Primitive Pottery Firing

So having attended a primitive pottery day a week ago I had a crack at firing the pieces I made at home. I don't have an area to have a fire so I utilised my fire pit to replicate this. I had intended to also do a Youtube video to accompany this blog but sadly the microphone lead wasn't in properly so all I had was hiss for sound.

I lined the base with a little soil, I'd discussed with Paul who ran the day what to do about the difference in heat retention between the metal and earth and I decided this was the best way to mitgate this.

  

I'd had the pieces I made  initially sitting on a radiator indoors to start the gentle warming process. I then started some shop purchased kindling with some firelighters off on one side and then introduced the  pieces to the other. They can suffer from thermal shock because despite being hard and abrasion resistant clay items can be prone to brittleness brought on by a large temerature swing so slowly does it.

 

Once the kindling was established I added some more sizeable pieces of seasoned wood to get the fire building, once it was going well and reducing to embers I then introduced the pieces to the centre and formed an ember ring around them. Note that I put the beads in the oil lamp as I'd seen on the course itself.

I left them to their own devices for around thirty minutes before adding more fuel which once it started catching I then moved closer, piled wood across the top and once blown to a decent flame was left to get on, initailly for twenty minutes or so.

And whilst we have a decent, established hot fire...Rude not to really. I also had some homemade bacon I had planned to fry for a mid session butty but with the all absorbing nature of this session I overlooked it.

I tried checking the gaps in the now roaring fire for hopeful signs and after a while I could see that one of the pots had indeed gone black...Which is a good thing. Shortly after I could see what I thought was a more terracotta hue on a piece which again is where you want to end up. 

As the flames died and left embers I decided to have a look. To my delight as I dug everything seemed to have survived and the terracotta colour was in evidence but there were a few small areas of black left and indeed the larger pendant was still completely black in colour.

With the fact that black should then eventually add to a more earthen cover I decided to pile some more embers back on the pendant and when I inspected the pots they were black underneath too, so I flipped them over and covered the black parts as well. I left it another short while and the pendant mostly turned, as did the oil lamp but bizarrely the potted container went terracotta on the base but back to black on the top! Perhaps I should have started the fire off in the middle to warm the soil too?

I am of course a total noob when it comes to ceramics so I don't understand the subtleties of what's just unfolded but I decided to call it a day and slowly cool the OKish bits and pieces, again on the opposite side from the still seriously hot embers and removed the bits getting an extended fire slowly after. I left them for around an hour to cool which might have been longer than needed but I had to nip out and that was the duration of my errand. I was also pleased when tapping the oil lamp to get a satisfying ring from it, even with the beads still in it.

With the bits now completely cool I set about doing an initial examination. I noticed a small hairline crack on the rim of the lidded pot, about the width of my little finger in the above right hand side picture so no biggie. Both the pictures show the colour difference between the afore mentioned pot and it's lid. 

I filled up the lidded pot with water to see if the firing process had made the vessel watertight-It had I'm pleased to say.

A further inspection also showed a small hairline crack on the oil lamp base about a third of the way up from the front. I also filled this with water to test it's integrity but alas the crack negates it being used for it's intended purpose. The tallow I made lives to fight another day...Maybe I could line the pot with beeswax?

So all in all I'm really happy with the results. I would have course have liked no cracks, a perfect terracotta colour and a crystal glass ding on the bowls but I counted them all in, and counted them all out again so that's a win for me. I have also pondered if something like the rune pendant could have a fairly large and simple design that could facilitate pewter being poured in? That's for another day of course but I must get round to doing a simple pewter casting blog/ video at some stage and maybe I could try with a homemade pottery piece.

At the start of the silent video clips I made the point that whilst in most cases a clip can be reshot, with pottery there is no second chance...As it also proved with the footage for the Youtube video that never was! I am however including links to the videos of the primitive pottery day that I made these pieces on, and a look at some more of the 'dog poo' mud which I processed to work out the clay content.