Wildcat Creek Brick Company

Thursday, February 4, 2010

Pottery photos from latest wood kiln firing.

Here are the pots from the latest firing. My focus has been on improving my firing to a useful level where the resulting pots would be glazed fully. That is now possible. My next effort will be to improve the shape and style of the pottery to a more pleasing and useful level. The shapes may be crude, but the salt glaze is really getting close. Im excited like a little kid!


The darker pots are that way because of the naturally dug Cutler clay they are made of. There is a low percentage of glass dust in these.









This next little pot with a handle is made from Flora dug clay that has a slightly higher glass dust content than the ones above. It cracked becase it dryed out too fast in an earlier bisque firing.
The next ones are all Flora dug clay with a near 50 percent addition of bottle glass dust.



These are the two that were nearest the firebox flue. The heat was too much for them. I think that the high level of glass dust in them made the melting point lower for them. I think from now on I will either fire entirely one type of clay mix or the other. No more mixing the types in a single firing. Its too hard to comprimise between them on the firing needs. Obviously the higher glass dust clay bodies need a lower temp or shorter firing time than the near pure clay bodies do.


Heres a cool before and after photo set from the kiln to compare.


2 comments:

  1. Those were great photos of the firing. You will be really excited. It certainly looks like you are achieving stoneware temperatures (I've never seen a pot melt like that before!). Also good how the salting is coming on, you are getting much better coverage now.
    Wonderful to see such progress!

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  2. Thanks. Old firings were taking 12+ hours and never got really high temps. I did this latest one in about 6 hours! For some of the pots that may have been an hour too long. Now I need to make something thats better looking in shape. Then work on glazes to get some pretty colors too.

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