Firing at Matt Jones

I had such an awesome time helping Matt and his apprentice Alex fire the extremely large kiln full of pots from Saturday to Sunday.  The picture above is of Matt's son London and one of his buddies shooting bb guns at cans.  Matt's son is the boy in the back.  I had especially fun spending time with London and Matt's daughter Sara Francis.  They are really great kids.  

This is just a picture of Mike stoking.  You can see Matt in the background and Alex's girlfriend Molly opening the door for a good hard stoke.  I learned a great deal about kilns this weekend since the wood kilns I usually fire are much smaller.  Although there were many similarities there were a vast amount of subtle differences I really enjoyed.  

Many people dropped by throughout the day to catch a glimpse of firing.  Mike brought a new puppy with him who got plenty of attention from everyone especially the children.  This was such a cute picture I could not resist putting it up.

It rained pretty much the whole time I was there.  The Jones's have two little ponds that are flooding into one another creating a massive waterfall between the two.  It may seem like a problem, but it seems the kids loved playing in it.  The picture above is of water that is harnessed to produce energy for his glass crusher.  There was so much water flowing that it could not go into the tube fast enough.  We cleaned a number of fairly large rocks out of it to help fix it.  I truthfully need to get on the ball and build me one of those pivoting glass crushers.  Those things are so cool.  There is an old post Alex Matisse did on it a while back.  Check it out here.  Look and you can see the difference in water pressure.  It is pretty interesting.