I had a good firing. There was a lot of variety in color from front to back. The front is usually more reduced and hotter whereas the back of the kiln is more neutral/slightly oxidized and cooler. The front will get cone 10 and the back is somewhere around 8 or 9. This doesn't bother me really as I can use one or two slips and get a lot of different looking pots just from where they are in the kiln.
The past two firings have been totally salt. Most of the time I do a combination of salt and baking soda, sometimes some borax. For this firing I went with all soda ash and the results were good. In my last firing I used almost 20 lbs of salt, I don't know where most of it went but I had little orange peel. In this firing I used less than 3 lbs of soda ash sprayed in as a solution and got great orange peel. Some pots in the front got hammered but all in all it was a good mix.
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