Neil Estrick Gallery, LLC

05/25/2026

05/13/2026

05/12/2026

The garden is in!

05/07/2026

Finally getting back to my glaze tiles project. Each tile gets a hole in the back for hanging, the right side gets covered in black underglaze to show glaze opacity, and the left side gets some lines cut in to show if the glaze breaks. Now they can dry out for bisque.

05/04/2026

Got a new glaze sieve brush. I've always used a big paint brush, but I saw this at the hardware store and thought it would be much better, and it is! Stiff bristles, easy to clean, ergonomic angle- it's perfect.

05/02/2026

Nothing better than coming into the studio on a Saturday morning to unload the kiln and finding it mis-fired.☹️ I took a look at the firing log and found that the middle relay was sticking on and off and threw everything out of whack right near peak temp. The top layer ran a little cold so I'll have to refire a few pieces, but over all or could have been much worse.

This is a solid state relay system. The SSRs will last forever, but each SSR is paired with a mechanical relay, and that's what was sticking. These are old mechanical relays that I repurposed from my previous kiln, so I'm not entirely surprised that it failed. It did last for over 350 firings on this kiln, and probably a couple hundred more on the previous kiln.

05/01/2026

Making more glaze tiles. Time to get the new glazes up on the board!

04/23/2026

You can get tungsten trimming blades on AliExpress and Temu for really low prices, so I thought I'd try a couple to see if they are any good. Turns out they work great. Nice and sharp, but not too sharp like some of the really expensive ones I've used. Yes, trimming tools can be too sharp, which makes them chatter and/or cut too aggressively.

The blades have a short stem on them that you can insert into a handle. For the little ones like in this photo I just drilled out the end of a cheap Xacto knife, making a hole just slightly smaller than the stem, and for about $7 total I've got a trimming tool with a replaceable tungsten blade.

The blades are incredibly hard, so I expect they will hold an edge for a long time. I tried to cut the stem with my mini bolt cutters but couldn't even scratch the stem. Left a dent in my cutters, though.

04/21/2026

Bisque loading day!

04/18/2026

Like I said...