Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Pottery

Pottery is the ceramic ware made by potters. In everyday usage the term is taken to encompass a wide range of ceramics, including earthenware, stoneware, and porcelain. The places where such wares are made are called potteries. For a description of the nature of the material, It usually falls into three main classes—porous-bodied pottery, stoneware, and porcelain. Raw clay is transformed into a porous pottery when it is heated to a temperature of about 500°C. This pottery, unlike sun-dried clay, retains a permanent shape and does not disintegrate in water. Stoneware is produced by raising the temperature, and porcelain is baked at still greater heat. In this process part of the clay becomes vitrified, or glassy, and the strength of the pottery is increased. Pottery is formed while clay is in its plastic form. Either a long piece of clay is coiled and then smoothed, or the clay is centered upon a potter's wheel (used in Egypt before 4000 B.C.) that spins the clay while it is being shaped by the hand, or thrown. Decoration may be incised, and the piece is allowed to dry to a state of leather hardness before firing it in a kiln. The type of finish, depending on the kind or number of glazes, dictates the total number of firings. When slip and graffito are used, they are applied before the first firing. There are two types of fires—reducing and oxidizing. The former removes oxygen while the latter, a smokeless fire, adds it. Reduction and oxidation change the color of the fired clay and gave early potters their palette of red, buff, and black. This is about the pottery

Tuesday, February 5, 2008

Apartment search in Texas

I would love to give some tips for the people who are going for apartment search dallas. They are at first you need to remember that few things about apartment hunting will ever change. Renters still need to visit apartments, fill out lease applications, however, is the expanded role of the Internet in the search process. As renters become more technologically savvy, they are turning to the Internet more frequently to get information about prospective apartments before visiting the community or completing an application. What the Internet brings to the apartment search is information, and it can take hours to sift through it all. With so much information available, it can be all too easy to get side tracked by non-essential details in cyberspace.

Whether you're considering a move across town, across the country, or even overseas, the Internet's global reach makes it possible to conduct an apartment search anywhere in the world without ever leaving your seat. These apartment search sites will ask you for your preferences for location, size, price and amenities. Once you enter this data, the site will present you with a list of apartments that fit your criteria. You can then browse the listings and determine which apartments are worth a visit while quickly eliminating those apartments that don't fit your needs. In addition, these apartment search sites generally have links to additional rental resources, such as moving companies, utilities, roommate matching services, and rental insurance companies etc. and this had made the people easy to have a comfortable search. Especially big states like Texas where you cannot go and search for the apartments manually.