Me and my classmates recently fired the wood kiln and got some great results. It was a 2 and a half day firing and we did a reduction cool near the end of firing. Reduction cool gives the pieces a dark red appearance because the reduction atmosphere is bringing the iron out of the clay. Reduction means that we starved the kiln of oxygen by closing off most of the air sources so the fire starves for oxygen and ends up taking oxygen out of the pieces, giving it a red color. We sealed up the kiln with chinking which is a mixture of wadding and water. Wadding is made out of fire clay, sand, and sawdust which means that it can be applied to the cracks of the hot kiln and not pop off, it will be stable and seal up the kiln. This ensures that oxygen cannot enter the kiln. The "cool" portion of "reduction cool" is achieved by putting wet wood into the kiln. The water in the wood slowly cools the kiln while allowing it to stay in a reduction atmosphere. It cools at about 30-100 degrees and hour. we started cooling at 2100 degrees and stopped cooling at about 1450 degrees.
The ewer on top is made out of porcelain with an iron heavy slip sprayed on the surface. The plates on the bottom are made out of stoneware with iron. You can see that the porcelain is much lighter because of the iron free clay. We can see that the red only came out on one spot because of the iron rich slip that was placed on top.
Here are some bottles that got some great surface results. Side note: none of the pictures on this post have glaze applied. All of the shine you see is coming from the wood ash melting on the peice
Im really excited about the orange colors I got on some of these bowls. In the past it has been hard to get orange hues out of the wood kiln so this is very promising.
*These are not my pieces* These are some of the other results we got from the reduction cool firing. The top left bowl is Caileigh Davis's (instagram: Caileigh_erin) and the cups are also hers. I love the rainbow drip effect the wood ash deposited on the top left bowl. The bottom left pitcher is Stephen Heywood's, the variation of color really accentuates the form.
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