Before this last firing, I filmed all the steps in sculpting one set of beasts. I’ve been calling it “Trio”, but in some ways it’s also “Cuddle” #2. I liked the beasts I made for “cuddle” and wanted to see a larger arrangement of them. It was surprisingly hard to figure out how to make the three fit together. Anyway, here’s the timelapse video fully tracking them from beginning to end.
I really like arranging my beasts in groups. And this sort of lumpy, toothy form really appeals to me. For a bit, I’ve been meaning to make a pile of 10 or 20 guys. Maybe next firing I’ll have time.
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.
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)
So while I was at the firing, I had a bunch of fun, once again, with the video features of my canon sd850. The first bits to be processed and uploaded are some time lapse videos of loading the kiln. The process of loading a kiln ends up being pretty slow and complex. I’m writing up an explanation of all the factors that go into that slowness, but decided to put them in a separate post. For now, you can enjoy the process of loading a kiln at x30 speed and set to fun music. It’s pretty fascinating, really.
Loading a kiln, from the inside: This video is shot from one of the stoke holes, and follows the loading of the shelf after the middle firebox. Since it’s so close to the middle firebox, where we’ll be putting in sidestoking wood, we’re being careful not to put anything small on the back side of the shelf that might get knocked over. It’s about 3 hours boiled down to 5 minutes.
Loading a Kiln, from the outside: This video is of loading the next set of two shelves, but shot from outside of the kiln entrance. It really shows a different aspect of the process. For every person in the kiln there’s another few outside, prepping the pots, organizing, discussing, shooting the breeze, and just hanging around. It covers about 2 hours in 4 minutes.
I’ve just discovered you can watch these in higher quality, but only on the Youtube website. So follow them back to their youtube pages for a less grainy version.
