We are very busy all this month with our winter wood firing workshops. We run these every winter, and it has become a reliable part of our income. We will be doing 4 firing workshops this month. We are currently half way through the series. 2 down and 2 to go.

So far we have had some of the best workshops that we have ever held. Excellent results keeping the students very happy. AND a zero rate of losses so far. Pulling red hot pots from a kin at 1,000oC can be challenging. The clay has to be of the right kind and the firing just right. Fortunately, we have a stock the very fast firing and fuel efficient small portable wood kilns that we build in our kiln factory, on-site. We have a number of these at our disposal these days. They work remarkably well, they are a joy to work with. We take about an hour to fire them up to top temperature from cold for the first firing. The work is unloaded using metal tongs. All the participants must be wearing flame resistant clothes, such as woollen material and leather boots or shoes to take part. they must also be wearing long leather gloves when working around the kiln. The hot pots are placed in a bed of damp sawdust to reduce cool slowly. This reduced atmosphere within the saw dust bed causes the clay body to be reduced to charcoal black colour that gives the fired work a distinctive contrast look between the shiny coloured glazes and the matt black clay body.

3 to 4 of these little amazingly fuel efficient kilns are sufficient to fire the work of about 10 students, as the kilns cycle through the day. I have built a few different shapes and sizes , so that we have a taller chambered kiln and a wider setting kiln as well as a cubic  chambered kiln, we manage to get through all the different shaped work in the day.

The kilns are reloaded with new work and left to sit in the residual heat of the kiln for 5 to 10 minutes. This allows the barely warm pots a chance to assimilate the residual heat from the kiln structure, before we start to fire the kiln up again. The subsequent firings only take 30 minutes, as the kiln is already hot, usually around 400oC when the recommence stoking. There is usually just a few small embers left in the base of the fire box, just enough to rekindle the flame and get the kiln going again. As the day progresses, the residual heat in the kiln is increased and there are more retained embers in the fire box. It makes for a very intense series of firings and unpacking. As each kiln and its firing crew work at different speeds with different loads of varied ceramic objects, all the firings and unloadings become scattered in to a series of repetitive, rhythmic ins and outs.

The day ends with a period of pot washing and scrubbing to get the work clean and shiny before packing back into their wrappings, stacked back into their vehicles and heading home.

It’s a very busy day for us starting at dawn, wheeling out the kilns in to the open and getting them ready for firing, stacking wood into wheel barrows, setting up pyrometers, preparing kiln shelves and wads, collecting kindling and setting up the outside coffee and tea table with electric jug and urn, etc. Its intense, we are glad to be back inside by dark, with everything packed away safely and all the surrounding ground watered and raked over to make sure that there are no stray embers allowed to start to smoulder. After dinner and again before bed we make our way back down to the firing site to check for any thing that might have managed to evade our watering can.