Unloading the Wood Kiln

Some celebratory flame to mark the opening of the kiln.

First section unloaded, here's the stack for the second section

Third section stack
The back.

Yes, this is a very long kiln...

Wood firing

Isa, lit by the glow of the kiln as she loads the front with wood.

Inside the kiln itself. So fiery and gorgeous.
The hill behind the kiln, lit by the fire shooting out of the chimney. 30 second exposure, can't remember how wide the aperature was open.

My one angel sculpture in the wood soda kiln. If you click on the image, you can increase the size and see how one wing was stuck to the wall of the kiln. I would have had to have been very careful in removing the sculpture from the wall when unloading her but...

While helping to get an empty shelf and post out of the kiln so I could get to more pieces, I dropped the post on her. Darn my relatively short arm length! At any rate, she broke off from the side of the kiln very easily. The front wing was fully broken off and some shards of her hair. The longest wing came off as well, not sure if it came off because of the dropped post or the difference in clay body. (I used 3 different clays in this sculpture).

The angel was already broken and chipped when I put her in, so I wasn't too worried about it. Although I do care about this piece, this is the nature of the medium. Things break. Can't worry too much about it, just move on and make something else.

Phil wouldn't let me toss it, so we collected the pieces and he says he will glue it back together. Will take photos of that when it's done.

Sale Remnants

White cup and white jar

Two teapots

Two cats, one angel and 3 martini pitchers

Green cups

Pendants (minus the pansies, those went to a friend)

Ladybug pendants

Dragons and Lotus blossoms

Butterflies

Lots of espresso cups... these have tapered bottoms

The rest were squared off bottoms


Brown cups

One big black shiny bowl

One beige bowl.

One thing nice about not selling everything, they can always become Christmas presents

Wood Kiln pictures

The kiln before we unloaded it.

One of the shelves.

My favorite angel

The treewoman fresh from the kiln

Matt and one of my cats

Isa and her beautiful bowl

Van with one of the shelves. This is the bottom of the shelf. Pretty, yes?

A close up of the shelf. This would be a pretty cool abstract photo to put on display

Finally, the moon with the shadow of some trees in front of it.

It was a cold night when we unloaded the kiln, but what beautiful results and what a great time we had.

Woodfire Soda kiln results

Here are the results of my sculptures! We had a really great woodfiring this last time. Oh, towards the end of the firing, soda was added to the kiln and that caused even more fun effects. Not quite sure what effects exactly, but we had a lot of great pots come out of the kiln. I'll post more pictures of the kiln itself before we unloaded it later.

The best angel. It's hard to see here, but she has two blue glass eyes. Some of the blue came from the celadon I put on it. The rest of the color is from the wood ash and soda. Both the bottle and the angel are soaking in water to help get the wadding off of the bottoms. Wadding is used in wood firing so that pieces do not fuse to the shelves. I'll post a picture of the bottom of the shelf too.
More angels and my kitties. So happy with how they turned out!
The Treewoman's face. No glaze is on this piece except for some flashing slip. The white areas were where the slip was placed.
Treewoman. She shrank quite a bit in the firing, but she turned out fantastically!

Pendants!

They turned out! This was made with PMC standard, so the pieces shrink about 30%. The cats are about 1.25 inches tall and the angel is a little under an inch. The kitty in the bottom corner has been burnished, but by hand. I think I'll have to get a rock tumbler to get it to be burnished properly.

Treewoman and Angels and Kitties

Treewoman, kitties and angels are all cooling in the Noborigama/Salt kiln. I get to see them tomorrow night. Will post pictures of them!

The drying pieces

Tonight, I get to load a bisque kiln of all 39 espresso cups, 11 bowls, 6 egg cups and 3 teapots. As well as 4 quarter bagger bowls (clay comes in 25lb bags. I split it up into 4 pieces and threw bowls out of them. The clay is Big Sur and well, my bowls are heavier than I'd like them to be. However, they were thrown from around 6 - 8lbs each, so, I guess it's kind of to be expected.

Still, I hold myself to higher standards :D


I also made some pendants out of Precious Metal Clay using the claystamps above. The pieces are cooling in the kiln right now. I'll post photos of those later today.