Saw in the New Year last night with a bonfire and firing a few small pots made by us all… We have a fair bit of lavender in the garden and we store some of it to burn on New Year’s Eve. The seeds and stalks give off a beautiful, powerful smell and the resins burn with a blue / orange flame, the stems twisting and glowing briefly before turning to ash… The pots made were an experiment, I haven’t bonfire fired for twenty years. We used craft crank, which although very resistant to thermal shock, meaning our pots all survived the firing, hasn’t given the best visual results. The clay doesn’t burnish well and the colour of the fired clay is buff / black, rather than the orange / black you can get with terracotta or the clays I used to use from Devil’s Water in Northumberland or other river clays.
Brakspear Ceramics 