Pottery, Photography, Design - Brandon "Fuzzy" Schwartz
Test tiles!
Hooray for summer break! And hooray for new glazes! Here are a few glazes that I recently tested:
Most are recipes that I found on the good ol’ world wide web. More technical info below:
Here’s a blast from the past. I was just about to upload some images of new glazes when I realized that I never posted my third batch of test tiles. I hadn’t even prepared the images!
It’s a good thing I’m on summer vacation…
So here are all 25 glaze variations. The base glazes are High Calcium Semi Matte 2 and Waterfall Brown from the book Mastering Cone 6 Glazes. Click the images to see a larger, more readable version.
Semi Matte 2, Cobalt Carb., RIO, Rutile
A few pieces from a glaze fire last month.
All Amaco Warm Brown Stoneware. Wheel Thrown. Glaze fired to ^6 in oxidation.
cooled soy wax in the crock-pot
I finally got to try the soy wax in the Crock Pot idea that I mentioned in another post. After unloading the bisque kiln and washing off the pots I was ready to wax the bottoms. Previously, this required getting out the wax resist and sponging or brushing it on each pot. This worked well but it was time consuming. While taking a class at the Goshen Clay Guild I noticed that they had an electric skillet which was used to melt paraffin wax which pots were dipped into. Even though it produced an odor and required more caution, it cut down on the time required to wax the bottoms. Then as I was researching this idea further, I read on the Ceramic Arts Daily Forum that some potters use soy wax and crock pots. So I decided to give it a try.
Finally…
I finally have some glaze test results from early summer. I decided if I was going to share them I may as well go all out and make them useful for anyone else that might be testing ^6 glazes in oxidation. If you click one of the six images below you should see the full-size, more readable images.
All base glazes are from the fabulous book: Mastering Cone 6 Glazes
I’m interested in developing some semi-matte glazes to add a little surface variety to my work. Here are two groups of test tiles with the High Calcium Semimatte 2 from Mastering Cone 6 Glazes (pg. 89).
High Calcium Semimatte 2 Red Iron Oxide and Rutile
High Calcium Semimatte 2 Rutile and Red Iron Oxide
I was really impressed with these two groups of glazes. I plan to use at least a few of these in the future after some more testing. I have already tested this base glaze with some more colorant combinations. It should be noted that the first tile in the bottom image is the “Bone” glaze from the book and the third tile is “Raw Sienna” both mentioned on page 90.