This summer I again covered Geoff, our ceramic technician holidays. This has been a great help to me as along with doing all the firings for everyone it has also given me more time to do my work which has turned out to be invaluable.

Whilst covering the post I wanted to do another gas firing. I enjoy this process as unlike electric firing, gas firing is fully manual. Last year Jane Duckett’s work was all gas fired so I had a few attempts at the process and ended up getting some good results for her. To determine a good result means getting a good reduction. However this year I obviously didn’t do it the same as the pots that came out did not reduce!.

Copper in a gas kiln will turn red so I thought that I would try some of my copper glazes in the gas kiln in a hope to get red but as I mentioned above it didn’t work. Below are the results.

The above 2 white pots will be ok for my winter range as I think they look like snow!

The glazes I used are from my winter range. The copper in the glaze turns this lovely cool blue however the images above show the different the gas and electric kilns make. The left images are gas fired the right are electric.

These gas fired pots are nice but they do not represent any season so I will not be using them. I will try to gas fire them again and hope that they get a nice reduction and turn red but only if I have time……. perhaps I’ll wait for Geoff to return!