We did our raku firing last Thursday night at Malley’s house. It starts out on a base of lightweight fire brick which you pile your pieces on, and then set and load up two more layers of shelves using regular spacers between them. We put the asbestos lined chicken wire “kiln” over the shelves and torched it with a propane fired weed burner. I’d never seen a weed burner before but it’s a pretty big sucker and puts out quite a flame – fifty bucks at your local hardware store. We let it heat up the kiln for about 45 minutes and very carefully lifted the kiln off the top of the stacked pieces. Using very long tongs we took each piece off the shelves and gently dropped them into a large tin trashcan filled with some type of combustible material – leaves, sticks, shredded paper. After each piece goes into the can we threw in more combustible material to give the next piece some cushion. The various materials make unique colors against each glaze. After they smoke in this for 20 minutes we put them in water.
We used special raku glazes and left parts of the pots unglazed. The bottoms of the pots turned out a really nice, almost shiny black, just from the charcoal of the fire. Each glaze has a range of colors it might turn, depending on the temperature of that part of the pot, or what combustible materials it sets against in the smoking part of the process. It’s a very unpredictable process but with very quick results. We fired two kilns of pots in about three hours – very different than using an electric kiln where it takes a good 20 hours to heat, fire, and cool down.
The raku process is not meant for dishware that you’ll be eating from so it has a limited usefulness. But it makes a very interesting metallic like finish with various colors and patterns in each piece. Here are some pieces:
1 comment:
This is some crazy stuff!
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