Hey folks, it's another Tech Tuesday — but today we are talking about wadding!
If you've ever participated in an atmospheric firing (usually wood, soda, or salt), you might have heard of wadding before. But what is it really? And how can we use it to affect our surfaces?
Wadding is basically a highly refractory clay or material that protects the shelf from your work, and protects your work from adhering to your shelf. You remove the wadding (if it doesn't fall off on its own) after the work is unloaded. As we know, atmospheric firings love to get ashy and drippy, and we don't really want these drips to fuse our work to the kiln shelf. That's where wadding comes in.
Wadding recipes and methods are fairly simple, you can make an easy alumina wadding by mixing equal parts EPK and alumina hydrate (the alumina prevents the clay from fluxing). This is often used in salt or soda firings.
You can also make a simple fire-clay wadding with added sand, sawdust, or other organic materials that will burn out in the firing and are porous enough to chip off the piece easily.
Some more experimental wadding will use unique clays, little shells (that turn to dust), or even rice hulls. As long as your ceramic piece is fairly balanced on the wadding and you make sure that you didn't wad on top of glaze, you'll be groovy.
From Simon Levin's article on wadding.
Not only does wadding protect your work from kiln shelves, but wadding can also be placed in between your ceramic piece and its lid (i.e. when making a teapot) in order to keep your lid from sticking.
Lindsay Oesterritter, citrus juicers with wadding.
A third (and wonderful) use for wadding is its use in surface design. We can strategically place wadding and use unique wadding recipes to direct flame path in certain ways and create certain flashing colors.
For example:
Simon Levin, porcelain with fire-clay wadding mark
Amy Song, porcelain with Newman's red wadding marks
Linda Christianson, calcium shell wadding marks
Zeynep Uner is the current kiln and wheel repair apprentice at Bracker’s, working directly with David Sturm (the head tech) on repairs large and small. She has been repairing kilns for approximately 3 years now, and has been absorbing everything she possibly can from David’s 30+ years in the field.
Zeynep enjoys atmospheric firing, taking film photos, and throwing on her old Brent kick wheel.
