A quick glimpse into my soda kiln… starting with a pretty perfect cone 10 !!!

Looks like an exterminator found its way into Cory’s studio! All joking aside… sometimes bad things happen to good bugs. Pottery has this strange way of keep all of us very humble. Just when you start to think that you’ve got this thing under control, the kiln gods step up with a healthy slap of reality. We’ve all been there. It hurts. All that time & effort… gone. And it always seems to happen at the worst of times. So here we are… less than a week away from ART IN THE GARDEN.

But we artists are a resilient bunch. So Cory & I are quickly developing a “Plan B” and trying to make the best of a bad situation. Desperate times call for desperate measures… and a LOT more creativity!!! I’m sure she’ll make the best out of this… some are fine, some art salvageable, some aren’t. So we may be shifting gears… but we’ll STILL have some fun collaboration pieces to show off next weekend. Perhaps not so many bugs… but who knows, maybe some TV’s or other fun things???

A little morning glow in the kiln… just waiting for the cones to start falling!

So it took my just about three hours to fully load the soda kiln… kinda like Pottery Tetris! Trying to fit in as much as possible, all the while trying to leave some space for air to flow through during the firing. The soda atmosphere needs to get in between everything to leave its glazed finish. I piled a LOT of work into this one! The back stack is a single shelf filled first to the top. Then front stack is a double-shelf filled up to the arch. It’s packed tight… so it might be a long firing today?!

And then I rolled down my studio cart… the same one my Dad built for me several years ago! I have figured out that a full cart of glazed & wadded work pretty much equals a fully loaded soda kiln. The masking tape just works as a little “protection” so nothing jumps off the shelves while I take the rickety freight elevator downstairs… kinda like a pottery seat belt!!

Last night started with an empty soda kiln… full of possibilities.

And we have IGNITION!!!
Starting the day… and starting my soda kiln firing!

Soda kiln firing… before & after. Side-by-side comparison of the magic
that happens in the soda kiln as the pyrometric cones melt and reach cone 10.

So the steel door finally came off yesterday when the kiln finally cooled down… creating ONE BIG REVEAL instead of layer-layer & brick-by-brick with the old kiln. Very exciting & everything looks great. I love when the bright colors are popping… instead of the grays & browns that usually come out of a soda kiln! It was a fun unloading… like a little pottery treasure hunt!!! More photos to come…

In terms of sneak peeks… this is all we get!!! With the new full steel door, I can no longer peel off the top couple layers of bricks to speed up the cooling & get better peeks into the kiln. So it’s one peep brick pulled for one peek. Guess we’re all gonna have to wait until the kiln cools enough to fully open the door!