Firing Allowances & Charges
All of our supervised sessions and workshops include a firing allowance.
This will either be for a specific make or an weighted allowance for your session.
If you attend regularly your allowance accumulates from one session to the next so there is no need to worry about it. We’ll keep track of your allowance for when you are ready to fire something.
Pottery involves a lot of practice and repetition. We encourage our potters only to fire what they genuinely want to keep or will use. Once fired, clay cannot be recycled so assess what you have made carefully.
If you don’t like it or think you could do better – find the bucket of experience and start again.
Whole Kiln Charges
If you have made enough work to fill a whole kiln or your work requires a specialised specific firing schedule our charges are as follows:
110L (Rhode TE 75 MCC+) the charge would be £75.00
43L (Rhode Ecotop 43) the charge would be £28.00
Remember that most work will need firing twice.
Partial Kiln Charges
Where appliable, additional firing charges will be based on the dry weight of clay.
For work made in the studio our charges by weight are 0.5p per gram
For work made outside the studio our charges are 1p per gram
Remember that most pieces will require firing twice.
Kiln Outcomes – In The Lap Of The Kiln Gods
We have done hundreds of firings and while we use cautious firing schedules and things rarely go wrong we can’t guarantee outcomes.
We will fire work to the appropriate temperature at appropriate firing schedules but there are a number of things that can affect the outcome of the firing.
From the particular clay used, method of making, underglazes, glazes, the combinations of particular materials, trapped air, there’s a lot of things in the mix. Then there’s the kiln itself. It’s a carefully engineered piece of technical equipment.
We will look after your work carefully before and during loading but the rest is down to the kiln gods. We cannot guarantee outcomes.
Firing Service
We offer a firing service to local potters. Please contact us before bringing items for firing to ensure that we are there to receive them.
The best time to transport work is when it is still leather hard.
We will ask you to unpack your work when you arrive at the pottery.
We will only fire clay where we have had sight of the original bag that the clay came in. We reserve the right to decline to fire work if we have any concerns.
Clay fired at too hot a temperature will melt, potentially costing several £thousand to repair or replace the kiln. As a community facility we do not have the financial resources to replace our kilns.
Please let us know if you want a particular firing schedule. We will otherwise fire to our standard schedule taking into account the size of the work.
Where possible we will evidence firing temperature with cones.