New Pots

We took a bunch of pictures today outdoors; however the lighting lead to a lot of unfortunate reflections and glares. Here are a few pictures of pots from the new load. I'll post pictures of more pots tomorrow or the next day.

I tried a new pitcher shape this cycle. More based on Medieval jugs. As always with trying new shapes (and really making pots in general) some came out better than others. I thought this one came out pretty well.


A platter of Christy's showing off our new red slip using a local red clay, with a clear glaze over the top.


Finally a picture of a jar from the front of the kiln.
We held the front of the first chamber at top tempature for eight hours. I used a a slight variation of a technique I learned from David Stuempfle to build up a fairly large ember bed, then covered the bottom of all the pots in the front with embers. We then let these embers burn off, then repeated the process.

For those of you who are curious, to build up good embers for this, we stoked several stokes with larger split hardwood, then stoked with heavy oak slabs, slowly working our way down to the last stoke of thin strips of wood. By the end hopefully all the larger wood has broken down into nice "soft" embers, and the small sticks should burn down pretty much right away. So by the end there is a fairly large fluffy pile of embers. At David's we then shoved a large piece of slab wood under the embers and started tossing the embers toward the pots. Here we had too many glazed plates and bowls to really be flinging around large quanaties of embers, so I simply pushed the embers up onto my pots that were lining the firebox. This picture doesn't really show the nice charring that we got on some of the pots up front. I'll take post some pictures of these and post them soon.
Joe