Kiln Firing 11/14/09

Sometimes the kiln is just filled with special pieces. This kiln firing was one of those. Just look at these wonderful pots. The pedestal made it! I'll post some more photos of Steve making and glazing that piece. To give you a better idea of the accomplishment, I should mention that the finished pedestal measures 20 1/2" high and 12" wide. The bowl pictured actually is not the one he made for it but another darker one we have. The bowl in the kiln firing tonight is glazed similarly.
The next piece is beautiful as well. It is close to an original Teco design. At 17 1/2" high it is quite large too.

and this is the lotus I was making in an earlier post.

Kiln Firing 11/6/09

We fired a glaze firing last night and started
propping the kiln lid open at 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

a little more at 460 degrees

Lid wide open at 300 degrees

completely unloaded... a nice firing.

Glazing & Firing 10/11/09

Today Steve glazed all day while I brought the orchids inside because of a frost warning for tonight. We will be firing tonight and again probably Tuesday or Wednesday to finish a couple of orders and add to the stock we'll take to Bethesda Row this coming weekend.

Opening the kiln

We fired again last night, the 28th, and opened the kiln tonight, the 29th. Here you can see the glazed pots loaded ready to fire and then the finished results. If you count the number of rows of electric kiln elements (the horizontal stripes) in the photo above and compare with the photo below, you'll see the evidence of the 10% shrinkage the pots typically make.



One of our cats, Powder, helped pick the best of the kiln.

Unloading the Kiln

We fired the kiln on Thursday night and unloaded it this morning. It has to cool at least 12 hours.
Some people have inquired as to how many pieces fit in a kiln load. Since our pots vary so much in size, the number of pieces that fit in a firing varies also. Here is what fit in this last firing:

The second photo is of the ginger that I was working on earlier.

Kiln firing 6/7/09

We have had two firings in the last week. Most of the space in the firings has been used for tiles for our floor. We are refiring some that didn't meet our standards, so we can finish laying the major part of the floor. By spraying a little more glaze onto the surface of the tiles, the glaze on most evened out. So the firings have been mostly tile and a few pots. We have two electric kilns which we use for either the first, lower bisque firing or the second, higher glaze firing. The first firing is done to facilitate handling the pots while glazing them. Since the pots are quite fragile before the bisque firing, we usually try to at least complete that part of the process asap. Then they can sit on our studio shelves until we are ready to do a couple of glaze firings. If we are working towards completing some special or many pieces before a certain date, we might just bisque pots as soon as we have enough to fill a kiln and continue making pots, accumulating them for a while. Then we will set aside a week to glaze and fire a lot of pots at once.