Reasons to be cheerful - Having Fun in the Sun!

Since we have time on our hands we have been experimenting in the pottery - doing things we wanted to try but never having time to do it.
So today we tried building a "barrel kiln". This is like having a pit firing but doing it above ground in an old incinerator.
Gerry prepared the "kiln" first, by cutting the bottom out of an old incinerator, and placing it in the garden on some old kiln shelves.
Then we prepared the pots which we had biscuit fired first. Some of them had banana skins wrapped round, steel wool, copper wire - in fact all sorts of stuff. (It was an experiment)

 Then he put a layer of sawdust in the kin, followed by some small twigs. He put the prepared pots on these, and covered them with dry leaves. He put some larger twigs on and scattered a sprinkling of copper carbonate and cobalt carbonate on top. Finally he filled it right up to the top with large pieces of wood and lit it, through some holes in the bottom of the incinerator.

 As the firing progressed the flames changed colour depending on the oxide that was catching at the time. Here you can see the  slight tinges of green from the copper.


When the flames had died down, Gerry closed off all the holes and put a lid on to seal it up. This had taken about two hours so far.

We left the kiln to cool down - about three hours.

We are really pleased with the results. We had different shades of reds, pinks and purples on one. On others we had greys white and yellow tinges. It was great fun and we are looking forward to further experiments.