Saturday, May 2, 2009

done.

I just finished firing #3 in the new kiln. I guess I should probably stop calling it the "new" kiln. I woke up at 6am, had my traditional iced tea and pb&j and noticed it was drizzling and foggy outside. I had only slept about 4 hours and was still exhausted and decided to just go back to bed. I woke up at about 10 and realized that I had kiln shelves in the wood kiln borrowed from the school that I had to have back on Monday. The wife and I have dinner plans with some other folks tonight so I decided to fast-fire this load. I fired in about 6 hours, taking time to soak at the critical points. I think I over-salted it but I guess we'll find out if I'm a fool or not Monday morning. I didn't see any cracks on any pots, so maybe it's all good.

So long!

8 comments:

Joe and Christy said...

Brandon,
I hope everything comes out well. Six hours is incredibly fast! We don't even fire our little gas test kiln that fast. I have to admit though I was worried when you fired the last load in nine hours. I was then some what amazed at how rich your surfaces still looked with such a short firing.
I had really bad trouble once with pin holes when I fired rather quickly. I've had a slight phobia of firing fast ever since... I guess it's good that you don't share in my phobia.
looking forward to pictures
Joe

Ron said...

Hey man, I hope those pots look great. You should be safe since you had the tea and pb&j. You could have prob. gone off in 4.
Have all the pots arrived from your guests for the Deep Roots Show? I can't wait to see some pics.

brandon phillips said...

i removed a few of the top rows of the door and peeked in tonight and it looked ok. i saw a blistered glazed pot but many that weren't. slips looked good. the tea and pb&j watched over me.

all the pots are here. warren ended up not being able to do it but he gave us the blessing to show pots of his from elsewhere. so we have some really old pots(70's) that one of the participants gave us to sell for an astronomical amount of money, and we have a few pots of his from private collections(mostly ours.) we just couldn't see doing this show without him. i should be able to have photos of the show up thursday.

Peter said...

Hi Brandon,
Good luck with the firing, hope it has come out well for you. Just a technical matter.... what is "pb&j"?? (forgive my ignorance of such things, but I'm in the Deep South of New Zealand, and our culinary habits are somewhat different here) I am assuming peanut butter and jam? But it could also read porridge, bacon, and juice! I enjoyed looking at the work on Earth and Fire Gallery site, thanks for the link to it in your last post. P.

brandon phillips said...

peanut butter & jelly! my traditional breakfast before firing the kiln is southern style sweet iced tea and "pb&j". i'm pretty superstitious about my firing routines(in a humorous way.) i had to go out at 1am the night before to get some premixed tea because we were out!

Ron said...

Nice.
Look forward to seeing your latest pots and the pics from the show.

Heather said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Heather said...

I don't know if this would be of any use to you, but I have a giant pine tree in my front yard that yields millions of pine needles. At the moment I probably have 20 lawn bags full of them. If you could use them in your firing, or know of anyone that could, let me know!