You’ve seen them before in greenware form, but now they are back from the soda firing — the same firing where you saw me sparying soda into the kiln. Here is one of them, below:
mutant teapot rat #1
Archive for the ‘Soda Fired Pottery’ Category
Teapot-Rats Back from Soda Kiln
Monday, July 9th, 2007
Dancing with Fire
Friday, August 25th, 2006Finally, thanks to Jenny and Pär who took over the cameraman’s job, you can now see me spraying soda into the soda kiln, too. Enjoy.
BTW it looks kind of dangerous, but really is not. No need to worry for me.. :-)
Photos of Me Working the Soda Kiln
Sunday, August 20th, 2006Okay, this is supposed to be a pottery blog, but since some of my long lost friends have found me here, and they wanted to know what I look like now — so here are a few reasonably current photos. In keeping with the pottery theme, though, these are all from a soda firing at Pottery Northwest two months ago — so you’ll also get to see the kiln and the process of how my soda-fired pieces were fired.
figure 1: what kind of phone is that??!
A typical firing cycle is 12 – 13 hours long. We usually start at 8 am, and the whole thing will hopefully be done by 9 pm. We are not busy all the time, though. In fact, most of the time is waiting time — so we get to goof around, like pretending to be talking on a home made phone (figure 1). The phone was the invention of fellow firing crew member Jenny Nelson, who managed to keep herself busy and creative while waiting for the kiln temperature to rise during the early part of the firing.
Something Different — a Soda Fired Piece
Monday, July 17th, 2006It turns out I don’t just make pit fired pottery. Here is a recent soda-fired piece — hmm… maybe you’d want to see this as two separate pieces, but they actually were two halves of the same piece originally…
The piece stands about 8 inches tall, was thrown on the wheel in two separate sections (neck and body), joined and deformed while both still wet, and sliced into two halves at the early leather hard stage. Black liner glaze on the inside, high alumina orange flashing slip on the outside. It was soda fired (~ cone 6) in the new soda kiln at Pottery Northwest where I was — and still am — taking a class in soda firing.
Oh yeah, here is a video of the soda spraying process. Don’t be alarmed — it’s not as dangerous as it looks…
Marge’s soda firing video
Wednesday, May 17th, 2006I know, I said that I started this blog to talk about pit firing; but I’m also taking a soda firing class at Pottery Northwest, and I happened to have gotten some good footage of a fellow potter spraying soda into the soda kiln during her firing last week. Oh yeah, I did exactly the same thing a couple days before I took this video for my own firing — but there was no one there to make a video of me doing the pyromaniac thing… Anyway, enjoy. (BTW, Marge is the one spraying, and Brad is the one helping to remove and replace the brick. Great team work!)