The long read: the kilns, the flame path, the clay, wadding, loading, the stoking shifts, the safety line, and seventeen videos from potters who fire these things.

The short version

Wood firing in eight sentences

Everything on this page rests on these eight. If you only read one band, read this one.

The kiln is doing the decorating.

Wood ash lands on the pots, melts at high temperature, and becomes glass on whatever surface it settled on. You are not painting a finish. You are aiming one.

Where a pot sits decides how it looks.

The flame takes one path through the chamber. A pot in the front near the firebox gets buried in ash. The same pot at the back comes out quiet and dry. Both are correct.

Your clay body matters more than any glaze.

Iron and other impurities in the clay react with the flame and give you the color. A refined white clay in a wood kiln mostly stays a refined white clay.

Everything gets stuck to everything.

Melting ash welds a pot to the shelf. So every piece stands on small wads of refractory clay, and every lid is wadded in its own seat.

One side of a pot is not the other side.

Wood firers talk about the flame face and the shadow side. Make forms that are worth looking at from both, because whoever loads the kiln decides which one faces the fire, and that is often not you.

A firing is often days, not hours, and it is a team.

Somebody is stoking every few minutes to every quarter hour for the whole run, in shifts, overnight. Turning up for the shifts is how you earn a spot in the next one. Safety is the other half: fire outdoors under a roof with open sides, never alone, and read the full safety list in the long version before you go.

Line the insides of anything you will drink from.

Ash deposit is uneven and can be rough or pinholed. A liner glaze inside a cup, one the kiln owner can vouch for, is the one piece of glazing nearly everybody still does.

You will not get every pot back.

Some come out welded down, cracked, or simply dull. Everyone who fires these kilns accepts that, and which is why you make more than you need and send test tiles the first time.

Video thumbnail for What Is Wood Firing? | Intro to the Oldest Pottery Firing Technique, by The Clay CoOp

What you actually hand over on loading day

Pots in a clay body the kiln owner has approved. Ask before you make anything.
Bone dry work, bisque fired if that is what they have asked for. If they want bisque, ask the studio team first how that works at The Clay Hole.
A liner glaze inside anything meant for food or drink.
Wadding made to their recipe, and more of it than you think you need.
Test tiles. Two or three clays, two or three slips, so one firing teaches you something.
Your name on the bottom of every pot, and your hours on the stoking roster.

Start here

What is actually happening in there

Video thumbnail for WOOD FIRE POTTERY ADVENTURE - the ENTIRE process!🔥, by Jonthepotter

Burn a log and most of it leaves as gas. What stays behind is ash, and ash is mostly calcium, with potassium, magnesium, a little silica and a trace of phosphorus. Those are fluxes, the ingredients that make a glaze melt. The silica and alumina that build the glass come from the clay the ash lands on, which is why the clay body matters so much and why this technique works at all.

At kitchen-fire temperatures ash is just dust. Get it above about 2,200 degrees Fahrenheit, which is where a wood kiln lives, and it starts to melt. Now you have a kiln full of hot moving air carrying molten glass in suspension, and it is landing on your pots.

Two things happen at once. Ash builds up physically on horizontal surfaces and on the side facing the firebox, and where it is thick enough it runs, pools in the shoulders of a jar, and drips. That is the glassy green-gold surface people recognize. And the atmosphere reduces, because a wood fire chokes itself on its own smoke, and a kiln starved of oxygen starts pulling oxygen out of the clay and glaze instead. Iron changes color. Whites turn to warm grays. Flashing slips go orange.

So a wood-fired pot carries a record of where it stood and what happened to it. That is a genuinely different proposition from an electric firing, where the point is that every pot on every shelf comes out the same.

Both approaches are honest. We fire electric here, to cone 5½, and we do it because repeatability is exactly what a studio full of members sharing a kiln needs. Wood firing is the opposite trade: you give up control and you get something nobody can reproduce, including you.

Why this page has both

Read it first, then watch somebody do it

Lists on one side, potters on the other

Most sections here pair a short list with a video. Read the list, watch the hands, then go and do the thing.

