Tuesday, October 7, 2008

glazes

We unloaded the final test kiln firing this morning. Final firing because we are glazing everything leather hard and since we've already started making pots, it seems like now would be a good time to mix up some glazes and slips. We decided to start from scratch with our glazes, since some of the materials are new to us, it's a new clay body, and a vast majority of the glazes we used before were used in wood/salt kilns (we're planing on firing salt free). Here are the four glazes that we came up with:
-A simple ash based little greenish grey celedon:
A glazed based on corn ash. People around here have corn stoves, which burn corn kernels. Seems funny to me to be burning a food source, but I guess there is plenty of it... The corn ash has quite a bit of silica in it, we ended up adding a little more silica to get a nice light milky blueish glaze.
A darker more runny ash glaze
and a dark black glaze. We're working on making this less runny without losing the gloss, but this is what we're mixing up for now.

Nothing to fancy, pretty classic glazes. Hopefully there won't be too many unpleasant surprises when these come out of the wood kiln. The only thing that might be a problem is if the glazes crystallize in the slow cooling of the wood kiln. Hard to emulate those conditions in a tiny soft brick test kiln.
Joe

2 comments:

ang design said...

number 2 is nice, as is the black..very classic an excellent beginning...

RobCartelli said...

Nice glaze tests and great blog. I'd be interested to read more about the corn ash glaze. I've just come across a source for corn ash and am curious about the best way to process it. Do you wash it? ball mill it?
Thanks,
Rob Cartelli
rcartelli19@hotmail.com