First the bad news, obvious right?! One of my brand new shelves, fired in the kiln only one other time, cracked in half somewhere around cone 10. I know this because I could see the cones fine through cone 9 and then I started looking for them and they had disappeared. Now I know why.
Good news is, it only fell on pieces that I had put in to re fire from my first try at reduction and they were all bad anyway, I just thought I would see if I could still get the celadon to reduce, Well, it didn't. The strangest thing is that the nicest of the pieces survived, things fell and stuck together all around them, but they are ok. It was like kiln natural selecton or something! The other good news is all of my good bowls and mugs are BEAUTIFUL! The temmoku is realllllly pretty and I think the other tests are good too. I did have one amber celadon that doesn't look all that great and one tiny white bowl that is very cool but, I don't remember what I put on it and my notes just say little bowl, forgot to say what was on it. The firing was smooth, in spite of pretty hard rain at the end, I came in around 7:30 fairly soaked, but had a nice pot of lentil soup on the stove, smart to have made that earlier!
Unfortunately it is 7am and pouring rain outside, so I'm not quite in the mood to go out and dig through the rubble. Mike, I know you asked for the firing schedule and I will do a post on how I fired the kiln once I'm awake. Just one hint, don't rush about the night before a firing making cone packs. Have them ready in advance. I put the cones in backwards, quite a funny sight this morning. How many cone packs have I made for other people? But mine? Backwards, go figure!
I think the temmoku is going to look really nice with my turquoise raku, I'm excited about this combination. I'll get some better photos later, I know these are not so good. Of course, will people buy temmoku, that's the question. We'll see...........
More later, tea now!