Video is the only way to show you some of this. No paragraph is going to tell you what it sounds like when a firebox takes a fresh armful of split pine, or how fast the flame answers, or what a kiln looks like at 2,300 degrees when somebody pulls the spy plug. You have to see it.

But video runs at the teacher's pace instead of yours. When the number you needed goes past at minute eleven, you are scrubbing a timeline with a wet thumb, hunting for the sentence again. Video is also poor at holding still. A ratio, a cone number, a wadding recipe: they all slide off the screen while you are still thinking about the last one.

Text does the opposite job. You set the speed, your eye jumps back up a list without losing its place, and a number sits there long enough to write down.

What we keep finding is that the order matters more than the medium does. Read first and you build a frame. Then the video drops into a frame that already exists, and you start noticing what the potter is choosing rather than just enjoying the fire. Watch first and it is a lovely video that leaves very little behind.

So that is how this page is built. Short blunt lists, then somebody doing it, section after section. The lists are short on purpose, because they are meant to be read off a phone propped against a bucket by somebody with clay on their hands.

If you only have a few minutes, hit Nutshell at the top. Same teaching, a fraction of the words, and it remembers your choice on every other page on this site.

Know which one you are standing in front of

Wood kilns you will actually meet

People say wood kiln as though it were one object. It is a family, and the differences are not trivia. The shape of the kiln decides how long you fire, how much ash lands, and how much say you get in what your pots look like.

Anagama

One long tunnel running uphill, firebox at the bottom, chimney at the top. Everything the fire touches on its way through gets ash. Fires for days. The heaviest deposits and the biggest differences from front to back of any kiln here.

Noborigama

A later design, a staircase of separate chambers, each one stoked in turn through its own ports. Later chambers ride on the heat of the earlier ones, so it is far more efficient, and each chamber can be loaded for a different result.

Train kiln

A long low crossdraft chamber with the firebox at one end and the stack at the other. Popular in American studios because it fires in roughly a day and a half rather than a week, and it still gives real ash on the firebox end.

Bourry box

Wood is laid across bars above the combustion chamber and burns from underneath, so it needs stoking every fifteen or twenty minutes instead of every three. Kinder on a small crew, cleaner burning, less dramatic ash.

Fast-fire

Small, lightly built kilns designed to reach temperature in eight to sixteen hours. Common at schools and workshops because a class can load, fire and unload inside a weekend. Less ash, but the real thing in every other respect.

And the odd ones

Groundhog kilns in the American South, onggi kilns in Korea, manabigama and other small hybrids. If somebody offers you a spot in one, take it. The rules on this page still apply.

Video thumbnail for Understanding Pottery Chapter 13 Wood Fired Kilns Part 1, by Washington Street Studios

Video thumbnail for Woodfiring Workshop at River Song Pottery | Train Kiln | Alex Olson, by Alex Olson

The one question to ask before you make anything

Ask the kiln owner how long the firing runs and where in the kiln your work is likely to sit. A three-day anagama near the firebox and a sixteen-hour fast-fire at the back are two different briefs, and they want two different pots from you.

The four marks

What the fire actually leaves behind

Video thumbnail for Understanding Pottery Chapter 12 Atmospheric Firing, by Washington Street Studios

Almost everything you will see on a wood-fired pot is one of four things, and being able to name them is the difference between admiring a pot and reading one.

Ash deposit

Ash lands, melts and becomes glass. Thin, it is a dry blush. Thick, it is glossy and green or amber and it runs downhill, pooling above a foot or in the shoulder of a jar. Heaviest on the flame face and on any upward-facing surface.
Flashing

Color from the flame itself passing over bare clay, without enough ash to make glass. Oranges, pinks and warm grays, strongest on clays and slips that hold a bit of iron or a lot of alumina. This is the effect most people are chasing and it is easy to smother with too much ash.
Reduction color

A wood fire starves itself of oxygen every time you stoke, so the kiln pulls oxygen back out of the iron in your clay. Iron that would be honey brown in an electric kiln goes gray, green or black instead. Same clay, different fire.
Carbon trapping and shadows

Where a pot touches another pot, a shelf, or a wad, the flame cannot get in. You get a hard-edged pale shadow, sometimes with carbon caught under the surface as a smoky gray. Potters stack pots deliberately to draw these.

