My Special Piece of Pottery that I am making in order to sell enough to save my house from the tax man is slowly drying enough so I can fire it up.
I sometimes wish pottery was an immediate gratification thing to do. It is not. No matter what you make from clay, the piece will be brittle when dry. Leaving it on the back porch table, as I did with some bird castings one day, the clay turns into a lump of mud again, as did my bird castings that I left out on the back porch that day.
Once it is thoroughly dried, it has to be heated in a kiln for hours. Clay absorbs moisture from the air so even if it looks dry, it will still have moisture in between particles of clay. Clay particles are like little chocolate jimmies. At the microscopic level, these little bars of feldspar when dampened, will slide together and line up in a dense clump, which is why clay holds together as it does unlike other dirt and rock particles that are round and crumble apart easily. I usually give my pots 3 weeks to dry, although they can be rushed to dry quicker by placing them in the sun or on a heater or sometimes in my kitchen oven once they look dry. If they dry too fast, however, they could crack in the bottom, so i have to be careful.
The kiln must be heated slowly, therefore, to evaporate the moisture. If heated up to fast, steam will explode the pots causing damage to other pots and a general mess in the kiln. I was gratefully given an old, 1950s or 1960s model of a small electric kiln that had been directly wired into a school art room. After installing a new plug and finding elements to fit (elements are those heating coils), I turned it on, stood back and prayed it would work. Sure enough, the elements worked fine. So I loaded my first pots, propped open the lid open and waited an hour and a half before I could shut the lid and turn up the heat. Soon there was a BANG! Apparently, the bottom element switch was stuck on high and the pots heated up way to fast. Looking for a replacement switch seemed impossible, so I took apart the switch and cleaned up the connections and do-hickey's inside. Still stuck on high. Only now I leave the whole lid up for a couple of hours and no more pots have exploded.
Once pots are fired, taking at least 6 hours, usually a lot more depending on the temperature you want to achieve, the kiln now being 2,000 degrees takes another 6 hours or more to cool off. These bisqued pots are usually glazed and refired taking another day.
So today I am patiently waiting for my special pot to dry. I must keep busy doing other things. I am a master in multi-tasking.
I moved back to grampas house in 1978. For the past 33 years, I have been multitasking a lot. Ripping out the remodeling done by my parents and grandparents in the house, the linoleum exposed nice wood planks, vertical kitchen planks exposed 18" horizontal plank wainscoting. I stripped floors of paint I scraped, stenciled and repainted walls and woodwork. I plastered ceilings too.
I have worked with plaster on my pottery molds. The plaster in this old house has fibers of flax and horse hair embedded in it to help hold it together. On the outer walls, two courses of brick are covered inside with 1" vertical planks about 12" wide. Onto the planks, accordion style slats are stretched to hold the plaster. There is nowhere to put insulation in the wall cavities. Outlets have been put on the inner walls or into the floor boards. The four upstairs rooms are pretty much original. Downstairs, my parents gratefully put in a bathroom in part of the kitchen where the stone sink used to be. A small bedroom and a pantry was made into a dining room. The 7 foot kitchen fireplace was removed around 1900. The hearth and chimney were inside the house taking up a good deal of the kitchen. The mantel still hangs over the new gas stove and cast iron sink. Sun shines in through 23 large drafty windows. It's a nice place to live.
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| The Kitchen today |
Still waiting for the special object ot dry! Thanks again to all of you ordering and buying my pots! My pots are not just pretty, they can go in the oven, dishwasher and microwave!
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