A nice warm blanket.

The oven construction continues! We wrapped the whole oven in kaowool blankets with the assistance and expertise of Bonnie Omang, a fellow local potter and a great friend. Kaowool is itchy, fibrous, snowy-white insulation used to make kilns, insulate furnaces and fireplaces, and also pizza ovens! And we used more than I have ever seen!  To give you an idea, when kilns for firing pottery are built using kaowool for insulating walls, one or two layers of 1" kaowool is all that is usually used to reach temperatures over 2000 degrees. But our giant oven has up to 6 layers of kaowool on top of the refractory cast walls, then there will be two or three layers of stucco, then we are making our own ceramic tiles and applying them as the final outer layer of the oven. There is so much insulation that the outside of the oven will never even get warm, unless you count the warmth of a sunny day! Pretty cool, eh?

Stucco pictures coming soon!