Friday, September 7, 2007

Priceless Art

Over Labo(u)r Day weekend we were in Tacoma, Washington meeting my parents halfway from Portland. They brought up my production batch of pigment. (See previous video entry where I make a fool of myself). As you can see, we kept such a valuable item in a ‘safe’ place.



When I brought it home, I went to work on it separating the coarse back from the finer silt front. As I had to do this ‘from scratch’ I used a broken piece of old bamboo, instead of a carving knife as I did with my proof of concept batch. Compare the level of impurities to the Proof of Concept photos. Looks like I’ll have to refine it at least one or two more times.





The good news is that a co-worker donated two 5 gallon buckets full of blue clay. Although it doesn’t look like this will be a good source of pigment just yet, I think I’ll be able to make some containers from it to enable me to do a much better refining job!

More on the clay next week.