Happy Holidays to everyone

May you have a Joyous holiday season. 

Metallic Satiny Copper and Chartreuse Lime Green Glazes tested

This weekends results from the continuing tests of modifying and testing (and re-testing) ingredients and ratios to create both exciting color and silky smooth finish with a shimmer or sparkle:
This week I am looking for an apple to chartreuse green;   sorry my pics are washed out and don't quite show the amt of green they did achieve

One blend of barium glaze with the addition of rutile and copper, plus some titanium yeilded a more limey green when applied very very thin. But a bit too matte with a tendancy towards turquoise where thicker. Also the rutile lent some speckling (probably should have seived it better).  Interesting but not exciting.

Then I tested with chrome, adding high amounts of lithium in hopes of that sparkle, a good but not saturated enough yellow green color response, and a totally crazed finish and I mean badly.  (I am sure I am part to blame for removing it from the kiln just a bit early - however, I think this would have crazed even if I had waited)  Further tweaking to that test glaze with the additions of more barium,alumina, neph and a scosh of titanium.  This yielded a smoother less crazed finish, but lost some of the green and leaned more yellow.  My next modification of that will be to add some more chrome and a little more flint.  The one thing I found really exciting about this blend is near the top and bottom where I applied some RIO and Mng wash the line where the yellow green and the black meet turned a brilliant turquoise.

The thing that grabbed me the most was an unexpected shimmery smooth metallic burnt copper orange in a small area inthe well of the foot of a piece I had refired, where I had failed to wash away all of the glaze from the dunk.  Now if I can only figure out what created that!

Glaze with a pearly sheen..... More testing ensues in my never ending search for "The Glaze"

I have been running a lot of tests tweaking and tweaking that barium glaze recipe for my little weed pots over the past week.  I veered off the purple variation for now looking for additional colors I could call my own.  Had a number of disappointments, but also some really promising ones.  My favorite tonite is a lovely mint green with yellow, which I will enhance with a bit more copper in the next batch to see if I can get a bit more of an apple green.   But I can't stop looking at it, it has a lot of promise!  Also born was an interesting deep mottled forest green and a super pretty medium blue purple too.  The light turquoise as well as the mint both have a lovely sheen, sadly the turquoise has to be applied so thin to retain the color that the throwing lines on the pot shows through and the texture is a bit too dry for my liking.  I guess burnishing them will help in that respect and maybe taking it up another cone.  I love the sheer veil and sheen in the turquoise, even with as hard as it is to get an even application,  so it will be worth the extra time to do that.  Take a peek at my results from todays kiln offering.

 

 

a study of crawl glaze pieces

Recently I mixed up a new barium glaze recipe that was noted as a lowfire cone 04 glaze.  Note, I used midrange porcelain for my testing bodies.
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!

 

pit fired pots without digging up the yard - making pottery in my new campfire pit

These pictures are from a previous attempt at firing a little bowl in my fire pit purchased at Menards for having backyard campfires.
By using some organic fuels, coloring agents next to the pot and then wrapping in newspaper and tin foil, and finally allowing it to burn in the fire for several hours, I can make our evening outdoor fires have a little of the anticipation a child feels at christmas.

Trying to be humble, but pretty darn excited!

Yesterday, after many months of anticipation, I was greeted with a package on my doorstep from DRG Network. Alas, my yarn bowl was back home, and accompanying it on its journey were 2 hard copies of the current issue of Creative Knitting Magazine. Wow, the cover shot is of a finished top to die for. Wish I had the time to really delve into knitting when I see some of these creations. If you're a knitter, this would be a fabulous magazine to subscribe to - and either the online version or the snail mail version are available. Perusing through, I find an overhead shot of one of my yarn bowls on page 11 "Knitting with a conscious" article - with a great writeup on eco friendly green yarns. The article continues and there on page 90 in all her glory a full shot of my bowl. The yarns they chose to feature in the bowl couldn't have been more perfect. I am normally a very humble person, but I can't help but be terribly excited about this - thank you Creative Knitting!
Visit Creative Knitting

There's hard Chunks in my Coyote Shino Glaze - Oh My

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.