Amanda Bridges Art

Results of the reduction fire are in! I had a little under half that I got good results from. Most of the glazes I used are Mudworks Glazes from Kentucky Mudworks . Melted Butter (bottom) and Satin Black (liner & rimmed) on Red Rock. Satin White on Red Rock. Kentucky Bluegrass (bottom) and Stardust (liner & rimmed) on Red Rock. Melted Butter (bottom) and Retro Brown (liner & rimmed) on Red Rock. Kentucky Bluegrass (bottom) and Satin Black (liner & rimmed) on 200 Stoneware. Melted Butter (bottom) and Satin Black (liner & rimmed) on 200 Stoneware. It got more reduction than the pitcher (below). This is one of my faves. Melted Butter (bottom) and Satin Black (liner & rimmed) on 200 Stoneware. Satin White and Apricot on 200 Stoneware. Kinda boring compared to the rest but not too bad. Melted Butter (liner and rimmed) and Satin White (outside of bowl) on 200 Stoneware. Also one of my faves. I may post "the bad" and "the ug...

Fired up the new gas reduction kiln yesterday for the first time. I'm a total newbie to being in the driver's seat, so I'm starting out with a cone 6 until I feel like I really know what I'm doing. I ended up adjusting the size of the top vent hole to 6". The 3-1/2" hole just did not look big enough, so I called Olympic (which is what I should have done from the beginning). The tech guy I spoke with said the top vent hole should be 6" and the burner port holes should be 3". I decided to leave the burner port holes at 2-1/2" and just enlarged the top vent. I also marked 1/4" increments on both sides of the vent hole, so I would be able to gauge the damper for reduction. Here's the fire schedule I attempted to use: 200 degrees F / hour to 600 degrees 250 degrees F / hour to 1100 degrees Start reduction at cone 012 300 degrees F / hour to 2232 degrees Soak for 1 hour Sounds simple enough. Here's what actually ha...

Check out the nice pad my sweetie built for my new kiln to live on. The next addition is a roof/awning to help keep it (and me) dry. The gas tank was delivered today and HOLY COW it is HUGE! Not sure what I was expecting, but certainly nothing this big. Me and KTott are going to have to get busy. Off to glaze the last of the pots and tomorrow we fire!

Spent most of yesterday doing post-winter clean up in the back yard and scoping out the site for the kiln, and then..... remembered I had shelf maintenance to do before I could load up and do my first test fire. So I hauled out all my kiln shelves and spent the remainder of the day grinding all the old kiln wash off and putting on new. Whew!!!

So I finally decided to make the plunge to gas reduction, but wanted a cheaper option than a pre-fab and an easier option than building one. Electric to gas conversion was the way to go. I bought a 7.0 Cu Ft kiln carcass from my local pottery supply store, Kentucky Mudworks . My next big decision was which burner system to buy, Olympic Torchbearer or the Summit Kiln Conversion Kit . Cathi Newlin of The Square Peg was a wealth of information for how she set up her system using a Summit system. I finally settled on the 23" Olympic Torchbearer burner system with ignition ring and thermo-couple shutoff. It just looked studier and I figured since it would be living outside in the crazy Kentucky weather, it was a better way to go. Gutting the kiln carcass took some time, but was not terribly hard. The next big step was to cut holes for the burner ports and top vent. There was surprisingly little information on the web for how big to make the holes. This is where the Summit Co...