Bloggy blog pt. 1

 My lesson on glazing went pretty well this week, I think. I felt a little awkward teaching from a real planned out set of notes. People are going to start thinking I'm a real teacher! I thought sure my students would be bored to tears with this stuff, or would feel like they knew it all already, but many of them asked lots of questions and seemed to find the info helpful, so that's good.

I did majorly screw up this week with the bisque firing. It always seems like I can't make a mistake without destroying something I've worked hard on. Once again, I placed a thick beginner piece right next to my piece, and it exploded. I thought sure I fired the kiln slow enough for the thicker stuff to be safe, but I guess the 3 hr hold at 180 wasn't quite long enough. And I did change it from 6 hours, because I didn't want to wait! My impatience is going to be the death of me. 

I tried to fix my girl, but the pieces didn't quite fit, and the bisque fix isn't sticky, so they wouldn't hold together. I'm wondering if I can make a new piece to fix it using paper clay. Does anyone know of a clever way to fix broken bisque? I'm not ready to give up on her!

Bisque fix fail:(

Layers of wax resist and glaze

I demoed a lot of wax resist decoration, which I've never tried before. No idea how it's all going to turn out. I've been playing with black copper oxide wash too, to bring out some depth in my flat glazes. Hoping to fire it all today, and have new pretties to post by the weekend. 

Glazes over black copper oxide wash

 Going to do a second post later today, to make up for my slackerness!

Hooray test tiles!

I got my test tiles out of the kiln this week, and I am really pleased with the results so far. This is the first time I've ever mixed a chrome tin glaze. How cool that such a vibrant green powder can make such a lovely wine color after firing! I definitely want to do more research on chrome tin glazes, since I understand they can be difficult to get right. I feel a bit like I cheated by skipping all the testing and using the tried and true recipe provided in my book. I did learn that you only need a tiny amount of chrome to get the best color - .1% provided the richest raspberry color.

Raspberry glaze from Mastering Cone 6 Glaze.

 I just found a very helpful article about trying to get a pink glaze using mason stains, and it breaks down the different elements that are needed to get color, and which ones will bleach out the desired pink or red (magnesia apparently is not compatible with getting pink to work, apparently). I assume that the same guidelines provided in this article are true for mixing glazes from oxides rather than stains, but I guess I'll have to test to find out.

Two mixes of Floating Blue Woo

A blue green copper glaze. We call it Maggie Moo, because our instructor Cathy's daughter, Maggie, mixed up the original recipe for a science fair project. How cool is that?

I hope I can learn from these base recipes and eventually be able to formulate my own glazes based on the results I desire. There certainly is a lot to learn! 

Not really mastering cone 6 glazes?

One of my duties as artist in residence at Beech Grove is to formulate studio dipping glazes for student use. Now, glaze chemistry has never been my strong point. I've no head for math, and I'm just not a very precise person, so in college I didn't have much luck finding glazes that I liked or had use for. All that repetitive testing just seemed tedious to me, and given the kind of surface treatments I prefer, not very useful. Except now I need that information for a job, and probably will many times in the future. So I better brush up on it, right?

I've always been the kind of person that will happily hit the books (or the internet) if there's something I don't know how to do. I really love learning, and usually pride myself on being able to pick up new skills easily. Several people have recommended Mastering Cone 6 Glazes to me as a really great resource, so I asked for it for Christmas, and I'm just now getting around to cracking it open.

Oh man. I'm slowly starting to think that once you have a baby, your brain just turns to mush and slides right out of your ears.

I woke up yesterday morning, fed Maddy, and after she went back to sleep, I figured I had a couple quiet hours to spare before she woke up again. I thought it would be an excellent time to sit down and finally begin reading this book. Next week being my break, and with my new (currently not working, but fixable) test kiln, I figured it would be the perfect time to get some glaze testing done. I sat down with my cup of coffee, and started reading.

And could barely register a word of it.

I can barely even remember what I read! What is wrong with my brain! I gave up in frustration, but several friends and potters assured me that it was probably not a good morning read, so I tried again in the afternoon (after many cups of coffee). Slightly clearer then, but still daunting.

Don't get me wrong. Clearly there is a lot of good info in this book. The base glaze recipes they include will probably be a lot of help. And they clearly intended this book to be simplistic so that anyone can use it and formulate their own glazes.

But my brain must be broken. Or stuffed with fluff.

Maybe it's just not the sort of thing you should read cover to cover. Maybe I need to look at the appendices and apply some of the practices in studio to really understand what they're talking about.

I know everyone says this a great book. But I can't remember the last time I've felt so stupid!

Argh.