Jubilee Monday #19: Firing Day

We finally got to Part 3 of the pottery making process...firing...this past Saturday.
I wrote about actually making the pots in Pottering Around back in October.

For some reason I didn't write about glazing the pieces, which is what we did in November's class. I guess I didn't really have too much to say about it...other than I learned it was easy to make a piece of pottery that was beyond my reasonable ability to glaze! The little flower bowl had teeniny spaces and curliques that I just couldn't get the available glazing brushes into. I had to just do the best I could...which included trying to drip the glaze into the little spots. I'm hoping I got it all covered, but after some discussion with the class leader, Mr. S., we decided that those little curly things would be better served by a higher-temp firing than what he does in his backyard. So that piece wasn't fired Saturday; it has been taken to another place to be high-fired and I will hopefully get it before the end of the month.

But my little braid bowl was glazed last month, and it was fired Saturday. The whole process fascinated me.
It was a very chilly day for North Alabama; I don't think the temperature got out of the 30's. I know the ice in puddles in the shady spots around where we were working didn't thaw! So we were bundled up, and one of the things Mr. S did was to put the glazed pieces on top of the kiln for a bit, rotating them around to pre-warm them before putting them into the firey furnace. Even though this was raku-firing and a lower temperature than food-use pottery is fired at, it was still unbelievably intense.
It was really neat to watch them through the little vent hole in the top of the kiln; the glaze would puff and bubble, then start running like caramel syrup. Once it began to run, then we pulled them out.

Mr. S wanted us to pull our own pieces; he actually gave me a bowl and the tongs to practice picking it up before he pulled the cover off the kiln for me to pull my bowl. The glaze is sticky and shouldn't be bumped against another piece or the side of the kiln when it's pulled out...sorta like the game 'Operation', if you ever played that as a kid (I don't think I did much...I hated that buzzer!)

Then, as soon as the piece comes out of the kiln, it is plunged into a container of combustible material...in this case, wood chips/sawdust. Of course, it flames up instantly, but what is desired is the smoke from that fire, so there's a lid placed over the container so that it smolders and smokes for a while.

I forgot to take a photo of what the bowl looked like when we pulled it out of the cinders of the sawdust. Not surprisingly, it was black, but not coal black...sort of an irridescent black, with some metallic shimmer in it. I thought that was what I would end up with, but after it cools enough to handle, the next and final step is to take it to a bucket of water and scrub it down. I thought I'd just clean some of the gunk off of it...I was astonished to see blue shimmer through.

Of course, now I can't remember just exactly what I did when I glazed it...I know I did an oxide wash on the braided part, so it would have a little more definition, and in my ignorance I got it too wet with that wash and I had trouble getting the glaze to stick properly. I think my original plan was to use a blue metallic glaze on the braid and a copper glaze on the bowl, but because I was having trouble with the glaze sticking I'm not sure what I ended up with. (The bright red bits are reflection of something off camera; and it really has more color than shows up here. A lot more. The sun was shining extra bright on the back porch, I guess.).



Raku is like that, though: even if you carefully document what is done, and dab the glaze on meticulously, it still has so many variables in the equation that it's impossible to tell what the final result will be.


I can find all kinds of spiritual parallels in this whole process and I think I'll sign up for another series of classes! This is fun!