The flame face is not a metaphor

Pick a wood-fired pot up and turn it. One side will be darker, glassier and busier than the other. That is the side that faced the firebox. Whoever loads chooses which face of your pot gets that, and it is the single most consequential decision anybody makes on loading day.

The decision that outranks every other one

Your clay body is doing most of the work

Two pots in different clays, sitting side by side on the same shelf in the same firing, come out looking like they were made on different continents. Before you throw anything, find out what the kiln owner wants you in, and why.

	What it does in a wood kiln	Worth knowing
Iron-bearing stoneware	The workhorse. Iron reduces to warm grays and toasty browns, and ash sits on it beautifully	If somebody says just bring a dark stoneware, this is what they mean
Grogged or sandy bodies	Rough tooth catches flashing and holds thick ash without crawling. Survives long soaks and thermal stress	Nearly every dedicated wood-firing body has grog in it. There is a reason
Porcelain	Ash reads as clear glass over white, and flashing goes soft pink and orange. Spectacular when it works	Warps and slumps at cone 11 and up. Ask before you commit a kiln load to it
Refined white stoneware	The quiet one. Little iron means little reaction, so it mostly comes out looking like itself	A flashing slip is what rescues this. Bare, it is often the dullest thing in the kiln
Wild and local clay	Unpredictable and often the best surface in the firing. Wild clays are usually full of the exact impurities that react	Test it hard first. Some wild clays are nowhere near cone 10 and will puddle
Anything low-fire	Melts. Completely. Takes the shelf and whatever is next to it with it	This is the one genuine disaster on the list. Check your cone range, twice

Send test tiles the first time. Every time, really.

Two or three clays and two or three slips, all clearly marked on the back, spread across different spots in the kiln. One firing then teaches you something you can use for the next ten years. Going in with a single clay and no tiles teaches you almost nothing about why the pots look the way they do.

Mark the bottom before it is dry

A wood kiln unloading is fifteen people picking through several hundred pots that all just got the same treatment. Your maker's mark is how yours comes home with you. Stamp or carve it while the clay is leather hard, and make it deeper than feels necessary, because ash fills a shallow one right in.

Video thumbnail for To Glaze or not to Glaze in Wood-fired Ceramics, by Marc Lancet

At the wheel and the table

Making pots that are worth the fire

You are making for a process that will attack the pot from one side for three days and then run molten glass down it. That changes a few of your normal habits. None of it is difficult, but all of it is easier to do at the wheel than to fix later.

Give it a shoulder, a lip, a ridge, something. Ash needs a horizontal surface to catch on and an edge to run over. A smooth straight cylinder gives the fire nothing to grab, and that is exactly how a pot comes out looking like it was in the wrong kiln.
Make both sides worth looking at. Whoever loads turns each pot, and that is often not you, so a design that only works from one angle is a coin flip.
Raise the foot slightly and keep it clean. Wadding goes under it, ash runs down toward it, and a pot with a crisp undercut foot is far easier to free and smooth afterward than one that meets the shelf at a soft angle.
Do not throw it thin. A long firing and a slow cool are hard on a pot, and thin walls plus heavy ash on one side is how things crack. A little more weight than you would leave for a cone 5½ electric firing is the right instinct.
Round over every rim, handle join and lid edge. Sharp edges collect ash first and end up razor sharp in glass, and they are the first thing to chip in the kiln.
Lids get fired in place, so make the gallery generous. They are wadded, and wadding takes up room. A tight fit before firing is a fused lid afterward.
Think about how it stacks. Pots that nest, sit on each other, or lean deliberately give you carbon shadows for free, and kiln space is the scarcest thing in the building on loading day.
Dry it properly and dry it slowly. A wet pot in a wood kiln is somebody else's disaster as well as yours. Our drying guide applies here with the volume turned up.
Make more than you need. Some will not come back. Everybody who fires these kilns builds that into the plan.

