Since working in the University studio in the summer, I’ve figured out a good home studio setup. I bought a kiln just before Halloween 2015, and it arrived the next week. At first, the plan was to clean out the tool room in the basement a little and turn it into a studio space and wire in the kiln. It changed to cleaning out a portion of the garage in front of the cars, and then my dad did the electrical work to install wiring for a 240 volt outlet. It took until Christmas eve for me to be able to do a glaze firing in the kiln.

Now, I’ve got a little room in the house dedicated as my studio, and the kiln works great. I’ve been making a lot of new work and experimenting with new forms and last week I even started doing some glaze testing 🙂 I’ve been making a lot of poppy mugs, a couple of coffee dripper cones, and now I make a few “wake and bake” pipe mugs. When I first saw them, I thought the idea was so ridiculous and they were so funny looking that I could never make them look good. Plus, the hollow handle was a bit of a challenge to think about at first– but I made a press mold out of Sculpey clay that works great.

All things pictured above are available in my Etsy shop, here:

https://www.etsy.com/shop/KiraCallCeramics