I thought it would be fun to have a thread where we could all share our glaze results-- the good, the bad, and the ugly. Feel free to share results from our house dips, commercial glazes, whatever you want!
I figured I would get us started by sharing some results from a project I started working on a couple of weeks ago. I started experimenting with creating my own glaze! We don’t have any matte options in our current lineup and I thought that would be a fun place to start.
I mixed up 1KG of dry ingredients for my base glaze and then split that up into 10 separate test containers, I added a variety of colorants to each test container, and added water, mixed them all up, and adjusted the water until I reached my desired specific gravity.
I let those test batches hydrate for a day or two and came back and dipped my test tiles-- one dip for the bottom and two dips for the top (long dips for this test-- about 3 seconds each). Results below:
Wow-- I never expected to get purple! I was expecting the cobalt carbonate to go from a powdery blue to an almost black at 10% (if I’m being honest, 10% was a mistake on my part-- never meant to go that heavy).
Most of these tiles are chalky to the touch-- not my intended result. A few of them do have a smooth matte finish to them. I am not sure if the colorants could be the root cause of this difference in finish or if it could be something else like not mixing some samples well enough or perhaps a different specific gravity is required. I’m thinking I need to add more frit to my base recipe to help it melt. Further investigation and testing is required.
Anyway-- I would love to see y’alls glazed pots and share combos, tips, and tricks!
Hey Stanton! Have you heard of glazeshare? A very cool website for sharing glaze results and recipes. They recently introduced a feature where one can register their studio and members can tag the studio on their works! Would be cool to add Asmbly and see what other asmbly potters are making
starting with the bad from this week’s glaze pick-up:
I had a TON of runny glazes this week, so much so that nasty shards were left at the bottom, I have never had this so far at asbmly which bummed me out and also makes me have to apologize - SOOOOOO sorry kiln operators!!! All of the glazes that this happened to were from commercial bottle glazes which i found interesting - rose quartz (2 coats with dipping clear over), purple aster (3 coats which I just hate the color of and cannot for the life of me find any good combos i like using it) & canary yellow (in donation pile that I thought I would try out). I was especially surprised that rose quartz and canary yellow ran so much since i left over a half inch of space as I really like the natural speckled look of this reclaim clay I had been working with and wanted the colorful contrast to come through. oh well!
Secondly - has anyone been having trouble with the gloss white? For some reason each time I try it it is so splotchy and refuses to stick fully to the pieces. I’ve tested multiple times and these are the examples from this unload - it’s so strange! And yes before anyone asks - the clay is always dust free and dry after a wipe down!! Any thoughts & comments??
But on the plus side I am really loving Rutile over gloss black from the dipping glazes!!! It’s a beautiful combo and leaves almost a light lavender/ blue hue where the material breaks and colors come together and is beautifully spotted! (might be my piece that is crazing, something keeps dinging but i can’t narrow it down just yet!) And as per usual underglazes are POPPIN!!!
Thinking about also trying my own science experiments mixing up some glazes! If anyone wants to go in on bulk dry ingredients together would love to chat and share! That’s all! <3