Bisque or raw?

Many wood kilns want bisque fired work, because a long firing full of raw pots means a very slow start and a lot of risk from anything still holding water. Some potters raw fire on purpose and get a particular quality out of it. This is not your call to make. Ask, and do whatever they say. If they want it bisque fired, ask the studio team first how that works at The Clay Hole.

The unglamorous part that saves your pots

Wadding, and why nothing sits flat

Molten ash does not care what it lands on. It will happily glue your bowl to the shelf, your lid to its gallery, and one pot to its neighbor. Wadding is the small lump of stubborn clay that refuses to melt and keeps those things apart.

Video thumbnail for How to Make and Use Wadding — A Useful Pottery Material, by Florian Gadsby

Video thumbnail for Wadding, Materials and Methods for Wood-fired Ceramics, by Marc Lancet

Use their recipe, not one you found

Every kiln has a house wadding mix. A common starting point is equal parts alumina hydrate and kaolin or fireclay, sometimes with sawdust or rice hulls worked in so it crumbles off cleanly. Ask, then make theirs.
Mix it stiff and roll it out

You want it firm enough to hold a shape under the weight of a loaded pot but soft enough to squash flat when you press the pot down. Roll a rope, cut pieces, and keep them under plastic so they do not dry out before loading day.
Three wads under everything

At The Clay Hole every piece sits on a kiln cookie, and in a wood kiln the wads do that job. Three points define a plane, so three wads sit stable on a shelf that is never quite flat. Four is a wobble. Keep them small, roughly the size of a pea for a cup and a marble for a jar, and set them in from the edge of the foot so the mark is less visible.
Wad every lid, in its own seat

Three tiny wads in the gallery. The lid is going to fuse otherwise, and a fused lid is a broken pot rather than a repairable one. Same for anything with a stopper, a spout resting on a shelf, or two pots stacked rim to rim.
Press the pot on and give it a small twist

You want the wad flattened and gripping, not perched. If a pot rocks on its wads on the bench, it will rock in the kiln, and a rocking pot in a three-day firing usually ends up leaning against its neighbor.
Smooth the scars wet, if they are sharp

Wads leave three rough spots. Many potters leave them, since they are part of a wood-fired foot. If one is sharp, smooth it wet: a diamond pad or a silicon carbide stone over a bucket of water, never dry, with an N95 or better and safety glasses. A bench grinder is a job for your own yard, outdoors, with a face shield and a half-face respirator with P100 filters, never at our tables. Then run a finger around the edge to check for anything that would scratch a table.

Bring twice as much as you think

Running out of wadding halfway through loading is the classic first-timer moment, and it stops the whole crew. It costs almost nothing to make and it keeps in a bag for months.

Slips, liners and the restraint to stop

What you put on before it goes in

The instinct from an electric studio is to cover the pot. Fight it. A wood kiln rewards bare clay and punishes a thick glossy glaze, which just sits there absorbing everything the fire was trying to give you. What most wood firers actually apply is thin, partial, and chosen to react.

Flashing slips

A thin white or pale slip, high in alumina, brushed or dipped on leather hard or bisque work. It does not melt. It reacts with the flame and the sodium and potassium in the ash and turns orange, pink and gray where the fire hits it. This is the single most useful thing to apply, and it is the reason wood-fired pots often have those warm blushes on an otherwise dark clay.

Liner glazes

Inside anything you will eat or drink from. Ash deposit is uneven, sometimes pinholed, and not something you want to scrub coffee out of. A liner glaze the kiln owner can vouch for, often a celadon, a clear or a white, brushed or poured in and wiped back below the rim. Whether a liner is food safe is for the kiln owner to confirm for that glaze, and a water test only shows it holds water. Our Food Safe Lookup covers only our own glazes, as fired here.

