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!

Tags: ceramics, citybeast, clay, woodfiring