Ceramics Two Week Block pt. 2

It's 11pm Tuesday night and I'm still so excited by what we did today! We had our 1st Raku firing!

Raku is an ancient Japanese pottery technique where the bisque fired piece is dipped into a layer of resist, fired again, then removed from the hot kiln and placed (straight out of the kiln) into a container filled with combustible material such a sawdust/shavings. This causes cracks, dots, spots of carbonization where the smoke penetrates the layer of resist, and where there is no resist. I really love the element of suprise involved because you can't be sure where the cracks will appear and have no real control of how the finished piece will look. But I suppose the same can be said of all ceramics, you can never really be sure whats going to happen once you put something into the kiln!

Here are about half of the pieces that I prepared for Raku. They are vessels, they are smooth and quite skinny and were dipped into resist at either end, so they should have some really intresting carbonization in the middles.

Here is the inside of the kiln when it was at about 700C!!! You can see some of the vessels are glowing a bright orange. It was so hot when Keiran took out the bung (isn't that a brilliant word?!) for us to look but we all crowded round and got pictures anyway!

Here is the kiln being opened, with Elaine waiting to grab the pieces and put them into the bins of sawdust we had waiting.

Here are the two bins full of pieces and sawdust, just smoking away!

 We had a sneaky look in one of the bins to see what was going on inside, look at those amazing colours! I almost wish that metallic sheen has stayed on them.

 This is one of my larger vessels just out of the kiln and about to be dunked in the bucket of water on the ground.

 There it is having a nice chillax in a bucket of water to cool down for itself.

 Here it is out of the water and with most of the resist scraped(sp?) off.

I love the way my camera decided that my boot was obviously what needed to be perfectly in focus in the picture! 

And lastly we have all the beautiful shards of resist that were scraped(sp?!) off the vessels. These are almost as beautiful as the actual pieces we made!

I'm so proud of my first Raku vessel and I can't wait to see how the rest of them have turned out!

Ceramics Pt.3 coming on Thursday night!