Harvest Sampling

Most of my first glaze firing was 266 clay, the dark brown clay that is one of my favorites. The oatmeal glaze went over it really nicely. Above, jugs and a handled wall pot. Below, the jugs again.

My kiln goddess. I painted her with blue and purple underglazes and wiped most of it off, letting it stay in the patterns I stamped on her. Most of the purple burned off, but the blue shows well.

Golden luster mugs.

Stamped handles.

Golden luster and oatmeal bowl.

Golden luster tumbler stamped with paisleys and an upsidedown wall pot in soda ash.

Paisley detail.

Turbulent indigo bowl.

Tiny turbulent indigo jar.

Lessons learned from the first glaze firing: I don't have to worry about the glazes running as much as I thought, so heavier application is possible, which will give me better color results. This is particularly true of the emeraude glaze, which you will notice is not featured here.

Glazes

I just bought some glazes for my home studio, since I'm approaching the time when I'll have a few kiln loads worth of bisqued pieces ready for glazing. It was hard to choose just a few, but I had to narrow it down to just a few among the vast selection of options out there. Above is turbulent indigo, below is oatmeal (which had more brown speckles than the sample shown the last time I used it).

The next one is emeraude.

I also ordered some golden luster, which I use regularly at Manassas Clay, and soda ash, another favorite of mine. Below is spotted blue, which I resisted ordering just yet. It's actually basically the same glaze as turbulent indigo, but with less cobalt. But it sure is purty...

I can barely wait to get started with the glaze tests!

Black Walnut

A classmate of mine and I have been working on a project at Manassas Clay, and today we got to reap the benefits. One week we threw probably around 50 "spouts" with a clay called Black Walnut. It's a beautiful clay that throws really nicely, but it produces such different glaze results than the other clays that we have been almost afraid to use it for fear of winding up with bad results. To rectify this problem, we tested each glaze on the spouts. Each spout was assigned a letter or number that was carved into it for tracking purposes. We dipped each spot twice so we can see how the glaze looks with a single dip and a second layer. We had also carved into the spouts so we would be able to see how each glaze "breaks" over horizontal and vertical crevices. After we had each glaze done, we tried combining glazes. We kept careful track of each spout so that we could replicate the results later. Since all of these steps require time in between, today was the first day we could sit down a see the end result, and even better, use that information to make glazing decisions. These are pictures of all the spouts. Some of the glazes are horrible on the clay - which we already knew based on our haphazard glazing. But some of them were amazing on the Black Walnut.

I have another glaze test in the works for the very dark clay I've been using lately. It's not quite as black as the Black Walnut, but it is still producing surprising results compared to the "dark" clay sample tiles in the glaze kitchen. I'm working on a different for for those tiles, and I'll share the results when I finish those.

In completely unrelated news, the painting in the den and the foyer is done, and we only have one more coat of paint left to get done in the master bedroom. I'll take pictures when we finish putting the rooms back together, and if it is ever light again in this very dark, dreary winter.