I help out at our local clay center when we fire Bruno, the wood fired kiln. My wife and I work one of the overnight shifts from midnight Friday to about 7AM Saturday morning. This is the hottest part of the process and we have to keep the temperature at about 2200 deg F for many hours. The whole process takes over 50 hours. We stoke almost constantly during this time with wood we have gathered and split for the purpose. This particular firing was in memory of the owner of the clay center who passed away in March this year. He was a wonderful person who created an incredible clay community with his wife who is an extraordinary potter and person. I brought several boxes of my scraps to use as well as a reject bowl to sacrifice to the kiln gods in hope of a successful firing. We will open the kiln to see the results on Wed 5/23/18. I actually have 3 clay pieces in the kiln that I did specifically in honor of our dear friend. I'll try to post them when I get them home. The video is my bowl in the front door of the kiln and took about 4 minutes to disintegrate.
Here are the pieces I had in the wood fired kiln. The cup on the left came out the best I think. This is what wood fired work is supposed to look like. There is no glaze on these-the wood ash actually melts to form a type of glaze. They are quite glossy. The piece on the right cracked in 2 places Overall it was a very good firing-many beautiful pieced of art. A good time was had by all.
