Okay, so after a long learning process, I got the opportunity to meet up with a fella at the Kolomoki Festival last weekend who was open firing some pottery. Since we arrived very shortly after the park opened, I was afforded the opportunity to watch the process all day long. I asked questions to the point of almost being annoying, but Mr. Stuckey was extremely helpful with information rooted deeply in historical research of my area.
Some of the pottery he was firing, actually still had rocks in it. Lesson 1: Your clay does not need to be perfectly clean. some sand is necessary, and many impurities will fire perfectly fine without all the extra water extraction (read work).
I stayed until he was about to let the fire go out and smolder for the night. I learned about literally creeping the pottery into the fire, why it changes colors in the smoke, and that historically Natives used what they had. Mr. Stuckey said very plainly, "If they had good clay, they made good pottery; If they had bad clay, they made bad pottery." Mostly utilitarian, often decorative, and seldom eccentric. KISS!
So.. a few months ago, I made some pottery out of clay I extracted and let dry. It's been too darn hot to build a fire and tend it all day long, so with temps lowering into the high 80s in the afternoons, I decided yesterday was a good day to start a fire, and try my hand at it again. It was a bit windy. Normally a pit would be dug, but wouldn't you know it... the road department already did that for me! so I went out to the ditch beside the road with a sliver of fat lighter, some dead pecan limbs and twigs, and got me a nice bed of coals, then surrounded it with some nice oak logs to hold the coals.
Here's the pottery at the start:
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Fire lit to drive off the dew and any ambient moisture. I used a small piece of plywood to do the extra drying of the pottery before it went into the fire.
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This posture was maintained for about 2 hours to make sure the ground was dry. I then removed the plywood, set the pottery straight on the ground to be inched closer and closer to the fire. I waited from 9 am, when I started the fire until 1 pm till I put the clay actually all the way in the coals. I took some pictures of the color change, but they were too blurry and smoky to tell any difference. So here they are in the fire.. I know you can't actually see them.. but they are in there and glowing as red as the coals in the fire.
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I let them cook till 5 pm then let the fire go out till it was just a big pile of hot coals and ash. It was still windy so I made sure to pile up coals from the perimeter on top of the pottery and walked away.
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I left them to cool overnight and will be pulling them out as soon as it's light enough outside to see what I'm doing.
I made a test disk to check shrinkage, so it will be interesting to see how much this clay can tolerate.
I will take some pictures as I take them out and wash them off so stay tuned to see how it goes. I think they survived and I'm really excited.. It truly is a test of patience.
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