Fired Pottery and Completed Shell Bead

Here is the completed shell bead. I already have two requests for more of these so apparently they're still as desirable as they were at Cahokia.
We also fired the pots yesterday. It turned out to be a perfect day and night for firing. We started in the afternoon Ashley used her bow drill kit to start the fire. It was the second time she's started a fire with her kit. Its a basswood on basswood set, but she also have a yucca on Western Red Cedar set she practices with. She used an elk knuckle (one I found at my friends ranch in Montana that we think may have been picked over by wolves. It was very white and clean when we found it), and tulip poplar tinder bundle with an oak gall in the center. Perhaps its because she's seen me do it so many times, but she really seems to pick up bow drill skills fairly quickly.
Once we got the fire going, we put the pots around to warm up and dry out more (we dried them for about two weeks or so prior to yesterday, and dried the larger one in the oven for a day. No drying cracks at all were visible.
We built the fire up pretty big and got it fairly hot, for about an hour before letting it burn down to coals and making a ring so we could put the pots in the center. Next step after putting the pots in is you start adding smaller pieces of wood and sticks on top of the ring of coals. These combusted fairly quickly. You continue to add on top of them and begin to place them so they form a kind of igloo of wood and fire over the pots. We added progressively larger pieces of wood, but not so large as to crush the other pieces of wood or risk breaking the pottery. You wouldn't want to put a large log on and accidentally break that nice cooking pot.
We continued to add wood and increase the temperature until I could see the pots glowing red. I was reading an article in a Society of Primitive Technology bulletin on firing pottery and I read that at this point, it is beginning to reach the temperature for ceramic change, and so you maintain this temperature for about 30-45 minutes. You could always keep it that hot for longer, but I suppose that's roughly the minimum amount of time.
You'll notice the edges of the pit are lined with bricks. I believe these might help with maintaining the temperature, or help focus the heat towards the pots.
We kept it going for another hour or so and let it die down. We left it to cool for the rest of the evening and the rest of the night. I did check it at 12 that night, but there were still embers and the pots were too hot to handle even with leather work gloves.
I pulled them out this morning and they turned out great. I did refire some pottery made with clay from Owego, New York, hoping it would harden up, but it's fairly week and still more of a soapstone consistency. Perhaps if I used some kind of grit it might have worked better.
The lighter coloured pot that you don't see in any of the other pictures is Ashley's. She made it at MAPS Meet 2007