The native American and a lot of tribes in Africe used to fire their pottery in a pit fire. I used the same techique to make my own micro mosaic tesserae.
I put all my different types of micro mosaic tesserae on one side of the pit. On the other side of the pit I made a fire and moved the fire closer and closer to the clay tesserae to dry them completly. This process takes time, because if you hurry, the tesserae will be damaged because of the thermic shock.
Finally I covered all the clay tesserae with burning wood.
It was sooooo hot, ufff! …because my wife went by ! 😉
Pit firing takes a lot of time. It was nice to read a little bit again after a long period of time without reading any books.
I was tired and actually I had enough of pit firing and reading, so I decided to cover the pit with wet soil so I could safely leave the pit fire knowing that the forest nearby wouldn’t be in danger to catch some fire.
One day later…
I wrapped the micro tesserae into the foil before I put all of them into the pit.
I was very happy, when I saw all the different colors of the micro mosaic tesserae.
Of course I had to try how hard they got and unfortunatly I found out, that I was much more successful the last time when I was pit firing, because this time, the tesserae were defenitly to “soft”. There were probably several reasons, why I wasn’t that successful:
1. Because the pit was much deeper that the first time, there was probably not enough possibility for the wind to heat up the whole fire to the aquired temperature.
2. Maybe I should have put the whole material more into the center of the pit, where the temperature was probably much higher than at the walls of the pit.
It seems, that I have to pit fire the tesserae again under the same conditions as I did last time, when I was actually successful and very happy with the outcome of the whole process.
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