Eva Funderburgh

So we unloaded the kiln yesterday.  All in all, it seem like a pretty good firing.  It turned out that we hadn’t dropped cone 13 in the far back, like we thought.  The cones were only viewable from a very strange angle in the back, and someone misread them.  We were only at cone 11 in back, which isn’t bad, but isn’t 13 either. However, we were right about the cones in the front. Cone 13 was completely flat, and cone 14 was starting to bend.

In general, the firing didn’t seem to be hurting from shutting down 15 hours early.  The back was much drier than normal, which was ok for everyone who glazes their pieces (I don’t), but resulted in one or two matte blue gray critters.  I might refirer those two.

Most of the pieces came out great.  I need to now work on cleaning up everything, which should be easy this time, and get photographing.  Unfortunately I need to finish rebuilding my lighting set up from scratch before I can do that.  Photos of the new work (and the new photographic lighting set up) will be coming soon!

The kiln has been above 2000 degrees in both front and back for about a day now. It’s been keeping between 2200 and 2300 in front, and we’ve been fighting to get the back to match that. We’ll gain maybe 100 degrees over the next two days. It’s funny how you spend the first day or two working to keep it slow, and now we might have to fight for every 20 degrees.
For the next few days it will mainly be about what the cones are doing, and what the coal bed is like. Cones measure a combination of heat + time, and give us a better idea of how the pots are doing than just temperature. Last I heard, cone 13 is bending in front, and 10 is down in the middle. Not sure about the far back. The kiln will continue to feel hotter and hotter as we go on.
Flame and smoke from the stack with every stoke now. Also, it is a VERY beautiful day.

I’ve been on shift since 4, and right now we’re at 2250 in front, and 2100 in back. I’m on the back of the kiln, and have been fighting with it for the last hour. It went down to 2040. I had to switch to small rapid stokes (3 pieces at once) from larger stokes (7 pieces). I ask Steve, who’s down at the front, as to how many pieces he’s been putting in - “how ever many pieces he #%}^* well feels like”

I’ve been trying to use the iphone wordpress app. It’s decent, but in this area of sketchy phone reception, it does have a few frustrating bugs. If a post fails halfway through sending, it will then crash every time you try to send it again, and you’ll have rewrite it. This post will be a little shorter than it once was.
Anyway, when I last checked the kiln a few hours ago, it was at 950 degrees. The day shift has it now. I’m on shift from 4pm to 12:30am. We started the kiln at 9 last night. For the first 900 degrees, the fire is outside the kiln, in the primary air intake. This lets us control the fire more easily, heating the kiln up slowly, as to not shock the pots.

So, far too early tomorrow morning, I will head off to Seabeck, WA for our woodfiring.  I’ll have my iphone, so it will be my goal to post a series of small updates during the firing.  I will apologize in advance for the spelling, since the wordpress iphone app lacks any form of spell check.

Here’s a shot of some of my preparations.  I have three giant bins this size, along with a milk crate of tiny pieces.  I’ve taken to using pillow stuffing to protect some of the delicate wings of my critters.  However, in this shot, I think laziness played more of a role than prudence. They do look like they’re taking a nap in a cloud, though.

Since the quality of the Youtube version of the unloading was so poor, I decided to uploaded to Vimeo, one of the many competitors that keep popping up.  It had its share of frustrations as well in the upload process, but I’m much happier with the final video.

Unloading an Anagama from Eva Funderburgh on Vimeo.

We went and unloaded Santatsugama yesterday, and it looks like everyone got some wonderful results. We had to make an early start after a late 4th of July party, but it was completely worth it. I’m very happy with my work from this firing.  There was lots of carbon trapping, resulting in ghostly looking grey blues in addition to the beautiful gloss orange red that we’ve been getting recently.  However, the black flashes that we’d been seeing recently were much less prominent.  We think this was due to difference in atmospheric conditions in the kiln during the cooling, but that’s another post.

As I said, I think it was a good firing.  One very sad thing though is that Erin’s cabbage jars self-destructed.  Some clays just don’t do well in this kiln, and will shatter unprovoked as they cool.  Each cabbage jar would come out, look beautiful, and then “ping” itself into a pile of leaves.  Hopefully we’ll see some surviving ones in the future.  Here’s a sneak peek as to some of what I got out.  I’ll be doing formal documentation photograph over the course of the next week.  I also have a fair amount of cleaning up and mixed media work still to go, especially with the big guy.

Also, like the loading,  I took stop motion video of the unloading.  It followed the whole unloading (3 hours instead of 2 days), and compacts down into 5 minutes.  It’s pretty fun to see.  (Fun fact.  I broke my gorilla pod during the filming of the video.  It just plain wore out from overuse after 3 months.  I’m hard on tech.  When I broke my old camera after a year, I’d taken 9,000 photos with it).  Anyway, enjoy the video.  If you go to the youtube page for it, there should be higher quality version.  (It takes about a day for the high quality option to show up)

As the title suggests, I’m back from the wood firing!  It went quite well.  We went for around 110 hours including reduction cooling.  We decided to keep the kiln a little cooler this time, and topped out at 2380°f in front, and about 2360°f in back.  We dropped cone 13 in front, (ceramics measures firings in cones, something I’ll explain at another time) and reached cone 12 or so in the middle and back.  In the past couple firings we’ve hit 2450°f, and dropped cone 14, but decided that was a bit hot for the results we were looking for.

This firing, the front of the kiln was loaded far looser than we’ve ever had it, while the back was very tight.  It will be interesting to see how this effects the results.  The firing was very even in temperature, and so many of the pieces looked positively juicy with melted ash.  I hope it comes out well, but I’ll have to wait a week to find out.

There will be a lot of fun videos and pictures appearing in the next few days, so stay tuned!

I’ve been really busy in the past few weeks, getting ready for a big wood firing at Santatsugama.  Santatsugama (3 dragon kiln) is the anagama style wood kiln in Seabeck, WA where I regularly fire.  We fire 4 times a year, so I need to have all of my work for the next four months ready to go by this Saturday.  As you can imagine, this leads to some long days and late nights in the studio before the firing.  However, at this point, everything that can be finished is finished, and there’s finally nothing left for me to do.  All of my work is in the bisque kiln now, and I won’t be able to touch it until Friday when I pack it up for the drive to the wood kiln. This means I’m finally free for a day or two, even if it means I have to get caught up on stuff I missed while I was in the studio.

We’re planning on following our normal schedule for this firing, which is to spend Saturday and Sunday loading, and then fire up the kiln at midnight Sunday night.  We’ll continue for 150 (+/-5) hours straight, finishing up Friday.  I’ll write up a whole post explaining wood fire at some point, but in the mean time, this flickr set should be able give you an idea of what it’s like.

Also, here’s a sneak peek of what’s going into the kiln. Once I’m back from the firing, I’ll be uploading many more pictures of these guys, including some more timelapse videos.  And yes, the guy in the bottom right is City Beast 2.0, who starred in the first timelapse video.  Pretty exciting!