Tomorrow I very carefully transport the pieces to school for the firing. I'm going to be using a slow fire electric big ass kiln to fire them. Each piece will go for three days! In a slow fire the kiln will very slowly rise in temperature, then hold that temperature for an allotted amount of time, then go up to your next programmed temperature, etc... and it cools down in the same way. You have to program the process which essentially means punching temperatures and hold times and then cool down times. There's a procedure to it and I've done this several times with smaller kilns but for this piece I'm having the manager of the ceramics studio program it for me. I'm nervous because this process is where the piece could crack and pieces could fall off if this happens. If so, I'll modify the end result and make it look cool but I really hope it doesn't have problems. I took extra special care to make sure it was built structurally sound and tried to keep separate parts of it drying at the same time.
Cross your fingers!
