A month or so ago we all got to have a go at making pots on a friend’s potters wheel. While none of us are going to be competing in next years Pottery Throwdown we all managed to create a couple of things we were pleased with – the great thing about pottery is anything you’re not happy with can just be binned and the clay reused. The idea had always been to have a go at pit firing these pots, although given that none of us knew anything about the process of pit firing it was all a bit experimental: How big should the pit be, how long to fire things, should we add charcoal etc.
So we guessed how big the pit needed to be, lined it with seaweed before we added the pots and then we surrounded the pots with charcoal before building a fire on top. In the end we added fuel to the fire above the pit for four or five hours; we still had a pile of brash from last winter’s hedge laying to get rid of and that really determined how much fuel we added. Then, having made sure it was safe and there was no chance of catching anything else alight while we weren’t there we left it until the following day.
Given how that it was all a bit of an experiment it went remarkably well. Only two pieces broke and at least one of those happened as we were trying to get things out of the pit, which stayed hot far longer than anticipated (we made fried egg sandwiches on it 24 hours after lighting it) which made getting our pots out harder. While the pit got hot enough to fire the clay it didn’t get hot enough to fire the glaze that had been added to a couple of pots. So next time the plan is to lay some metal pipe into the bottom of the pit to add air there which should get the charcoal to a higher temperature.
