Kiln Report The First

Well, nothing melted. :)

So far my experience with my little baby kiln has been completely positive.  The learning curve has been... curvy, but that's not the kiln's fault.



Let's admit it: life is more fun this way.

The biggest single advantage is the cycle time.  The kiln I've been using was made for glass work, and glass has to be heated and cooled slowly or it cracks; glass kilns are therefore set to slowly ramp up temperature, hold the temp for a certain amount of time, and then sloooooowly ramp down.  All summer, each firing I've done has taken 8-9 hours to get through.  Metal isn't that fussy, but there wasn't any way to change the kiln's basic set-up.

MY kiln, on the other hand, has a jillion pre-set programs, including separate menus for metal clay, glass, and porcelain.  On a metal cycle, the kiln ramps as fast as it can, holds for as long as I tell it, then shuts off.  The whole thing takes about three hours.  Dramatically increases production time, lemmee tell you.  Also pulls a lot less power, so costs less, which is a yay.
I originally thought I'd hit the right firing temp exactly right the first try -- I put a note in my kiln log that said: all perfect! <3.  Now it says: all perfect! <3 because when I sat down to polish the second batch, the piece I was working on crumbled to little clay bits.  It looked done, and I hadn't pressed hard enough to test it properly.

At least it's only a kiln and not a nuclear power plant.

So then I learned about re-firing, and somehow (!) managed not to over-cook everything and err in the opposite direction.  Delayed win, but still a W.  Also, the convenience of having the kiln in my house can not be overstated.  I had to re-fire some pieces three times... but I still got that done in a day and had way more control than I'd have had with the previous kiln.  I'm sure no one's shocked to hear that in Monique-world, more control = more happy.

I keep threatening to post pics of, y'know, Actual Jewelry, but haven't.  Hopefully that will happen next week.

Have a great weekend!

Kiln!

Vocab first, since not everyone knows the word "kiln".  It's a metal box, similar to an oven, which is used to fire pottery, glass, or metal, depending on the type of kiln.  The formal pronunciation is "kill", though recently it has become acceptable to include the "n", and that's how I say it.

The primary medium I'm currently using is a formulation of bronze that needs to be fired in a kiln in order to finish.  Up to this point, I was using the kiln in my university's Art Department through an Independent Study class.  That magic kiln-for-free time ran out early August, however, and I've been kiln-less.

No longer!


There are many kilns like it.  This one is mine!

The fun part is that I spent a good couple of weeks slagging pieces in the Art Dept kiln whilst figuring out the ideal temperature range, which varies from kiln to kiln.  I haven't yet begun the testing process with this one yet, and am not particularly looking forward to scaling the shiny new learning curve, but it must be done.

(Yes, I'm the sort of pretentious ass who un-ironically uses words like "whilst".  I'd apologize, but I'm not really sorry, so...)

Hopefully, I will soon be posting pics of new work, and hopefully those pictures won't be mis-shapen lumps of bronze.  There's a couple of special orders I need to get in the mail soon, and it would be nice if I didn't have to sculpt them multiple times.  My experience with art, however, is usually that getting it right the first time is not the best goal.  Far better to play around until you like it than to set unreasonable expectations.

So that's the latest: KILN!  I miss the days of setting my hair on fire with my acetylene torch (oh, calm down, it was just the bangs, and only a few times) but contained fire is better than none.

It is, sadly, not larger on the inside.