Pottery beginner, need help.

It depends on the clay. Different clays need different temperatures.

You can actually get clay that fires in an oven. It is not suitable for anything other than decoration but that would be the minimum "firing" temp for pottery. You can also do pit fires which are lowfire.

some samples

(nice page)WHAT HAPPENS AS CLAYS AND GLAZES ARE FIRED100oC Water boils.

100-200oC Clays lose "mechanical water." 200oC Typical kitchen oven baking temperature. 374oC "Critical" temperature of water. Chemically combined water leaves clay. 500oC Red glow in kiln. 573oC "Quartz inversion" SLOW, CAREFUL FIRING UNTIL 600oC 800oC D015 Organic matter in clay burns out. 800-1000oC D015-07 Orange color in kiln. Low-fire earthenwares and lowfire lead glazes mature. Normal firing temperature for red bricks, flower pots. 1000-1160oC D07-1 Yellow color in kiln. High-fire earthenwares mature. Feldspars begin to melt. 1170-1190oC D3-4 Bright yellow-white color in kiln. Mid-range clays and low-fire stonewares mature. High iron-content clays begin to melt. 1250-1285oC D7-9 White color in kiln. Stoneware clays vitrify, feldspathic glazes mature. 1285-1350oC D9-13 High-fire stonewares, porcelains vitrify. MOST STUDIO POTTERY IS FIRED TO D9 OR LOWER. 1712oC Silica melts 2050oC Alumina melts

Thanks Thats All I wanted to know. Oh one more thing... I noticed that I have non typical oven :-) My oven has 300oC (temperature counter ends on 300 i guess that it can make some more heat ;-) )

That would be 572F and most ovens that I know of go to 500F.... still it would not do anything but dry out the pot on most clays potters use (600 is where you begin to get things going on I believe...)

Although the oven clay is not really clay I have been impressed with what can be done with it. I especially like the affect that mimics glass - I cannot remember the name of the technique but for glass you take and do layers of different colors of class (often pinching in the ball of glass on one layer to then give the next layer different depths of color. When you get enough layers of different colors and the glass is hot you have two people with an iron rod attached to both ends of the glass run like hell away from one another. This stretches the glass out to thin rods that can the be sliced and used to 'tile' a piece of glass that is then blown. It is much easier to do with the synthetic clay....

pulling cane

And what is the finished piece called? They used to do paperweights with them as well.... Looks kinda like an old fashion quilt.

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not quite. you make a brick or rod of glass somehow. you can either build it up with rods, strips, frit, etc, then melt it together in a flame or kiln. that's called a cane. attach a punty or grab it with plier-like tools on each end. heat up in a flame and pull making it be very thin. pulling cane. you then take the long rod, cut it into slices (saw, nippers, glass cutter, etc). these slices are called millifiori. you then use these slices in making other objects (paperweights, bowls, etc).

As far as I can tell from a search on pulling cane the glass style that I'm talking about is called Millefiore or Murano glass. Thanks for the lead. DK

Millefiori, meaning "A Thousand Flowers" is small segments of differently shaped and colored glass rods, laid close together and then fused into tiny mosaics, each of them being unique. Each piece is a one-of-a-kind work of art, entirely handmade.

Not quite what? When I was a child they used to make quilts from pieces of fabric that were cut, shaped and formed around of all things on bottle caps. These were pieced together and looked just like the pieces of glass works I'm referring to that were around quite a bit at the same time.

For the glass pieces that I'm talking about the canes were cut into slices that were put together much like you would form a pattern for a quilt. This 'grid' of glass pieces had a liquid glass 'ball' (yes I'm making the jargon up because I can't remember what we called it) pressed onto it. You could then leave it as a solid piece (paper weight) or blow it out as a bowl, vase, etc.

Look at the second item down the page. Then look at the bottom of the page to see how it is constructed.

description on how to make cane

finished slice of cane is called millifiori. it isn't usually seen by itself, but used in producing other things, like encasing it in clear to make a paperweight, or laying out on a heated flat metal surface and picking them up with a glass bubble on a blowpipe, or arranging a bed of them inside a ring mold, then fusing it in a kiln to make a flat blank of solid glass, then forming that blank in a ceramic mold or blowing it out to make a bowl,