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Do You Employ A Kiln Watcher?


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No - NOT a kiln sitter - more like a little totem you place on your kiln for luck when firing.

Many bags of clay ago I had purchased a used kiln but was terrified to fire it. I had no idea what I was doing and the internet wasn't quite a thing yet. I posted on a bulletin board (yes, I am old) for someone to hold my hand through my first load. The girl who answered brought over a project to work on while we brought the beast to life. I had nothing started so she suggested I create a 'kiln watcher'. She said it would bring luck and watch over your wares while firing.

I still have that thing and even recently made it a little kitty all it's own to keep it company while it sits atop every load I fire.post-78600-0-34288500-1471323065_thumb.jpg

I'm just curious what type of superstitions you've got or heard of regarding clay?

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many many years ago I visited Vivika and Otto heino when they were still in New Hampshire or Vermont. I was in a group from Mudflats on Boston and we went on a studio tour. Visited Michael Cohen, Gerry Williams and the Heinos. Vivika and Otto had over 400 Kiln Gods around the frame of their kiln.

I employed them when I was teaching at the university in Montana. After I retired I went back to see if I could have some of them for memory sake. They had been thrown away by the new teachers. They thought they were bad juju. Unfortunately, the roof caught on fire the last week of their first semester.

just saying.

 

Marcia.

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Kiln gods I do not use or employ. However, I always have a few cone packs drying on a firing. As to employing someone to watch my kiln. . . . I could not pay them enough to do the hours I do, from 5 or 6 pm til 2 am. Rather do it myself anyway as I use as much temp color to watch the kiln as I do the cone packs. Cone packs are only so good as long as you are near the end of a firing. I don know of anyone that sets kiln packs for quartz inversion or other stages in the kiln. In the long run there is as much wizardry of science as there is precision of science.

 

 

best,

Pres

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I have always seen them around kilns where I worked. Undergrad, potters studios, Grad. school. For firings in school,  someone from the firing team made a kiln god for their firing. Tradition. 

In Spain I saw many kilns that had been blessed by priests with a cross marked on the wall. 

Potters there also had statues of Santas Just a and Rufina, the patron saints of pottery. They were martyred in Seville for selling pots on a Roman holiday. When I went to Seville's great Cathedral , one of 3 largest in the world, I visited their chapel. I was more interested in that than Christopher Columbus's tomb...but that was interesting too.

Marcia

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