Shino and other reactive glazes

Shinos, ash glazes and iron glazes all do things in a wood kiln they will never do in an electric one. Carbon trapping in a shino is a wood and gas firing effect. If you want a glaze on the outside, use one that has something to say to the flame.

Leave some of it bare

Glaze one side, or the top third, or nothing at all. The contrast between a glazed area and raw flashed clay is most of what makes these pots interesting, and it is very easy to lose by covering everything.

Video thumbnail for Applying Slip for Woodfiring, by Barbara Costanzo

Video thumbnail for A Cool Trick for Spectacular Wood Fired Pottery Effects | SIMON LEVIN, by Ceramic Arts Network

Nothing glazed goes near the shelf

Keep glaze at least a finger's width up from the foot, further than you would for an electric firing, because ash lands on top of your glaze and makes it run further than it was ever formulated to. A pot glued to a kiln shelf is a bad afternoon for whoever owns the shelf.

Loading day

You are choosing an address, not finding a gap

Video thumbnail for Loading Wood Fired Kiln - wood firing #8, by Matthew Kelly Pottery

In an electric glaze kiln, loading is packing, fitting the most work into the space without anything touching, and at The Clay Hole our staff do that part. In a wood kiln, loading is composition, and it takes a whole day because every pot you set changes what happens to the pots behind it.

The flame has one path, and you can see it

It comes off the firebox, up over the bag wall, through the ware, and down or along to the flue. Stand at the door and look through the kiln toward the chimney. That sight line is roughly where the fire is going.
Front is ash, back is quiet

Nearest the firebox means the heaviest deposit, the most drips and the most risk of a pot welding down. Furthest back means dry surfaces, subtle flashing and much less drama. Neither is the good spot. They are different spots.
Turn each pot deliberately

Decide which face gets the flame and put it there on purpose. This is the moment the pot gets designed, more than anything you did at the wheel.
Use pots to shelter pots

Anything you put in front of something else casts a shadow on it. Experienced firers use this constantly, setting a tall jar to shield a row of cups so the cups get flashing instead of a face full of ash.
Leave the fire room to move

A wall of pots packed edge to edge will stall the kiln and cook everything in front of it while the back stays cold. Gaps are not wasted space, they are the draft.
Cones where you can see them

Cone packs go in front of every spy hole, front and back, because a long kiln is not one temperature. Draw rings on a wire let you hook a sample out mid firing and read how far the ash has built.

Take a photograph before the door goes up

Two minutes with a phone gives you a map of exactly where every pot stood. When you unload and one cup is extraordinary and another is flat, that photo is the only way you will ever know why. Almost nobody does this the first time and almost everybody wishes they had.

The long part

A wood firing, in six stages

Lengths vary enormously between kilns, so treat the times below as shape rather than schedule. What does not vary is the order, or the fact that somebody is awake for all of it.

Preheat, and be patient

A small fire at the mouth of the firebox, sometimes for a full day, driving the last water out of the pots and the kiln itself. Rush this and you get pots exploding inside a sealed chamber you cannot open. Even then, treat every surface as hot.
Climb

Bigger stokes, longer flame, steady rise. Somebody is watching a pyrometer and calling the pace. This is the stretch where a crew settles into a rhythm and starts trading shifts.
Body reduction and the long middle

Once the kiln is properly hot, each stoke chokes the oxygen and pushes the atmosphere into reduction, then it clears as the wood burns down. That cycle, over and over for hours, is what develops the iron colors. This is also where most of the ash accumulates.
Side stoking

Wood fed through ports along the side of the chamber, right into the ware, to put ash exactly where the front-loading firebox cannot reach. This is the most direct control anybody has over the result once the door is closed.
Soak and finish

Holding temperature so the back of the kiln catches up with the front and the ash on every pot has time to melt properly. Cones are read at every spy hole. The kiln is finished when the coldest part of it is done, not the hottest.
Cooling, which is not nothing

Clamming up the kiln and letting it fall over two to four days. Some crews reduction cool, feeding small amounts of wood on the way down to hold the atmosphere and deepen the colors. Opening early cracks pots and there is no version of this where somebody peeks.

