The little yellow teapot that (hopefully) could

People may not realize what a crapshoot making pottery is. You follow procedures, and hope for the best. Glaze firing is especially tricky. I select my glaze recipes, all of which I developed, because they are reliable. Some glazes are tricky and do crazy things in the firing and fail. My glazes are a bit like the banana bread recipe in Joy of Cooking: slap it together, slap it on the piece, bake it, turns out perfect 99% of the time. My electric kilns are all reliable too, but the big one has a computer to fire it: I give it speed, temperature, warmup, cool down, about like microwaving some leftover soup. But you never know. It is also true that the unfired glazed pot looks nothing like the fired--the piece shrinks, the glazes flow, things get shiny. So here is the little teapot I have been showing you all week, 9 am, headed into the kiln, fired up to about 2200 degrees by about 9 pm, cool until about 3 pm tomorrow, unloaded and pictured here. Check back.