Christmas Sweater
Kiln Openings are like Christmas Presents, Sometimes Like the best gift ever, sometimes like Aunt Edna giving you one of her ‘famous’ sweaters.
I’m like a kid on Christmas eve when I have a kiln to open…
I try to ‘peek’ in before it’s time, I watch the temperature S-L-O-W-L-Y creep down to a manageable level, wonder exactly when I can chance opening the lid; Now exactly where did I put my oven mitts?
Ok, so patience is not on my list of virtues when it comes to pottery, and that’s the one thing that pottery demands: time and patience. We often get people who want an order and can’t understand why they can’t get it today. We live in a society where we’ve become accustomed to instant gratification, Amazon the same day, Uber Eats in a few minutes, even the latest movie, Instantly. Yet some things still are no respecter of time, and anything clay falls into this category. To properly pay homage to the clay, it takes no less than two weeks to complete a piece, and the journey is fraught with hazards.
One misstep during the process and you’ve relegated your piece to the waste pile… and I have a significant one of those. Up until the first firing, a wayward piece of pottery can merely be crushed and recycled, buckets of vaguely distinguishable shards beckon from the back stoop like an antique doll hospital gone wrong. A quick crush, splash of water and vigorous stirring with a mud mixer and we’re off again. Fire the piece to bisque and it’s all over, somewhere along path through the first firing, you pass the point of no return as internal forces of the clay battle the potter’s skill and one will ultimately win.
Even with a perfect piece, the glaze process is sometimes tricky. You see, potters are never content with the ‘perfect glaze’ of last week. There’s always the striving for a ‘better blue’ or ‘little more green’... problem is that a little more of the component that makes the blue can turn the glaze into the ugliest green you’ve ever seen, and it runs off the piece and onto the kiln shelf like some kind of primordial slime oozing from swamp. Take the chance and put that glaze on a bunch of pieces and they are nothing more than something good for target practice.
So I, the potter wait patiently (not!) as the kiln slowly cools. My grandmother always said that a ‘watched pot never boils’ and I know the corollary to this is a ‘watched kiln never cools’ I hope the wonder and awe of finally opening the kiln after a glaze firing never ceases. It’s something to look forward to, hopefully full of amazing ‘Christmas Gifts’ that I can’t wait to share with everyone, and not too many of Aunt Edna’s sweaters that will become fodder of our next target practice.