Primitive pottery 3: Firing pottery in a camp fire ⚱️
Channel: Make It Primitive
Date: 2020-10-02

I've had to wait for an opportunity to fire my pottery for a long time now. Those who follow me on Instagram may already have seen that recently it finally presented itself, in the form of our holiday home in Denmark that had a fire place in the garden.

I had brought a lump of my self-refined clay with me that I made on this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIDM6oifV6w

... but we also visited the clay pit "Gram Lergrav", where visitors can dig through layers of black clay for 10 million year old fossils of sea creatures. We found a couple of ancient seashells and I got to take home a nice ball of fine clay.

After some initial problems with drying cracks (due to me being too impatient), I was able to produce, dry and fire three batches of various vessels and implements over the course of two weeks. Thanks to the local clay source, I even had enough material to get a bit creative.

I suffered no losses during firing and got to take home these self-made souvenirs:
- three bowls, one beaker and one small saucer/plate
- a pot with lid,
- a ball-shaped, lidded storage vessel,
- a sieve and a spoon,
- a dice that really loves to roll sixes, and
- a short pipe (fired with the elder branch still inside as an experiment)


A couple of things I learned along the way:

- Don't try to dry unfired pottery in the wind and sun. It will dry unevenly and develop cracks due to uneven shrinkage. You may get away with it in the beginning, when your greenware is still very wet, but after that your pots need to dry slowly and evenly.

- For similar reasons, try to keep your wall thickness consistent, including the bottom, and dry your pots upside down as soon as the rim can take it. At first I kept inadvertently producing pots with rather thick bottoms, which led to the thick parts drying more slowly than the walls, which in turn led to the aforementioned drying cracks.

- If a pot cracks during drying, there is no way to fix it. Believe me, I tried it. Just turn it back into a lump of clay and start from the beginning.

- The back of my fingernail turned out to be a pretty good burnishing tool. The clay tends to stick to it much less than to even a smooth stone, which allowed me to do this at an earlier stage, when the clay was still rather wet and soft. It will wear down your fingernails, though. I later discoverd that acorns work very well for this purpose.