ANAGAMA LOADING : DAY ONE

earlier i thought i would hv not enough energy to keep the diary going during the anagama. but i come back home so charged and excited i hv had problems falling asleep at night!
today is the first day of loading, everyone has finished glazing. pre load plan is ready. so we have actually started loading the anagama form today morning. ( a potter from delhi who was part of the anagama firing last year, had wished us saying we shd hv lots of fights abt the placement of pots and kill each other. no such luck. everything went smooth). we cleaned the kiln, put sand inside and made the kiln posts and shelves ready. we use kiln wash for the shelves, each shelf has to be cleaned and painted with kiln wash and wad clay has to be prepared: two kinds this time, one for the shelves and one for the pots. It was also so dark and hot inside the cave kiln- we fixed a light bulb inside and also set up a fan! yes, there was not a single dull moment the whole day!
we used the wad clay with fire clay and silica for the shelves and with lot of rice husk for the pots. the rice husk burns off quickly making the wad clay porous, so it can be knocked off from the pots easily: we all love the wad marks on our pots, the wads create beautiful patters on the surface. we also collected lot of sea shells and used it underneath the wad clay for the shell marks on the pots. each pot has to be waded. and kept in such a way that two pots don touch each other. but in anagama we usually tumble load the pots with the help of the wad clay.
it took us the whole day to load the back most three shelves which is our salt shelves. we are going to be spraying salt in that chamber when we reach the desired temperature. most of us had kept some raw pots for this chamber and used specially made salt slips and glazes.
we also managed to load the first firebox today. still its not even half the kiln. we do hv two more days of loading to go!