Slightly Off Center

After two lovely, consistent, even-temperatured firings in a row, the kiln was back to its old tricks again. Hotter on top, a fair amount of random oxidation, barely made cone 9 on the bottom. Cones melting backwards off the pack, though not, thanks be, into any actual pots.

Worst that happened was, while pushing the car in, a pot snagged on the roof, pulled the shelf out of line, tipped over a couple of glasses, one of which broke. I had to reach in and carefully dismantle the top two shelves so I could pull the car out and restack. Several pots got scrapes on their rims, which I touched up with glaze before reloading, but I missed a small casserole that had glaze scraped off the underside of the rim. Still looks okay from the top, and is completely functional.

So after stressing for the entire cooling cycle, it was a tremendous relief to open the kiln and find an actual pretty good firing. My glaze has a fairly broad firing range, and is still mature at cone 9. The white pots will still find a home, almost all of the special order pieces turned out lovely, including almost the entire shelf of mugs for Great Harvest Bakery. And no blistering on the black stain, no randomly occurring rim cracks.

And now I have new pots to take to Roseburg.