THE CRAFT OF FIRE

So it's been about a year since I've posted anything here, but it's not because we stopped working! For many months, the Fire Craft crew has been trying to make fire, using pyrite, quartz and a very special fungus called tinder fungus. I did this myself years ago, so I decided to just point people in the right direction and let everyone figure things out on their own. That's the typical approach in transmitting the Crafts, and in any case it worked out well because often I needed to take care of my daughter when everyone came over. So, last year late summer they went to the woods to find fungus. They found both false tinder fungus ( fomes fomentarius ) and true tinder fungus, aka chaga. They bought some pyrite at different rock stores in town, and prepped the fungus. And then over the winter, they tried their hand at banging the rocks together to make sparks and get them to alight on the fungus. Click click click , over and over, came the sound ...

This weekend we did a bisque firing of most of the clay pieces that we'd made over the winter with our molds. (From right to left, a few hundred thousand years of pyrotechnic progress.)  Above are the pieces, pre-firing. Most were clay, but there were four Egyptian paste objects. Ka-blam! All the miniatures of the Hall blew up very early on, around 100°. I figure the clay was too thick, pockets of air within expanded... But the Venuses and yoni-lingams turned out lovely. And as usual, even if we thought this firing was going to be very straightforward, there were strange surprises. Three pieces had been modelled with the clay/sand mixture with which we built the mud oven: a yoni-lingam, a pine cone and a Venus. For some reason, the Venus got an incredible shiny glaze on it. There are tiny traces of shine on the yoni-lingam and pine cone, but the Venus shines nearly all over. I'm guessing it's because of the sand that was added, extra sil...

(Now there's a blog post title for ya!) We've been trying to make a nice copy of this here salamander. These are copies in ceramic and pewter I made a few years ago. But whenever we tried to make new clay copies, it kept breaking when being demolded. We figured one of the molds was no good, so we discarded it and used the other one. But that never worked either. I tried a much more flexible mold material (Po-Yo Putty) and figured that would solve the problem, but still it didn't work. In hindsight I probably pressed the mold material around the legs of the critter too tightly, making it very narrow. But still, it shouldn't be so complicated - it's a simple little object. I then figured we needed to use a release agent, some vegetable oil in the mold. We never needed to do that before but surely that would solve our salamandrical problems. Nope. So by this point, it was becoming personal. I had done this before, thousands of Siloi...