So now that I’m back from the firing, and have had a bit of sleep, I think that this was a pretty good firing. It will be completely fascinating to see how it turns out, but I’ll have to wait until we unload on Nov 1st to see what it looks like.
I still find it weird how hot we got. Normally, we might have cone 13 down in front, 12 in the middle, and 11 down in back. Having 13 downs through out the kiln, is unusual, alarming, and a bit awesome. I feel like shutting it down early was the right thing to do, though. The risk of going on and getting everything too hot, were greater than any downsides of shutting it down 15 hours early. I think that since we started side stoking early than normal, there won’t be much of a difference in the amount of ash especially in the back of the kiln. However, there’s just so many variables (very tightly packed kiln, no stoking in the far back port, very hot, short firing, early side stoking, heavy reduction cooling in front, but we forgot to seal off some of the air to the middle) that it will be hard to figure out any cause or effect. Well, no sense in guessing until Nov 1st.
In the mean time, I’ll take some time to tackle all those less glamorous tasks in the life of an artists: sales tax, expense receipts, website maintenance, and dirty laundry.