User talk:CFPottery

== Origin of horse hair raku. I invented this firing method. In 1968 I began experimenting with black pit-firing. I lived in Fort Collins, Colorado at the time. There was an ordinance prohibiting open fires so I had to abandon pit-fires. I found I could remove pots hot from an electric kiln and place them in a container with fuel then close the lid to get black smoke staining. In 1969 I dropped a hot piece on grass accidentally. It rolled and picked up smoke markings from the grass. I named tis effect "cloudfire" after the term fire clouding that archaeologists use to describe soot stains on pots that come from firing. In 1971 a hair fell from my head onto a hot pot. I liked the effect so began doing it deliberately, usually with human hair but sometimes with animal hair, and with feathers. My wife, Mary Blake Witkop, and I used the hair fired pots as our principal output for several years. After we moved to New Mexico in 1975, we began working with Taos Pueblo potter Bernadette Track, her sisters, mother and aunt, mostly with pit-firing but sometimes using human hair. Bernadette and her sister Soj expressed reticence using human hair, so we switched to the use of horsehair, which we had already experimented with, in the late seventies. We also made pieces using feathers, leaves, grass, and other materials. We called our work "Cloudfire Pottery" I have never used the term "raku" to describe horsehair firing as it is quite unlike Japanese raku, the only similarity being the use of tongs and the smoke staining. The kiln atmosphere, the temperature fired to, and the absence of glaze in the horsehair firing being different. Carl Gray Witkop. CFPottery (talk) 22:18, 3 September 2022 (UTC)