Archive for December, 2008

Fuming Materials: A Mini How-To

Thursday, December 11th, 2008

Well, well… it’s been over a year since my last post here. Though I did not get to fire much in the last two years, I finally managed to achieve fairly consistent results by the last couple firings. The firing method remains essentially unchanged, i.e. a fast 6-hour affair in a relatively shallow pit, details for which can be found here and here. And I still use mostly cone 6 porcelaneous clay, but now bisqued to cone 010 instead cone 06.

(Update 2009-10-25: now I typically bisque my pieces to cone 012 instead.)

recent pit fire result

figure 1: a recent pit fired piece

What I want to write about in this post, though, is how I use fuming materials to achieve the kind of results as shown in photos above (figure 1) and below (figure 2). This approach, of course, does not work aesthetically in all situations — so I am offering this only as a hopefully useful reference. As always, take whatever you need from it and adjust to your own requirements as you see fit.

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