Stuff into kilns

Last night I went out to the studio to do some glazing, and it turned out the folks were loading up the salt kiln. I asked if I could help, and they gave me the task of mixing up fresh kiln wadding. Wadding is a 50/50 mix of clay and alumina hydroxide, mixes up like a gritty bread dough—well, not a bread dough you’d want to eat, but you get the idea. Maybe it’s like Play-doh. Anyway, the alumina in the mix means that it won’t vitrify (get melty and hard like clay) until about 3000 degrees, way hotter than the kiln will get. That way it won’t stick to the pots or the clay kiln shelves, and the salt won’t stick to the wadding, either. So you put wadding on the bottoms of your pots and set the pots on the shelves and off you go.

Nobody likes mixing up wadding, but it’s just the type of mindless repetitive task that my ADD-addled brain likes to do while relaxing, so I was more than willing. I’m almost positive that as a result of doing the unpleasant task, I got more pots into the salt kiln than I might have otherwise. I had 21 pots on the shelf for firing. I took four of them off and put them on the wood-fire shelf, and there are five left for the next salt firing. So that’s 13 pots I have in the kiln, which is pretty good. Oughtta work all right for the big sale next weekend.

I also got nine other pots into a gas fire kiln, so there will be more pictures on Friday. Yaay! Sadly, the grotesque is not one of the pots that will get fired, but that just means I have some time to do a little painting on him. Eyebrows, maybe teeth…