June 2020 Soda Firing

After a small hiatus from making and firing due to Covid-19 closures, I was so glad to be back in the saddle of the small Northern Clay Center soda kiln! During my time quarantining and not making work I was able to spend some time researching clay bodies and formulating some new ones. I read through Robert Tichane’s book Clay Bodies along with reading Gail Nichol’s Soda, Clay and Fire. I don’t mention much more about these clay bodies in this post as I am still working on them and plan to post something about that research in the future. The firing ended up being a bit of a difficult one in the beginning but turned out very well towards the end and had some really stunning surfaces.

Materials:

• My porcelaneous stoneware body, porcelain and my clay body tests.

• RF Studio East Soda Slip.

• FR Studio Blue Celadon.

• Basic soda wadding and newman wadding.

Loading:

With this firing I had a lot of plates and flatter objects which allowed me to pack things pretty close as the flame would travel across the wares. I created some variation with stacking different heights of posts and posting pots up among others.

Notes from firing up in temperature.

• Pilot burner blew out over night and the when I came in in the morning to begin the firing it was at 545°F.

• The pilot burner continued to blow out and after some tweaking, I fixed the problem. This problem did end up setting back the firing about 5 hours.

• At hour 13.5 and 14 I sprayed 675 grams of soda ash and one gallon of water into the kiln while in reduction.

• The kiln soaked in reduction for 45 minutes after the last spraying session.

• Overall took 14.75 hours.

Results / Post Unloading Notes:

• A great range of surfaces:

  • Stony grey carbon trapped areas mostly in the bottom half of the kiln. I would attribute this to a stronger reduction in the bottom half of the kiln.

  • Yellow / peachy colors within the stony greys most likely coming from the small period of reoxidation.

  • Intense reds and oranges.

  • Surfaces are not too rough. I have been working on creating surfaces that are not as rough and blistery where there is a lot of soda glaze. I believe that holding the kiln after spraying helped mitigate that here.

Summary:

The pilot blowing out over night really set this firing back some but I am glad that I was able to recover after playing around with some things. The firing was very smooth afterwards and I had a good amount of time for the down-firing. With this firing, I used wet soft brick to plug up the peeps which I believe steamed the kiln, creating more pressure and influenced the path and dance of the flame. I had a lot of clay body research in this kiln that I learned a lot from. I did not like the surfaces that I got but did learn a lot from them to continue developing new clay bodies. With my next firing, I am hoping to cool the kiln over a longer period of time and hopefully hold it in the 1700°F range.