A summer opening and some good pots

If Brenda Horrigan keeps coming to these summer kiln-openings, we may need to get a liquor license ...
Brenda, a fine writer and editor who once worked for me at Martha's Vineyard Magazine, has come to the past two openings with her son Cullen and a bottle of Prosecco and a container of orange juice. Instant mimosas all around ... Do I have cool friends, or what?
It was a small but friendly crowd at this opening, with Bob Skilton, Ed and Mary Sholkovitz, and Mie Elmhirst and her father Jaap. Jaap, in his 80s, is a botanist and expert on the plants of Belize, but he spent time telling me about his earlier love of glass. He looked at the kilns in my studio and identified instantly.
This was a better and faster firing than last week's. This one was packed more loosely, with fewer plates and low bowls, so much less kiln furniture to heat up. The reduction began, as I try to do it, at cone 012 and continued through to cone 10 flat around 3:30 p.m. That's about 6.5 hours from room temp to 2350 F, so it's about as efficient as it gets.
Plenty of reduction in the shinos and the temmokus and copper reds. It was a model firing in many ways, so I'm hoping to keep doing it that way. I'd rather pack somewhat fewer pots in the load than struggle for 12 hours to get up to temperature.
This is all a learning process, even after firing this thing for about six years.
I'll attach a few photos. Good shinos this time.