How to Fire Pottery

Video Transcript

"I'll be showing you how to take your ceramic piece from start to finish. One of the last steps while getting your pieces ready to be fired is making sure that when you're putting them in the kiln, they are supported the correct ways. If you just take a piece that has been glazed and put it on the bottom of your kiln with clear glaze still on it, if that's touching a shelf, this is actually going to fuse to any piece that it touches. So this will actually become a part your kiln shelf, which we don't want. So, there's a couple different ways we can put this piece into our kiln and have it fire correctly or fire properly. All we need to do is figure out how we sort of want the piece to sit in the kiln and what sort of finish we want to have on it. There are some people who don't like to have any raw bisque on the bottom rims of bowls or plates. For this all we do is we take a stilt and these come in all kinds of different sizes. Some have many, many spikes. Some have just three. Some are really tall to be raised for different specialty pieces. So you sort of just have to find the right one that fits your piece. Attach it to the bottom of your piece. Then you're going to flip the piece over, do a clearance check to make sure the feet of the stilt aren't the same height as your foot of your plate. You do want it to be out further. Then all your going to do is your going to simply place this inside of the kiln as is. If you did want to have a raw part on your piece or you did want the rim of your plate or bowl wiped, what we have is we have a simple large sponge that we can wipe the piece on. So we have a sponge just put...it's wet with water so there's a lot of moisture in there...and all we need to do to remove that paint is to flip it over, put it on the sponge, give it a couple wipes and it will very cleanly remove all the paint from the bottom surface. So you just want to give it a couple good wipes. You don't really want to put any pressure cause you don't want any water to come up through the sponge and wet the entire piece. So give it a couple wipes, do a little clearance check. Make sure there is no glaze on there so it doesn't stick to your shelf and then this piece is now ready to be loaded into your kiln."