Just thought I would take a minute to post this for anyone out there who is perplexed about finding hard little chunks that won't dissolve back into their shino glaze, which has just happened during the past few months. I keep my glazes in the basement. A dungeon of sorts, since it is a very old house, which is not heated by ducts. It's winter and sometimes drops into the 50's temperature wise, which I found out, is why my Coyote shino glazes were getting gritty/chunky. I didn't realize that just being cold would cause this, but it does. One of the ingredients in it doesn't tolerate cold temps well (neither do I for that matter).
So I posted my problem to my friends on the Etsy Mud Team after I had already glazed a bunch of mugs with it, chunks and all, thinking they would just melt down during the glaze firing. On the good advice of some of the members, I found out you need to immerse your glaze container in a bucket of nice hot water to warm up the glaze until you can get the chunks to dissolve. I tried it and it worked perfectly!
But in the meantime the already glazed pieces went on to be fired. The result was a somewhat mottled spotty effect, which worked fine over the black glaze that I had layered the shino on top of. Above is a picture of one of those glazed pieces heating up in the kiln at the early stages of a glaze fire.........every little hardened speck erupted in the glaze. It almost looks like gorilla glue oozing out all over the mug doesn't it? I found it so interesting I couldn't resist sharing.
