From Dusk to Dawn

Stoking an underwater fire for Christmas.

Gee whiz.

So, I did not get my kiln’s outlet installed until 12 days before Christmas, which seems like a long time, but it certainly isn’t when it comes to pottery.

Each piece must go through at least two firings:

• Bisque - this is where a “raw” piece gets fired to a low (ish) temperature of 1800°-1900° F to cook off organic materials and make the clay porous so as to readily accept glaze. The porosity helps with adhesion.

• Glaze - A Bisque fired piece is “painted” with glaze and re-fired to a finished piece!

My firings take roughly 18-22 hours to execute until you can hold a piece in your hand. With that being said, getting everything done for Christmas was guaranteed to be a nightmare!

Between working my other jobs and the actual glazing process taking so long, I thought if I were efficient and clever with my time, I could everything gift-wrapped and ready to go!

How wrong I was!

Cave of Wonders… I mean: Plague in Waders

Only a day or two after the kiln was officially ready to go, we were hit with a MASSIVE storm. Out went our electricity, and along with it, our sump pump.

In the days following, about 6 inches of water accumulated in the basement and it was coming in as fast as it was being pumped out. Seven and more hours a day with a squeegee and a wetvac and many borrowed pumps slowly made a dent in the onslaught.

I remember my housemate looking up at me with sympathetic and sorrowful eyes as a newt swam past our ankles and I edged closer to my breaking point. To me, this was a test of my endurance and my resilience against unforeseen circumstance. If I could not hold down the home front when what when wrong inevitably would, how could I justify my efforts to keep myself from drowning when out in the public? If I could consider giving up at home, what made me worthy of success elsewhere? How could I be sure I could stay afloat when the world showed me how powerful it was?

Frustration works in mysterious ways.

Eventually, I had the kiln up on stilts, most of the water out, and fired up the kiln. I looked up at her, peeking down at me from the top of the stairs, and said, “here goes nothing.”

Of course, we laughed at the absurdity of it all.

The Dawn

There is a fine line between “desperation” and “determination.”

I have a manually operated kiln, which means that it needs adjustment every hour or so to gradually adjust the temperature correctly. Every day before Christmas Eve was busy and the only 12 hour stretches I could fit were overnight.

Each night, my alarm chirped annoyingly on the hour. Unlike the pleasant sounds of nighttime creatures, this one was created to disturb my sleep and urge me into a panic that can solely be soothed by two flights of stairs and the reassurance that the kiln will, in fact, get hotter the longer it burns.

By the third night I had three broken shelves, an untold number of broken pieces, the panic of a burned-out computer-operator, and the complete loss of my sanity
BUT
everything was finished by Christmas Eve.

Now I’ve got to figure out how to fix that kiln’s computer.