THE CRAFT OF FIRE

I've been wondering how to colour the clay and ceramic pieces I have, and of course I could go to the pottery supply store and pick up some glazes, but a) it's very far away and I don't have a car, and b) it seems more interesting to do something more 'primitive'. What could I use from around my house that would make an interesting mark? A few days ago I was out on the deck and noticed some rust stains on the wood beside the legs of a metal chair we have. Rust... iron oxide... of course! The theme then became how to get iron oxide. So I put some steel wool in a can with a bit of water and let it sit for a while. I also scraped some rust flakes off the lid of a metal can that coincidentally we're going to use when we do our raku firing next week. And lastly, after doing some internet trawling, I burned some steel wool because that apparently produces iron oxide.* The whole week long I saw rust everywhere. Everytime I walked my dog was a chance to find some ...

We made our garbage can kiln today, to do raku firings and then work with metal casting in my backyard. It's a 20L galvanized can, lined with 1" of ceramic fibre, held in place with some nichrome wire and "paper" ceramic fibre acting as a gasket inside, so the thicker fibre doesn't tear. Normally you'd make ceramic buttons and thread the wire through those, but since we didn't have a kiln to make the buttons in the first place - a kind of chicken-and-egg scenario - we went with this design which seems to work fine. We cut a 4.5" outlet at the top of the kiln and a 3" hole near the bottom for the 100,000 BTU weed-burner I found on craigslist. And then sprayed the inside with rigidizer which helps protects the fibre a bit. The whole thing took a leisurely and enjoyable 4 hours. We'll test drive it in a few weeks...