Kiln Results Headed to Show!

I unloaded the kiln earlier this week between work at MESDA (Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts). Tomorrow, I get to be on the grounds of Old Salem and a part of the Pottery Fair on the Square where I will have new pieces from the recent kiln firing!

This will include some exciting new hanging flower planters, as seen in the two photos above. They're all rigged up for hanging!

So come visit tomorrow between 10-5:00 on the square in Old Salem. Check out the farmer's market there, too, in the morning until noon. If you have time, don't miss the opportunity to see a hidden gem like MESDA.

Here are a few more photos of things in the kiln:

First Peek in the Kiln

I may have jinxed myself, but I cracked the kiln slightly this evening since it was getting down below 500 degrees Fahrenheit. I'm hoping to unload tomorrow morning before heading to work and then an evening meeting. Here's to hoping for some good pots to tag along with the other inventory at the Old Salem Pottery Fair on the Square this weekend!

Slightly better view

Record Kiln Firing

Rim of a flowerpot during the kiln firing

I am quite remorseful that I have not posted for several weeks, and will try to catch you up this week on the craziness that has recently (if not always) been my life.

An exciting recent event was a successful, record kiln firing yesterday at the farm! Not only did we accomplish a single firing (meaning no bisque-firing involved) in just over 12 hours, but almost all of the cones in the kiln reached cone 11.

Cones before they go in the kiln - each is made of clay that melts at different temperatures

Cones in action- the ones flattened have melted, telling me that the kiln has reached beyond
cone 10 (around 2300 Fahrenheit)

The cones give me a gauge for how hot the kiln is, as each cone melts at a different temperature. I usually shoot for cone 10, but reached 11 in nearly the entire kiln! My front left corner of the kiln is usually quite cool, but I have been adjusting the shelves to sit back from the wall and leaving more air space for the heat to move through.

Why, yes, that is clay on a baking sheet, ready to go in the oven!

Once again, I forgot to have draw rings or draw trials made up before we started the kiln. These get removed during the firing so I can tell whether the clay has matured and how far along my salting and slip color is. I ended up baking them in the oven the night before and putting them in the kiln in the morning. This seems to work well to get all of the moisture out of the rings and not have them explode when I put them in the kiln.

Side of a flowerpot

What was different for this firing was that I did a gas preheat with one tank in one firebox starting Saturday afternoon. Saturday evening I added a second gas tank (100 pound) burner to the second firebox. While the temperature at about 4:30 on Sunday morning was around 250 as it usually is, I think the bricks were heated up more, and that ultimately made the firing go faster. Because I foolishly made my kiln walls with two layers of hard brick, I spend more of the kiln firing just heating up the mass of brick. By using the gas preheat, this cut back on how long I would have to spend heating up the mass of brick.

Top of a hanging planter in the kiln

I started salting around 2200 degrees Fahrenheit, and did two rounds of salt about 30 minutes from one another. I did this both because I had a lot of people on hand at the time to accomplish this task, but also that I figured it might help to have the salt in place and get things good and melted for the rest of the firing. 

For a cute factor, a nest of baby wrens decided to try and take flight. They spent part of their day scaling various pieces of equipment opposite the kiln, including an old Farmall Cub tractor (photo above).

I'll have my fingers crossed for the next day with the hopes that everything turns out well! This coming Saturday is the Pottery Fair on the Square at Old Salem, so I hope to have some fresh flowerpots for the event!

Kiln Firing Results and Show

 Last week was one of those nightmare weeks when everything seems to happen at once and it all becomes a big blur. We had some nasty weather again, and cleaning the pots took longer than I had hoped. Although delayed, here are some photos of pots from the recent kiln firing:

I am pleased with the results overall and very excited to see the newer forms I have been playing with coming to fruition.

All of these vessels went with me to the Catawba Valley Pottery and Antiques Festival this past weekend and some of them found new homes. Thanks to everyone who came out for the show! I am not going to fire in April so that we can work a lot on the new barn/studio at the farm.

Kiln Firing Video!

The second kiln firing of 2014 took place today! I thought you might enjoy this video I made at the beginning of the firing when color from the heat starts to brighten up the ware chamber. You can see ash already starting to sit on the surface of the pots.

Here is what those same pots looked like at the end of the firing:

They are really coated in ash and salt! We will see the results in a couple of days and then on to the Catawba Valley Pottery and Antiques Festival next weekend!

On the Farm and Kiln Firing

Blue skies!

It was an absolutely gorgeous day for a kiln firing yesterday! Everything was all loaded up, the overnight preheat went well, and other than some strong winds that wreaked havoc on the pressure in the kiln, it was a good firing! When the wind is strong, it keeps the chimney from drawing quite as well, and plays around with the fireboxes, but we did not have a lot of stalling out or holding at one temperature, so that was nice.

I cannot say it was a successful firing until tomorrow when I open it up!

