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Ten hours of fire and I am not allowed to watch.

The door is sealed. The temperature is climbing past the point where aluminum melts. And the most dramatic part of making jewelry looks like this: me, on a stool, staring at a number on a screen, drinking tea. Just kidding, who has Buddhist qualities like this nowadays..?!

I wish though.

But inside that box, four separate things are happening to every piece I made this week. Four chances for something to go wrong. Four reasons I keep checking the readout.

First, the water leaves. Up to about 200 degrees Celsius, all the moisture trapped in the clay evaporates. If you rush this part, steam builds pressure inside the clay and the piece explodes. I have heard it happen. It sounds like someone dropping a ceramic plate, except the plate was your project and the floor is the inside of your kiln surrounded by other projects.

Then, the clay stops being clay. Between 300 and 500 degrees, any organic material burns away. The piece enters a fragile in-between state that has no good name. Not clay anymore. Not ceramic yet. Just... waiting.

At exactly 573 degrees, everything shifts. The quartz crystals in the clay suddenly rearrange their molecular structure. If the temperature rises too fast, the sudden expansion cracks the piece. If it rises just right, you will never know anything dramatic happened. The kiln does not send progress reports.

And then the main event. Somewhere around 1220 to 1300 degrees, depending on the clay body, the silica melts and fills every tiny gap between the particles. The whole thing fuses into a glass-like solid. Waterproof. Harder than steel. Permanent.

Eight to twelve hours climbing. Then twelve to twenty-four hours cooling. You cannot open the door early. I mean, you can. But you would thermal-shock every piece inside and crack them all at once, which is an efficient way to ruin a week of work in three seconds.

So you wait. Tea. Work. Tea. Something else. Work.

The next morning, you open the door. Everything you put in as soft, chalky, fragile clay is now stone. Glass-smooth where glazed.

Most of the time it works. Sometimes a glaze reacts unexpectedly. Sometimes a piece warps because one side was slightly thicker. Sometimes everything comes out exactly as planned, which feels exhilarating and victorious!

The thing about the kiln, in my and my friend's opinion, is that for us it is like some witchcraft or black magic that we cannot totally possess, and we kind of like it a little, to not have total control over the outcome.

The kiln has so many shenanigans it is almost as if I should just give it a name and humanize it so I could potentially ask it for favors :)

But at the end of the day, the kiln does not negotiate. It applies heat and lets physics handle the rest. Learning to work with that instead of against it is maybe the most important part of this whole process.