How to Load a Pottery Kiln

Video Transcript

"I'll be showing you how to take your ceramic piece from start to finish. In this clip I am going to give you a couple tips on how to load your kiln. There's a couple things to remember when you're starting to load your kiln and that is to think of your kiln as a giant puzzle. You sort of want the same height pieces going on the same shelf. That way, you don't have any space wasted. Generally, kilns are loaded with medium sized, medium to tall pieces in the bottom, which are generally mugs, piggie banks, small vases, that sort of thing. Second, we move on to our plates, our tiles, our flatter items, our smaller bowls. Next we'll get into our much larger pieces like our tall vases and taller figurines and those sort of things. When you're working out your shelf height, there's a couple of things that will help you get the correct height for your shelf. You want to make sure when you are selecting your piece that you check your tallest piece with your tallest shelf stilt. Shelf stilts are basically stilts that hold up the layers in the kiln. So what you'll generally have is three of these along each corner of a shelf. So what we'll do is we'll put on the edge. We'll put one on that edge and we'll put one balancing out all areas of the kiln so that...that shelf at least. So when another shelf is put on top, it's supported by those three stilts. A little tip for making sure that your shelf stilts are the same height or higher actually than your pieces is to actually take your shelf stilt and put it right next to your piece on a flat surface. This way you can make sure...you can easily see...that if we put a shelf on top of here it's going to completely cover that and it will fuse this piece to the shelf above. So what we want to make sure is that our shelf stilt is actually higher than our pieces on that shelf so there is enough clearance in between...enough air can flow in between the piece. So, after we have our stilts supporting our shelf, what we are going to do is we're going to start to load the pieces. So whether is is a wiped bottom or a stilt, you're just going to grab the piece and you're going to hold the bottom of the stilt and place it inside the kiln. When placing inside the kiln, it's really important to make sure that your pieces are spaced out with about a half an inch spacing in between. This is important to allow good air flow around each piece and so your glazes have a good chance to breath during the firing. When all your pieces are loaded it's then time to close the lid and turn it on and start your firing."