Day 22... Chickened out

I chickened out at firing the special pot today. The model is made of local red clay.  It will fire around 1800 degrees F, and still be porous.  Because of the iron in red clay, the particles of feldspar and other trace minerals will bond together at a lower temperature than earthenware, stoneware or porcelain. 

I did fire my small Alpine kiln, 1950ish version, with a load of glazed pots.  These pots have already been fired so there is no chance of steam exploding the pots. I usually just crank the switches to high after the kiln is warmed up to 400 degrees or so.  Then I shut the lid, stop the peep holes and wahla!

If I had put my unfired special pot in however, I would have had to heat the whole thing slowly and also risk the chance of a chip flying off or pot exploding. So I left it out.

Sometime in the early 1990s, I almost burned the barn down. Not because of the kiln failure this time. Some other day I will tell you how almost electrocuted myself plugging in an old ungrounded kiln. This day, my sister and I had decided to try waxing the bottoms of our pots to save us a step in cleaning them. We were new potters, just out on our own in the pottery world. Like most things I try, I just jump in and see what works. I put a pot of paraffin on an electric  hotplate to melt the wax. Then we noticed it was lunchtime and went in the house for food and tea. Soon, there were young workman at our door telling us to call the fire department.  The year before, a developer had started grinding up our woods full of laurel and blueberries and had left them in a large, house size pile of chips 30 feet from my barn window where I was working wedging up clay.  Now the chips were gone, and there was to be a 2 story house where my grampa grew corn and potatoes. Sad, and yet these workers saved my barn! 



Here is me inside the barn at age 5



Our outside water hose, now that the greenhouses with all of those hoses were gone, consisted of one spiket on the far end of the house about 100 feet from the barn.  The young fellows brought buckets of water from the bathtub in the house, and our brave and fearless volunteer fire department got here in record breaking time, the firehouse being right across from Walmart 1/2 mile up the road. Quickly they actually covered my kilns and some pottery, broke in the back loft window and hosed down the whole loft soon having the fire out.  The wax had caught on fire, ran up the back wall melting my radio and scorched the peak of the barn.

The beams in the barn, being 200 years old, are 8-10 inch pegged chestnut. The siding in the back near the roof still has black streaks and charred holes, but the beams and roof held up well, with a new nice black tint to them too.

Needless to say, that was my last wax experience. Sometimes old methods like wiping the glaze off the bottom of the pot with a wet sponge is.. more sensible and a time saver in the long run.



Grampa with chicken coops and calf 1940ish



And we did have chickens. Grampa was fond of eggs

and chicken soup. These chicken coops were right behind the

greenhouses and next to the road. A neighbors driveway now runs through the middle of it, but when I was a kid there was an old car seat over on the right. My brother and I would jump off the roof and bounce on it. The tall tree behind was a tulip tree next to the stone wall.  It was cut down to put in the houses and the stone wall disappeared too. On the right is one of our fields. It being only about 4 acres, we cut it with a push behind tractor and stacked the hay in our pickup truck to be carted off. By the time I was in this picture, the cows and chickens were gone and we had taken to raising rabbits, so we did not need the hay.

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