Firing disaster

Just to wrap up the adventures of the pseudo-Minoan pot:

 We arrived when the kiln was partially unloaded. They had heard a noise when the top of the kiln was up to temperature. My pot had been on top and it fell into the corner that had been kept clear for the flames to come up.

 Very few pots survived unscathed - the bottom pots didn't get fired hot enough.

 Mine fell onto a cup of my teacher's:

There are also cracks around the base where my early coils weren't smushed together well enough - I got better by the end.

I should add that the pots were "tumble stacked" since they wouldn't have fit with the traditional shelves system. They were separated by "wadding", the tan blobs in the top picture. My teacher has a theory that things fell in part because the wadding was freezing as we were applying it during the loading and it wasn't sticking properly. She then tried to glue them on until the glue froze up. The rest were applied with spit, which would have thawed well before the final collapse - but there was an early collapse in which the upper set of cones fell when the kiln was at about 200F - they took things apart to fix that, but one of the teacher's pots was broken. Ah, who knows.