Post 3 - Yes! I bought a kiln

 In the big floods in the summer of 2010/11 I had 4 pots ready to fire at my friendly pottery shop just when it went under 2.5 meters of water and my pots turned to mud!!!

 So I used the time to make a new more aesthetically pleasing mould. This one still at the roughly 450mm raw length has a beading around the base and nice rounded corners. The next innovation was to make the feet in separate plaster moulds of their own and then to slip join them to the body of the pot later. This is one of the first to come out of that mould, in a different type of terracotta clay that I wanted to trial glazing after bisque firing.

 

 

Along with my four pots the kilns at my pottery shop went under too and that’s not too good for refractory blocks and electrics. They were going to be out of action for months. 

Cruising the net one day thinking about kilns, found me on the Trading Post and low and behold there was a second hand kiln for sale not 10 km away. Well it was too good to pass up wasn’t it – at least that’s what I told my wife. As Grace Hopper coined it is easier (sometimes and always better) to ask for forgiveness than it is to get permission and so I was faced with one of those “ Honey, great news, I’ve bought a kiln” moments. Bless her soul she was pleased too.

 

 

Fortunately I had three phase power on at the house and so getting it hooked up was pretty easy. It’s a big heavy thing but I put it on a set of furniture moving wheels and it is really easy to roll it out of its storage space for firing. A little rebuild of the arch and it was ready to run.

 The kiln is good for 4 to 5 of the pots at one time. Here it is with 4 as well as an assortment of other experiments, and a few glaze test tiles.

By now we are up to April 2011 in the journey and here we are ready for a first bisque fire in my own kiln. I’d just stepped through a portal into whole new, complex and fascinating world of ceramics and glazes.