Less Shelves for Firing 17

It's nine in the morning, a clear sky, cool breeze and twittering birds. Levi stoked beginning at 5:30, and I took over an hour ago. We're almost up to between 600 in the middle of the kiln where I have the probe for the pyrometer.

This kiln load is stacked using a minimum number of shelves. We have some tall, narrow pieces and we stacked quite a number of pieces on top of each other, some extending into the opening of another pot as pictured to the right.

I did a lot of this kind of stacking many years ago when I was firing burnished pots in a low-fire underground kiln dug into the side of a hill. I'd fill the pots with sawdust and the effect was dramatic - shiny black where the pot was inside another pot and subtle flashing on the outside with reds and greens.

I feel like I'm creating more opportunities for pots to crack or maybe fuse together, maybe topple over or something in the firing, but I'm hoping for some interesting results with this kind of stacking. We'll see.

A collaboration between Phillip Pollet and I made it into this kiln. It dried just in time to get it. I've got quite a few large pitchers, some glazed in shino, and of course some soul pots, large and small.




This is the front of the kiln with a few
pots nestled inside each other and only
one shelf
. We'll pull out the red local clay
pieces at
cone 10 or so.





Two shelves a little further back with more stacking.
You can see the collaborative piece to the rear of the
shelf and on the right.





One shelf towards the back. There are three
tall pieces that Levi created behind this shelf.


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