As readers may know I am somewhat a specialist in pit firing, having explored it extensively during my PhD and then writing a book about it which you can find on lots of online book stores such as AMAZON.
Lately I have been yearning to explore more methods of alternative firing. The idea arose when my pugmill decided to die leaving me with lots of clay I haven’t had time to manually reclaim. So I thought I would make an outdoor clay kiln – this is still in the planning stage, and I hope to get it up and running (so that it is ‘fired’) before fire restrictions come in this year.
In the meantime I decided to use some of this excess clay – mainly from buckets under the potters wheels which has a high water content – and experiment with a TeePee firing. I did the firing a couple of weeks ago, but hadn’t had time to post it till now – it seems to be very busy at the moment!
I am lucky enough to live on a 10 acre property with lots of trees, and it has been a windy year so there are lots of blown down branches scattered around. I began by constructing my TeePee using these branches and then lining it with fence palings which I reclaimed from a neighbour a few months ago. Before lining the TeePee though, I constructed a tripod with smaller branches within the TeePee which included seeweed, cow dung, salt and some copper sulphate and nestled my pots into it.
I had previously made a series of pinch pots which were were prepared using string and copper wire wound around the pots to hold on seaweed, gumleaves and cow dung.
Prepared pots
After lining the TeePee with fence palings I dipped newspaper – in two or three layers for strength – into clay slip, which I had made by using my glaze drill to mix the clay in the potters wheel slag buckets. I then lined the TeePee with this paper making sure I left I left two holes for lighting the fire and a few draft holes to feed the fire. I also left a hole in the top of the TeePee for drawing.
The firing was really fun to do and visually splendid and I was very happy with the result for a first effort and intend to experiment with this technique more.
And here are the finished pots cleaned and polished 🙂
Pot One – when the paper slip fires it creates an almost low fire sculpture, so I rescued some shards the following morning and experimented 🙂
Pot Two – love these colours!
Pot Three – great copper wire markings here!
Pot Four – love the subtlety ….
What a wonderful experiment Dawn and I love your results!
When I was a student we did a pit firing and it was the most fun I had in Ceramics!
The subtle colours you have achieved are really gorgeous. Bet your heart sang 🙂
Posted by Robyn G | October 6, 2016, 10:25 amThanks Robyn – yes very happy with the results…. and yes I agree these alternative firings are the most fun 🙂
Posted by Dawn Whitehand | October 6, 2016, 2:47 pmthat looks like fun… and some really good results
Posted by Anna | October 7, 2016, 4:57 pmyes it was, thanks Anna 🙂
Posted by Dawn Whitehand | October 8, 2016, 7:12 pmWhat beautiful pieces you have created. What items did you use to bring out the different colors?
Posted by Cofused and Skeptical | December 27, 2016, 1:33 pmsorry for the delayed reply 🙂 Got caught up in Christmas & New Years!! I use copper, iron & salt, seaweed and anything organic and combustible…. its a matter of experimenting!!
Posted by Dawn Whitehand | January 2, 2017, 12:06 pm