Clay and FIRE part 2

I was so busy telling the story of firing the old wood kiln in part 1, I didn't include all the photos I had picked to go along with it! For more information of what these are about, ready part 1 from December 2, 2022.

Here I am stoking the kiln early in the day.

You can tell a kiln is in reduction if you pull the plug from one of the peep holes, and flame comes shooting out like this! The fire is starved for oxygen, so it's reaching out through the peephole to get it.

If you have this much fire shooting out the chimney, you are in HEAVY reduction.

Dave Graham doing his spear and raking magic to keep logs from clogging up the passage to the ware chamber above

In part 1 this was still wet on the wheel. Here it is fully fired. None of the other pots had protrusions like this one. I think that's because I had put woad inside, and we capped it with aluminum foil so that the woad vapors would stay inside. Something about that made whatever impurities were in the clay kind of pop out. This was the A body garden gold you saw me mixing in part 1 of this post.

The shine you see on this is entirely from wood ash deposit, it was not glazed.

This is the outside view of the cup above. I used 100% garden gold clay (dug from the East 40) using a brush I made from grasses at the East 40 to make the bush marks on the side. This was a commercial 119 clay body. I had made this for a demo before making the A and B body clays from the East 40 "garden gold."