Kiln fire at 2254/F
Kiln, fired to 2254 degrees F. Hot stuff!
So I'm sitting in the living room, listening to my wife watch "Grey's Anatomy" on Netflix in the kitchen, and trying to hold onto my patience with both hands. Not because of Grey's, especially- my relationship with that show is not something I'm yet willing to talk about in public. 

I'm holding onto my patience because I fired the kiln last night, it's been cooling all afternoon, and we're probably about 1/2 an hour from opening it up and seeing what we got. This is one of the most exciting parts of pottery for me. With the wheel, when you mess up it's fast and easy to get past- scrape the work off the wheel, let it dry a bit, re-wedge it, and try again. Bang- done. In the kiln, though, if the glaze is to thick, or if it didn't bisque (dry out) well enough, or if the glaze is runny, you can get all kinds of fun stuff going on. Explosions, cracks, fused work, etc. And yes, a lot of this is mitigated by years and years and years of experience. Unfortunately, I'm still a couple of groups of years short.

So this is the exciting part. Glazes, when you put them on the pots, look nothing like the finished product- I have a blue glaze and a pink glaze that look exactly the same when they come out of the glaze bucket. And sometimes glazes mix into unexpected shades- I have a clean and a blue that, when overlapping, turn into a VERY runny black (I found this out about two firings ago. For the uninitiated, very runny = going at a kiln shelf with a power grinder).

I'm sitting here, holding onto my patience, and writing about it is not helping. Excuse me- I've got to go check the temp again.
 


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