Customer Reviews

The Complete Potter: Sawdust Firing

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This text is a great reference for the potter beginning to work with unglazed firing techinques, and for the experienced potter seeking new ideas. There are slip recipes, definition explanations, and interviews with contemporary working artists. Beautiful photos intersperrsed throughout the text, both color and black and white, illustrate a number of technique results. A variety of kiln assemblies are described, including pit fire kilns and above ground models. Sawdust Firing is an interesting, easy read packed with information and a number of artist's personal preferences regarding their techniques. I highly recommend it to any individual curious about the art - this book makes unglazed firing very accessible, even to beginners.

"Sawdust Firing," through interviews with potters, sets forth how those potters do, rather than stepping through how-to's. This is NOT a book for beginners, except to give a taste of the medium. Brilliant photos of potters' works, 'though mostly UK potters and the editor's own, with a spattering from other countries. The vocabulary is distinctly UK-based, with some terms explained in the glossary. For a US reader, "ceramic fibre" may not instantly translate to "fiberglass," and "bin" to "garbage can." Having said all this, the book is worth the money just for the glimpses of Duncan Ross' work.

This is one of my favorite books. It is not for a beginner. I do a lot of sawdust firing and find this book so inspiring and helpful. If you have some instruction on this firing technique and have an understanding of different clay bodies, this book will enable you to continue to experimenting and improving your results.

I was disappointed in this book. I was hoping to find detailed information on firing techniques other than traditional kiln. It did provide this information; however, no detailed information was provided on how to use/position tin to preserve glazing...this was the essential information I was looking for and thought the book would give detailed instructions on how to do this. The book did give good information on a variety of techniques used by potters all over the world, and it was very interesting...but not the "how to" I was hoping for. There was information on building outdoor kilns...and how to fire, which would be helpful to more experienced potters. Not exactly a book for beginners, like me.