Video thumbnail for Essential Elements | Lindsay Oesterritter | Wood Fired Pottery, by Alex Olson

Video thumbnail for How to WOOD FIRE Pottery, by Jonthepotter

The best day

Opening the kiln, and the work that follows

Video thumbnail for Wood Kiln Unloading - Firing #3, by Matthew Kelly Pottery

Unloading a wood kiln is genuinely one of the better experiences available in this craft, and it is also two more hours of work after the excitement wears off. What comes out is not finished.

Some pots will be stuck. To the shelf, to a wad, to each other. Ask whoever runs the kiln before you free one. Some do not come free, and forcing one is how you lose it and the shelf together.
Smooth every sharp wad scar wet. Use a diamond pad or a silicon carbide stone over a bucket of water, with an N95 or better and safety glasses, then run a wet finger around the foot to find anything sharp. A pot that scratches a table gets returned.
Check the insides for pinholes. Anything that will hold liquid gets filled with water and left overnight. If it seeps, it is a beautiful object rather than a mug.
Photograph the whole load before it gets divided. Then compare it to your loading photo, and you have just learned more than the firing itself taught you.
Help unload and help clean. Shelves get scraped and re-coated with kiln wash, the firebox gets shoveled out, and the wood pile gets restacked. Whether you are invited back is decided almost entirely here.

Read this one properly

Fire, fatigue and carbon monoxide

This is an open flame at 2,300 degrees, running for days, tended by people who have not slept much. It is safe when it is run properly, and every one of the rules below exists because somebody got hurt when it was not.

Never fire indoors, and never fire alone. Wood kilns live outdoors under a roof with open sides, and there are always at least two people awake.
Carbon monoxide is the real hazard, not the flame. A reducing kiln pours it out. That is exactly why the shelter has open sides, why nobody sleeps in an enclosed space next to the kiln, and why a headache on shift means you step away into fresh air and tell somebody. A salted or sodaed kiln adds a vapor hazard: read our salt and soda lesson first.
Cover yourself in natural fiber. Cotton or wool, long sleeves, closed leather shoes. Synthetics melt onto skin. This is not a fussy rule.
Proper gloves and a proper face shield for the ports. Welding gloves rated for the heat, and a shield when you open a spy hole or a stoke hole. The flare-back when a door opens is instant.
Never look into a hot kiln without shade 3 or darker. Cone 10 puts out enough infrared to damage your eyes over a firing's worth of glances. Ask the kiln owner which glasses they use: welding shade or infrared rated glasses are the usual answer, and didymium glass is made for sodium glare rather than as a stand-in.
Assume every surface near the kiln is hot. Including tools you set down five minutes ago, and including the ground.
Water, shade, food and actual sleep. Most injuries on a long firing happen late, to somebody who thought they were fine. Take the shift you signed up for and then hand it over.
Know where the extinguisher and the hose are before you need them. Ask on arrival. Sparks land on a wood pile more often than anybody likes to admit. Dust follows a potter home too. Mix dry wadding powders outdoors or at home, never at our tables, in a fitted respirator with P100 filters. Damp kiln wash before you scrape it, and wear an N95 or better to scrape it or shovel out ash. Keep sanding wet, and wear safety glasses when you tap a stuck pot free. Wood ash is alkaline, so keep it off wet skin and out of your eyes.

Nobody hands a first-timer the firebox

You will be asked to carry wood, split kindling, watch a pyrometer and learn the rhythm before you stoke anything. That is not gatekeeping. It is a several-thousand-dollar kiln load belonging to a dozen people, and the person running the firing is responsible for all of it.

Before it happens to you

Ten ways a wood firing disappoints you

Three ways a first firing disappoints you

Everybody who fires these kilns has had all of this happen. Knowing the list in advance is the difference between a disappointing unloading and an educational one.

