Last Friday I took myself over to Shadbolt Centre in Burnaby to join the other participants in the soda firing. The kiln wasn’t quite ready for introducing soda so Linda Doherty suggested I check out the Craft Fair that was taking place in the main building that day, and Saturday and Sunday.

First I took a lovely Fall stroll down to Deer Lake in the sunshine. The colours gladden the heart! Then I wandered around the Craft exhibits and was happy to find several potters. It was good to finally meet Elaine Futterman and Mike Allegretti of Roberts Creek. We visited their studio in the summer but they were away. A little later Mike joined us up at the kiln to see how the soda firing was going.

Once the kiln had reached roughly cone 8 we took it in turns to spray the soda solution into the white hot kiln. One person removes a brick while the other carefully squeezes the trigger on the sprayer, taking care to point the spray at the ware and to stop before removing the barrel again. Then it is dipped in a bucket of cold water before repeating the process in nine other peep holes.

After a while it was time to remove a draw ring. These are indicators of how much melting is happening as a result of the soda insertion. It’s so exciting to take the ring out of the cold water bucket and decide how much more soda is needed. Soon the cones indicated that the kiln was evening out and we’d reached cones 10 and 11. Time to stop. We left the atmosphere to oxidize for maybe twenty minutes before turning the kiln off.

Then the tough thing is driving away and finding other things to do until opening day, which was yesterday. I drove in to Vancouver to meet up with Al who’d taken sky train in and we spent that evening checking out the Parker street and Mergatroid studios as part of the East Side Culture Crawl. Saturday saw us returning to Vancouver and even so we saw only a small percentage of the tens of open studios that weekend.

I had suggested to the Raiders that they could come over for another painting day while I waited for kiln cooling. They were here on Tuesday.. so I’ll show you some photos of their productive day here and the results of their work in my next blog.

And then, after we’ve taken some good photos of all the work, I’ll tell you about the kiln opening yesterday. Now THAT was fun!