The draw rings, as seen above, which are pulled when I am salting the kiln, looked nice. I put about 10 pounds of salt in, then drew some of the rings out. The first round of ring were not quite as salted as I would like, but the blue slip color looked nice. I added a little more salt and then pulled some more draw rings.

Greenhouse under construction

Yours, truly, volunteered today to help the Farmer with some projects at the farm while the kiln cooled. No rest for the weary! We worked in the morning on pulling dead plants from the garden beds and getting the lining on the raised beds in the new greenhouse in place. Here are some photos of the lining going in:

The lining will keep the grass from growing up from beneath the greenhouse and (hopefully) help keep the weeds down.

While weeding the garden beds this afternoon I came across some lovely worms, which excited me to no end. Our farm was historically used for tobacco and then hay, which can deplete the soil. Earthworms are not present in large numbers where the is depleted soil. When we first started putting in the gardens, we saw very few earthworms. Now, they are all over the place!  This means we are getting lots of good organic matter into the soil.

I also came across a very tiny little frog. Can you find him in the photo above? If not, check out this photo:

We have been enjoying the tiny frogs' return to the creeks and ponds near the farm. Their chirping sounds are such music to my ears!

Of all of the things we did today (which also included bonding over cutting potato starts in the evening), feeding greens to the chickens was perhaps the most entertaining thing of all.  Above is a photo of the chickens eating on a random plant of kale I pulled from the garden. Here is what it looked like after a few short minutes:

Death to the kale plant

The chickens love their greens! I am happy the daylight is getting longer as that means we are getting more eggs from our chickens, so we have a few more options for kitchen adventures! Speaking of the kitchen, I highly recommend trying The Palate magazine's recipe for Brazilian Chicken Stew. We used one of our farm chickens we processed last year, sweet potatoes from the late fall harvest, and tomatoes canned last summer. The flavor of peanuts (I used peanut butter), tomatoes, coconut, and sweet potatoes was fantastic! I also love that it was described as "a kindred spirit to the many aromatic one-pot meat dishes that followed the spice trails and trade winds from the western coast of Africa, to the eastern coast of South America, up through the Caribbean, and into the deep ports of the colonial South."

You might be thinking, "Brenda, where is your 52 Form Project from last week?!" For you who are wondering, I hope to have a surprise from the kiln firing tomorrow about last week's form! Stay tuned! 

Kiln Loading

This whole week has been pretty much swallowed up by kiln loading and various errands. On Monday, we worked on the greenhouse at the farm and got the raised beds finished. Here's a photo of the raised beds in construction:

I've been posting photos on Facebook as I went along with the kiln loading, but I thought I would share some thoughts with the photos and about the process since I just finished yesterday.

Do any of you fine readers remember the game Tetris? I would liken loading a kiln to the game Tetris in which you have different shaped blocks that fall and you have to rotate them in order to fit into the blocks below them. Luckily, in loading the kiln, the blocks don't implode or disappear when you fit them together, but I sometimes wonder if I would go insane if I listened to this theme music all day:



First, the pots had to make it to the farm. We're working on building a barn to get my studio and a workshop out there, but for now, I move the pots from my house to the farm like this:

In other words, I move them VERY CAREFULLY because they're thin, raw clay pots! I've been pretty good about taking photos this week at every level of the loading. Sometimes it is hard for me to remember to snap a photo before throwing another shelf on top (which I did in a few instances), but this will give you the general idea of how it works.

The first couple of rows seem to be the hardest for me. Not only do I have to try and fill as many spaces as possible, but these shelves tend to hold my smaller items, so there are more to deal with! Dishes take up a lot of room. The rims are deceptively wide and they need some tending to in order to get them in the right position. I've been trying to be better about making things like the smaller dishes in the photo below to fit below larger dishes in order to maximize filling the spaces. 

 A few more rows:

 I shifted my front shelves around for this firing and decided to put this stack of flowerpots there in front of the firebox. My theory is that this layout may provide for more airflow and make the kiln more evenly fired. We'll see!

 Kiln halfway loaded and here is what I have left:

 First row on the front stack:

 I purposefully made the first two levels of this stack very tall in order to encourage some air flow. Typically this front left corner is pretty cool in temperature, which is also why I put the flowerpots in the corners.

 Sneaking in a few more dishes:

 I had to take the lid off of the compost crock at the front and put it on top of the stack of dishes in the back left. Otherwise, it could have touched the ceiling, which would not have been a good thing. Top part of the final stack:

 This is the final view of the stacks before I put the bricks up in that opening, making a solid wall across the front.

 And here is what was left at the very end:

I will do a gas preheat overnight on Saturday to keep the pots from freezing since it will be cold and to give us a leg-up on the firing. The preheat puts the kiln at around 200 degrees Fahrenheit on Sunday morning and ready to roll. I do what is called single firing, which means that the pots are raw when they are loaded into the kiln (no bisque firing). When we were not doing a preheat, the firing took 17-18 hours, and now with the preheat it takes about 16 hours total. Because I salt the kiln I had to build it out of hard brick, and a double layer of hard brick is a lot of thermal mass to heat up!