Your pot is welded to the shelf

Too little wadding, wadding that was too soft, or a glaze that ran further than you expected once ash landed on top of it. More wadding, and keep glaze well up off the foot.
It came out dull and nothing happened to it

Almost always a refined low-iron clay with no slip on it, sitting at the back of the kiln. The clay body and the address did the deciding. Try an iron-bearing body or a flashing slip next time.
The inside is rough and it will not hold coffee

Bare clay inside a cup in a heavy-ash spot. Ash deposit is not a food surface. Line the insides.
The ash ran all the way down and glued it to its neighbor

A front-of-kiln spot with two pots too close. Ash runs downhill and it does not stop at your property line. Leave more room in the heavy zone than feels necessary.
One side is beautiful and the other is a blank

Working as designed. This is what a flame face is. If it bothers you, make forms that read from every angle, or ask to be loaded further from the firebox.
The lid is fused shut

No wadding in the gallery, or a gallery too tight to take any. Three tiny wads, every lid, every time.
It cracked somewhere in the long cool

Usually thin walls, an uneven thickness, or a form under tension such as a wide flat base. Wood firings are a hard ride. Build a little more forgivingly than you would for cone 5½ electric.
Your test tiles are unreadable

Written in pencil, or marked on the front where the ash covered it. Carve or stamp the mark, put it on the back, and keep a written map of what went where.
Somebody else took your pot home

No maker's mark, or one so shallow that ash filled it. Stamp deep, at leather hard, on everything.
You are not invited to the next one

Wood firings run on people who turn up for the overnight shift, split wood, scrape shelves and stay to clean. Whoever does the least work and collects the most pots is a known figure, and they only do it once.

At our studio

Not something we do here

The Clay Hole does not have a wood kiln. Our studio kilns are electric, and we fire glaze to cone 5½. Nothing on this page happens at the studio.

The reasons are unglamorous. A wood kiln needs an outdoor site with a permanent roof, a wood yard, a permit, neighbors who are fine with smoke, and a crew willing to be awake at four in the morning on a Tuesday. Those are the conditions that make a wood kiln work, and our building has none of them.

So why write all this? Because members ask about these pots constantly, because a good number of you will end up at a university firing or a workshop or a friend's kiln at some point, and because knowing how a surface got made changes how you look at every pot, including the ones you make here. Learning a process is not the same as having access to one.

If you want the closest thing we do run: our raku workshops are a real atmospheric firing with real fire and real tongs, and they are the closest thing we run to a fire doing part of the decorating.

Get raku certified What a kiln firing does

Asked at the glaze table

Wood firing questions we get

Mostly from members who saw a pot somewhere and wanted to know how the color got on it.

How do I get into a wood firing in the first place?

University ceramics departments, craft schools and a handful of private studios run them, and most of them need bodies. Turn up to help load and stoke without asking for kiln space, do it well, and you will be offered space. That is the standard route and it works.

Anywhere with an anagama, a train kiln or a noborigama is worth an email. Regional wood-firing groups and ceramics guilds usually keep a list of firings looking for crew.

Is it expensive?

Usually you pay a firing fee based on how much kiln space you take, and you pay in labor as well. The fee covers wood, kiln wash, shelf repair and the fact that these kilns wear out. The labor is not optional and it is a bigger cost than the money.

Can I get a wood-fired look out of an electric kiln?

You can get somewhere in the neighborhood with ash glazes, iron-rich glazes and layering, and there are glazes on our wall that read as warm and toasty in that direction. Look at the fluxes over an iron-bearing clay.

But no. The two effects that actually define a wood-fired pot, ash landing where the flame decided and reduction color from a starved atmosphere, both need a fuel-burning kiln. An electric kiln has an oxidizing atmosphere and nothing floating around in it. Getting close is a legitimate goal. Claiming a match is not.

Is a wood-fired pot food safe?

Most stoneware and porcelain is dense at cone 10, so the body is rarely the problem. The surface is. A bare ash-deposited interior can be rough and pinholed, which makes it hard to clean, and ash and some glazes can leach. That is why nearly everybody puts a liner glaze inside cups and bowls. Whether a liner is food safe is for the kiln owner to confirm for that glaze. Our Food Safe Lookup covers only our own glazes, as fired here.

