Alright so we are here with the kiln. The kiln is our most important tool for
when we are doing clay, because it's what takes it from being a very fragile piece
of clay to something that its hard like stone. So inside the machine there are
what we call the heating elements. They're just coils of little metal and
that's what heats up and heats up the inside of the kiln. You can see down the bottom we
have shelves and posts so that we can stack shelves all the way up to the top.
Over here on the side this is the control center this is the brains of the operation.
Alright so when you finish with your clay it's gonna be a dark grey color
like this. One way to know whether it's ready to fire not is that color is going
to change. As its color changes and gets to be a lighter gray the clay gets
hard, but it's very easy to break and so if you're not careful when you pick it
up. It might just snap or fall apart. And so that's why it has to go to the kiln
to get hard like a stone or like a brick.
The next step when you are done with clay is that has to sit over
here on the shelves to dry and so usually takes about a week to thoroughly dry out
so all the water is gone. If the water is not completely gone when it starts to
heat up in the kiln the water turns and into steam and causes the clay to explode.
It shatters into a bunch of pieces. So it's a very important that
it's sits to dry. Usually everything is spread out so it's not touching any of
the other clay while it dries but I've gone ahead and done some cleaning to the
clay to make it ready for to fire. So to clean our clay a lot of times I'll
take one of my knives and I'll scrape the edges or I might take this brillo-like pad
and kind of sand down the edges, because we wanted to look nice
before gets fired. Because once it's fired its that way forever.
Alright so now it's time to load all of this and to there.
When you are firing clay for the first time it can be stacked up and can touch each other. It doesn't have
to have a lot of wiggle room. There just needs to be a little bit of room around
the edges of the shelves so the air can circulate around clay tile.
So we can really fire a lot of pieces all at the same time when we squish them close together.
see inside we've run out of room on this
shelf to stack it any higher so that's where these little pegs, the stilts, come
in handy, because then they can hold up another shelf above the other one and we
can just keep stacking everything in, until we have all our clay loaded.
now as I'm loading this you can also see this little guy down here. He's like a
thermometer for the kiln. He measures the temperature and how hot it gets inside
So this tells the kiln
when to stop heating up or if it needs to heat up longer. He's a pretty
important guy so I want to leave lots of room around him.
And so it's very important that when you're making stuff you attach the right
way. Otherwise it falls off, like in this guys case. And so that's why when
I'm doing this I have to be very careful and very focused to try not to hurt
anybody's clay project.
As you can see I'm pretty close to the top. So I don't think I have room for
another shelf, but I think I have room for all my pieces that are ready to fire.
All right, so the next step is to close the lid and secure it. And then over here
on the control box I need to tell it exactly what I need to do. So I'm gonna say it
needs to fire and it needs to be at a certain temperature and I want to go fast.
So that we can be ready to work on the next day. Now it's ready to go and all I have
to do is press Start. So we're back and it's time to open the kiln to see how
everything turned out. Usually I fire after school and then it takes the whole
night heat up to the temperature it's supposed to get to; which is close to
2,000 degrees. And then it has to slowly cool back down which usually takes until
right first thing in the morning when school starts. So let's open her up and see how
everything turned out. It looks like we had a great fire. It doesn't look like
anything got broken and everything is just like it's supposed to be. And so now I
have to take everything back out of the kiln and put it back in all the teachers
tubs so that way you can find your clay and work on step 2: the glaze process.