A flax weaver on the harvest and the rules
Tane visits a master flax weaver near Gisborne who explains harvesting harakeke by the rules she was taught, preparing the fibre, and why a kete takes longer than a pot.
Opening the wood kiln after three days of firing
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Show notes
Opening the wood kiln after three days of firing
Tane fires his wood kiln twice a year, and each firing takes three days of stoking in shifts. This episode is recorded on opening morning, brick by brick, with the two friends who kept the fire going at 3am.
- Why wood firing takes 72 hours and cannot be rushed
- Reading the flame, the cones and the colour of the chimney
- The night the temperature stalled and what they did
- Unbricking: the first glimpse and the sound of cooling pots
- What survived, what cracked, and the one bowl Tane will keep
Photographs of the whole firing, from loading to the finished pots, are on the show page.
Transcript
Kia ora, I am Tane Ropata and this is Kiln Opening Day, the show about making things slowly by hand. Today is actually kiln opening day. Three days ago, two friends and I loaded about two hundred pots into the wood kiln behind my studio and lit it, and we have been feeding it in shifts ever since, including a night when the temperature stalled for four hours and none of us slept. The kiln has been cooling for two days. This morning we take the bricks out of the door one at a time and find out what we have. I have been doing this for fifteen years and I still feel sick before the first brick. So you will hear the unbricking as it happens, the good news and the bad, and the one bowl I already know I am keeping. You are listening on Witspeak Podcasts.
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