Another amazing fire

The forecast for the weekend was cold, snow, possible rain, and more cold. This is why I was committed to doing my part to add to global warming- Matt and I spent the weekend at the Laurelville Mennonite Church Center, firing the wood kiln. But first off- let me show you how awesome all the stuff the THREE of us made for this class. Amazing volumes, right?


All that is hand packed into the kiln- it takes most of a day- more than a normal work day for sure, to carefully balance each piece on 'wadding'- clay mixed with sand and wood chips that becomes unstable after the firing, but keeps all the pieces from melting to the surface of the shelves.



We lit the fire at 7- this is the earliest we've lit it, EVER, and a couple hours really seemed to help. Once the kiln was going, we could focus on the business of making wood fired pizzas. Oh yeah.

We share the load in 8 hour shifts, mine were both midday- my coworker Sarah went from 8pm-4am (I did that before- it is tiring), and Swarna did from 4am-noon. I tried to be helpful and stack wood or gives breaks whenever I was awake, since I had the easiest time. During my shift on Saturday, I moved the temp from 800 F to 1700 F- so I was pretty much feeling awesome. My friend J even came out to see what all the fuss was about! But my camera started acting up- so I don't have any more pictures. Frown.


By 7am Sunday, the kiln was up to the temp (2100 F) it needed to be help at for a couple hours (Thank you, Weather!), so my shift was rather abbreviated. We did actually help seal up the kiln this time. This involves slowing the rate we feed the kiln, then choking out the air intakes and sealing the cracks with more wadding. The bravery and skill required to 'mortar' the kind of crack that has 2150 degree flames shooting out of it we left to our teacher. I just dropped the last piece of wood. We seal it up, and let it happily melt the remaining ash into glass while it cools. We'll unseal it on Thursday, and see what we get. There are other photos posted here, but these are quite similar to similar albums of the past.