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!