interesting. I saved a few tiles out in case I want to remember and try this again on purpose some time. See, those browns? Now that is what the terra cotta and the pipe clay actually want to be. Remember that for later.
A level down, and the clays are darker. Hotter, but not hot enough.
So it's into the square kiln they go. This kiln is rated to 1200C, which is not really enough, but it's a huge improvement over what the round kiln does these days. I got Dave to reverse wire the controller so that it won't trip as long as the temperature I dial in is LESS than the temperature inside the kiln. That means it won't turn itself off ever. Shocking. Literally. Something about the bricks themselves becoming conductive in this kiln. Yes yes, it's bad for the bricks, and will shorten the life of that kiln, but I want my tiles, and this is the only way I can see to get them done this week. Don't try this at home. Yes, I know, I'm doing it at home, but I have a resident sparky.
I just want them all in there at this point. No longer care about how they're stacked, what happens happens.
Clocks have to go flat in this kiln, too. I'll give the Frith method another go some other time.
Ah, what a difference a few hundred degrees makes. THESE are black tiles. Still too hot to unload, but it heartened me enough to get me through the rest of the work I need to do in the day. Yes yes, I know you like the underfired ones better, but this is my vision. You should be able to make your own just the way you like them with all I've just told you.
And based on this little peek, I went ahead and ordered new clock hands to be sent. Because they're so dark, I got straight red hands, and squiggle hands in gold and silver. Mostly silver. Probably not entirely clever of me, I've only sold three of the clocks from last year. I'm just kissing my money goodbye to become rich in unwanted clocks. But perhaps someday people will see in them what I see in them, and I'll sell enough to cover expenses. At my level, that's all I can really hope for.
I've been putting coats of this waterproof stain stuff on the three boards, figuring I would get them nice and dark, then put a glossy clear coat on to make them more chip-resistant. Super slow motion, like a coat a day, but one was ahead of the others by a day, and, well, it was getting silly. So I finally got around to putting the clear coat on and guess what! It beads up into little droplets on the surface of all that waterproof stain. I DID do a test, and that did not happen. Oh well, one less step. That clear stuff is pretty noxious anyway.
In the mean time, I need to get working! I set up a brown-scale chess board for photos back in January, and it is that which appears in my COS guide image. That, at least, should be on display. So I hauled it out to the tent, and was pleased to see that we got it right, it still fits in the wood we measured out. And room for grout, too.
I flipped each tile over on the work board. These are the backs of the tiles.
Then adhesive. I got a kind made for tiles on wood.
Then the stained wood board upside down over it. I pushed down gently.
The flipped the whole thing over, supporting the work board from underneath.
And removed the work board. I did fuss the little tiles around a bit to get nicer lines after I took the photo. It'll dry overnight and get grouted in the morning. Will I use the blue or the black grout? Probably blue because this is a low-contrast board. Let's keep it all in the same value range, shall we?
Of course this was all done in the near dark because the sun set right about the time I decided to just do this. Later, I went out with a flashlight/torch to see if I had really closed the adhesive bucket all the way. With actual light, I read the side, and it tells me that it could be days or weeks before the adhesive dries. I think they're talking about floors, though. This is small enough to pop into an oven at low heat for a few hours. That's probably a stupid idea, but I imagine I'll be testing it before this is done.
Remember all those clock works I ordered because the clock faces looked so good at first peek? Mistake. They fused together, and broke when pried apart. But I'll make more. The clocky bits will not be wasted.
I thought I might use these for mosaic pieces. Note the rainy background. That has been a nearly constant feature for weeks now. It's got me and everyone else really worn down.
But the tiles came out nice. Some of them stuck together too, but for various reasons, these snap apart pretty well. Except the ones that don't. There are enough.
For the next board, I'll put adhesive over the whole of the wood face first. In retrospect, the individual glop method is probably going to be too weak, and require too much grout.
It's time for a big bad lesson about life, in which the moral of the story is "I am an idiot." I didn't test first. I've tiled before, I knew what to do. Yeah, the container said not to use this blue grout on unglazed tiles, but they meant wimpy store bought tiles. These puppies are vitrified to the core, ain't nuthin' seepin' into these. Well guess what? The grout clung in defiant blueness to every delicious bump and crack I'd taken delight in creating. I was so tired, I didn't know what to do. I tried my super duper heavy duty tile cleaner, meant for the job of removing the residual grout from newly lain tiles. Nope. I freaked out and scrubbed them with straight chlorine bleach. Nope. But as I considered whether I could get away with an artistic "I meant to do that!", the bleach pooled in the grooves and started turning the blue grout that I did want to a sickly yellow.
Here are my lovely assistants. They turned up to keep me calm and working, but I made them do horrid grunt labour. The mother got to paint my giant wooden board, and the daughter sorted my game pieces into baskets by animal. I think it amused them to watch me try to think my way out of the blue grout debacle with a sleepless brain.
Anyway, the answer became clear. I did NOT mean to do that, and I was not going to put it out on display like that. It was good to know that bleach will remove the colour eventually. The answer: oik the tiles out, soak them in a pan of bleach, and reset another day. Reuse the wood part of this board for high contrast tiles. So the prising off began, along with the Violet Beauregard jokes.
And the scraping.
And then there was a miracle. Oh wait, no. And then there was a lot of hard work, and at the end I have three chess boards. Two of them are wet in this photo because I'd just cleaned them. The adhesive I have can double as a grout, and it got its chance to serve both functions. Grey is not my top choice, but my top choice betrayed me by being cooler in my imagination that in real life. And the grey is still better than a lot of colours would have been. I'm okay with it.
I'm pleased with the end result, but it's been a hard few weeks. Although some of the work couldn't have been done sooner because I didn't have all the clays I wanted, I'll attempt to leave more time to recover from failures next time around. Famous last words.
And unless some new disaster happens overnight, that, my tile loving friend, is the end of the story. I might take photos of them with chess pieces on them in a few days, but that is matter for another post.