Another thing that got accomplished this weekend is Greg Bender’s sculpture of Shiitake mushroom logs.
Here’s Greg with his Grasshopper and Ant.
Alone with the kiln.
Pizza master Tom with Andreas, Lyza, Slate, David and Rose.
Yum! Grilled Pizza!
Kiln late in firing.
I’m at Co-Op of Seagrove Potters today – come see me!
We did not, luckily, burn down the house, thank the gods and powers to be, but the kiln got hoooooooooooooottttt and wore our butts out last night. Everything started great, the beginning of the firing was a breeze. Adam and I joked about being “armchair firers”, since for the first 10 hrs or so this kiln is so mellow, and you can literally spend firing most of that time by sitting in a chair, in front of the firebox (knowing it will be all over in about 12+ more hours).
Yes. I am a lazy firer, I admit. The days of getting high on 10 -24 hour shifts of stoking big slabs of wood into a fuel hungry hot-ass anagama and enjoying every minute of it are over for me. Sure, I’ll still do it for the nostalgia for the early days of my life with clay, and just because I occasionally like to torture myself – I AM an Estonian dangit. But now that I have my very own sweet baby-kiln, I sort of want to savor every moment of it – mindful, at peace, careful…
Firing this “fast-fire” kiln in two days allows me not only to have a good night’s sleep, evenings with no headache or back pain, and time to think, absorb what is happening. That was firing #3.
Well. This was firing #4. A completely different animal. I did take my sweet time with the loading. I love to load by myself. I always try to have wadding made into perfect little balls the night before, same with cone packs. I like to get in and out of the kiln, pause to think, put that puzzle together at my own pace without conversation or having to give out or follow orders. This kiln can easily be loaded in one day, but there were many other obligations this week, so it stretched out to two days, which I think was good – I had a new perspective on the second day, fresh eye.
Even figured out how to get this baby in:)
Well, I’m getting off track.
David and Rose came around 5pm, Tom and Slate followed shortly. Tom grilled some pizzas for us for supper, and all seemed well and dandy, until we decided to side-stoke. And even then all seemed well and dandy, until 3 hours later we were still sitting at the same temperature (right around 2100˚F – 2200˚F), the cones were not budging it was around midnight and we were starting wish we were in our own beds by now… (For the record, we were still right around the schedule, I had planned out – I expected to be done by 1pm, just hoped for an earlier close up)
Well, I’d had a hunch about this whole side-stoking business for this firing all along… and as soon as we made the decision to quit the side stoking – the cones started to move and melt, and before we knew it it was time to slide a few boards with salt in through the primary firebox air holes, and we were done right about 2am.
I stayed up another hour just keeping an eye on the kiln.
That’s all boring pottery geek talk.
Here are a few more pix. Lyza took a whole bunch more. I should make her an admin of this blog too, she could be our image sharing manager.
