Interesting color response that I loved, but the feel was a very dry matte and the surface had a crawl effect (although it looks crazed it is not, the edges are smooth) on the areas where thicker, the glaze turned a very vibrant purple and crawled, on the thin areas it was a lovely turquoise. The color was brilliant though and I wanted to pursue perfecting the glaze to a smoother surface, in hope of keep the same color response.
I started by simply firing another piece to cone 5, the glaze did not run, did smooth out a bit, but it still crawled in larger patches and the brilliance in color was subdue. The mottled look inherent of the nature of a matte finish. Still I wanted this color, but in a silky soft finish.
I mixed up another 1/2 batch (#2) this time increasing the flux via added neph and barium and continued firing at cone 5-6, no more low fires. More neph seemed to make a deeper inky blue while more barium a lighter denser denim blue.
Smoother, but where's the purple? One more batch (#3) that I poured 1 cup of mixed epsom salt water solution into as part of my liquid, hoping the MgO would brighten the color up. Well it did, but now we're back to a crawl effect. Apparently all the mgo in the epsom salt water was overkill. I will continue on, not making that mistake with the epsom salts and report new findings later on. During these tests, I notice that on the pieces with a wash of red iron oxide at the base, a light green was occurring, so I also tested a few pieces that show the color response when iron is added. I also had a green results over iron bearing clay bodies.
If anyone knows what ingredient will increase the purple, please feel free to leave a comment and I will play around with the amounts.
Ingredients in the glaze are Barium-Neph_EPK-Flint-Lithium-Copper
Happy Testing!
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