THE CRAFT OF FIRE

What's a mud oven without a video to accompany it? Mud Oven 2013   Enjoy. Mud music by: Beethoven, the Muppets, Flanders and Swann and Bix Beiderbecke.

It works. And it's beautiful. Last weekend we finally fired up our mud oven, because we are essentially done, and because we couldn't wait any longer. And it was lovely. The air goes in, feeds the flames, and vents back out the front. No chimney required. Orsi and her kids came over, and Dani B. too, and with Sigrid they finished covering the oven with a thin layer of insulation (more to come). At least until the kids found worms in the mix, at which point they moved on to other things... Meanwhile I worked on the door - an old washboard I found on garbage day which happened to be exactly the width we needed. We really should have carved out the door before the oven mud dried so thoroughly. Getting it open to the right size (11.5" wide x 10" high) was not easy. Wetting and careful sawing did the trick. By the time it was all ready, it was dark, and the perfect s...

It's been a very busy week. Of waiting. For mud to dry.  And waiting a bit longer.   And doing some work.  And waiting some more.  And, while waiting, looking at the garden. (Still haven't gotten a photo of the garter snake that's made a home in the base of the oven.) And enjoying the waiting. Because things have a process. And you can't rush mud. And then doing a lot of work with the whole gang and being nearly, nearly done.  Here's Phil and Dani scooping out the sand while Danny and Orsi do some final patching of cracks.   Here we are mixing up some more insulating mix (sawdust, shavings, dried grass and mud). Here's Orsi adding some mortar to the base - we did a final layer of bricks along the top too. And here's Gloria preparing more mud for mixing. Here's the inside of the oven!  The paper shows where the sand form ended and where the mud-clay walls begin.  It's s...

We had another great session this past weekend, with a lot more mud-stomping and the dome of our oven finally taking shape! There it is, the sand mound, bird's eye view. The mud we mixed up last week needed re-hydrating, and this time we added a big bag of sand to it, to act like grog does - to help the clay-mud material resist cracking as it dries and heats up. And then once it was mixed and more or less ready to go, we left that to start building the sand dome. This is actually the empty space of the oven that we're forming, 16 inches high and about 22 inches in diameter. The sand gets covered with clay-mud, and later we'll scoop it all out - a "lost-sand process" - and be left with just an empty space within a clay-mud dome. Or in other words, a mud oven. It's fun to do a trick with your head and try to visualize the sculpting of negative space... (And this brings us close to another part of the Craft of Fire which is all about mold-making and ...

This past week and weekend we kept our progress going steady with a session that included finishing the foundation, laying out the hearth bricks, and mixing up a first batch of mud! It's a profound mystery why none of us thought to sing the most appropriate of all tunes for this occasion, but now we can all rehearse for next time. "Just happy as a cow chewing on a cud..." The pieces of mud and clay were very dry and hard, so a shovel and boots were required - not to mention water. It took quite a while, but eventually it all got broken down, nice and evenly muckified. And slippery. There were close-calls, but (somewhat unfortunately, photographically-speaking) no one fell completely in. We can't help but include this photo to show-off the new wheelbarrow donated by Gloria which will eventually have its home in the "future Toronto-area Park of Study and Reflection "! While Danny, Daniel, Sigrid and Orsi had fun in th...

With the base stable and solid, we set about building the form with found cinder blocks. They are kind of ugly, but we figured we'd cement over them later and decorate the base - maybe even make a mosaic on it - later. Once the form was built, I started filling it up with all the rubble in the garage, collected over months. And then some gravel and sand to make it level about 10 inches from the top. The base has a circumference of 45 inches, and the oven interior itself will be about half that. Next we made a layer of insulation so as to keep the energy of the oven inside of it. This layer is made up of beer bottles (glass retains heat fairly well as does the air trapped within it), encased in a mix of slip and sawdust. (Slip is basically a liquid clay-mud, of the consistency of heavy cream. You fill up a bucket with clay-mud and add water, let it sit overnight, and then stir it up evenly.) The added sawdust acts as an insulant, and over time it will get burned out, leaving ...