Fill anything that holds liquid with water and leave it overnight before you call it finished. That shows it holds water, not that the glaze is safe for food.

What is the difference between wood firing and salt or soda firing?

Both are atmospheric, meaning the kiln makes the surface rather than the glaze bucket. In wood firing the glass comes from ash carried by the flame. In salt and soda firing somebody introduces sodium deliberately near the end and it welds into the clay surface as glass.

Plenty of kilns do both, wood fired and then salted or sodaed at the top. Our salt and soda page covers that side in the same detail as this one.

Why does everybody talk about pine?

Softwoods like pine burn fast with a long flame, which is what you want for reaching temperature and pushing fire deep into a long chamber. Hardwoods burn slower and hotter with more ash per log. Different woods also leave different ash chemistry and therefore different colors, which is why some kilns are fussy about the species and the fruitwood pile is guarded.

All of it must be properly seasoned. Wet wood does not fire a kiln, it steams.

How many pots come back looking good?

Ask ten wood firers and you will get ten answers, most of them lower than you expect. A firing gives you a small number of pots you could not have made any other way, a larger number that are decent, and some that are firewood. That trade is the entire proposition. People who need every pot to work fire electric, and they are not wrong to.

Not instructional, just very good

Four films worth an evening

These will not teach you to wad a lid. They will show you what a life spent at one of these kilns looks like, which is the part that makes people want to do it.

Video thumbnail for Nic Collins: "Potter" short film about his life & woodfired pots, by Goldmark Gallery

Video thumbnail for Ken Matsuzaki: "Elemental" feature film about Japanese potter, by Goldmark Gallery

Video thumbnail for Lee Kang-hyo 'Onggi Master' - film about a Korean potter, by Goldmark Gallery

Video thumbnail for Anagama - A Documentary Short, by White Buffalo Film Studios

More where that came from

Our curated ceramic artist videos page collects free how-to lessons from top potters on the core skills, if you want more to watch.

Keep going

Six pages that pair with this one

Three pages that pair with this one

Everything here lives in Clay Hole University, which is where all of our teaching pages are gathered.

Salt and soda firing

The other way a kiln makes its own glaze, and the one most often paired with wood.

What a kiln firing actually does

Why a pot goes in the kiln twice, what happens at each temperature, and a short look at how reduction, raku, wood and salt differ from an electric firing.

Clay Hole University

Every lesson we have written, in order, from wedging to selling your work.

Pit firing

Fire in a hole in the ground: pots, sawdust, wood and smoke, how to prep for it, and the Utah fire rules to check first.

Prepping and testing wild clay

How to find out what a local clay will survive, which matters more here than anywhere.

Raku firing

The atmospheric firing you can actually get to through us, and the one we certify members for.

Last thing

You are not glazing the pot. You are aiming it.

Every habit worth having in a wood kiln comes from the same shift in thinking. In an electric firing you decide what the surface will be and the kiln carries out the instruction. In a wood firing you set up conditions, hand the pot to the fire, and find out three days later what it decided. The skill is in the setup: the clay you chose, the form you gave the ash to run over, the slip, the wadding, and the address you picked in the kiln.

That is also why people get slightly obsessive about it. You cannot make the same pot twice, and neither can anybody else.

None of this happens here, and it is still worth knowing. The next time you pick up a wood-fired cup, turn it over, find the three wad scars, work out which side faced the fire, and you will be reading it instead of just liking it.

In an electric firing you decide what the surface will be and the kiln carries out the instruction. In a wood firing you set up conditions and find out three days later what the fire decided. The skill is all in the setup: the clay, the form, the slip, the wadding, and where in the kiln your pot stands.

There is a much longer version of this page if you want it. Hit Comprehensive at the top.

Back to Clay Hole University Read salt and soda next

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Mon	Class 10:30 AM to 2 PM · Class 6:30 to 10 PM
Tue to Thu	Class 6:30 to 10 PM
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