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70's Ceramics Plastic Lights


Mug

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It's use must have died in the 70's. I have not been able to find anything relating  on how it was used to fill holes. 

My mom, friends and aunts have all used it and no one seem to remember how they did it. My search skills are falling if it's on the internet. 

Would it be possible to use this in cone 6 stoneware or was it only used in low fire?

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Frits can have various melting temps.

I recall these where very popular back in the slip cast bunny days in the 70's-that was low fire. We called those shops old lady ceramics shops (no offense Oldlady)

They where everywhere-full of molds and you could pour or buy your own bunnies and decorate them along with all the items that went with that genre .

Its not dead  just harder to find, much of that morphed to the cone 6 of today. The market shifted to high electric temps-just look at the ads say in a CM . Check out a CM from the 70's-the ads where cone 06 now its all 6.

The shift was from the slip shops to the do it a home market.

Ferro is a frit supplier as well.

My guess is those bright glass ones are low fire

I can see them in the bunny eyes now.

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I so though this would be a simple question, ceramics were so popular in the 70's and 80's. I'm in ceramics today because of those old lady's. I was painting ceramics right with those old lady's.

I'm not overly convinced it's plastic or glass yet. I tossed out all of the low fire glowing eyed gnomes and ceramic bunny's 30 years ago.

( In this day and age glowing eyed zombie gnomes and possessed bunny's would probably sell well.)

 

I remember making those sun catchers that were really popular at the time...That's what leads me to lean toward and think it might have been plastic. A little bit styrene crystals and some Rez-N-Bond might make a hole filling mixture.

 I'm thinking glass could have been used.  I'm not sure how glass crystals would have stayed in the cut out hole when firing without falling out of the hole. Maybe cone 6 could be re-fired at a lower temperature. If it's glass would imagine the thermal expansion of the pottery would have to be fairly close to that of the glass.

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I'm wondering if you are making this harder than it needs to be. Couldn't it just be smashed up plastic/acrylic beads, like in the upper row of them in your photo, mixed with a clear resin and glued in place after firing?

Like these ones from Etsyil_570xN.203640175.jpg

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I'm wondering if you are making this harder than it needs to be. Couldn't it just be smashed up plastic/acrylic beads, like in the upper row of them in your photo, mixed with a clear resin and glued in place after firing?

Like these ones from Etsy...

Those plastic bits are too uniform to be 'smashed up beads'...  can't tell from the pic whether they're partially melted, or just held together by a clear resin - but I'd be willing to bet they're the same 'crystals' used for the sun-catchers.

 

Yup, you are probably right. I was thinking that if you ran a heat gun over broken chips of beads it would smooth/round over edges to get kinda the same look as the sun-catcher stuff. Mugs don't look so uniform though.

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Someone in 70's and 80's tested and used it successfully. The material and the method are unknown.

 

I'm ordered some vintage Crafts-made plastic Crystals for the Makit & Bakit sun catchers. Seems they still sell the sun catcher kits and no longer sell bulk crystals like they used too. Ill test it out and see how it goes. I had completely forgot about the plastic baked sun catchers and that seems to make the most sense and I will let everyone know how well it works.

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started out in an old lady lowfire ceramic store in the 1970s because there were no other choices.  i remember the plastic "lightbulbs" on the big christmas trees.  they were plastic and fit into the 1/4 inch holes that had been drilled into the ends of the branches before firing.  the light was a normal bulb at the bottom of the hollow tree.

 

the old lady who owned the shop got really tired of pushing a hole maker tool a thousand times and picked up a drill.  great example to me.  "do what works, not necessarily what you have been told you have to do."  

 

those things might still available at "ceramics studios" which you might find in your local area.  ( almost said look in the yellow pages )  they are still around where people congregate while making things and enjoying the company of others who do the same.  like "Cheers" without the liquor.

 

you might look online at Aftosa for the originals.

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  • 1 month later...

The Makit and Bakit translucent polystyrene Crystals finally arrived after being lost in the postal system for weeks.

 

I tried a few different methods melted the crystals with a heat gun (took for ever to get the ceramic hot and completely melted the crystals), Mixed them with glue( they look like they were mixed with Glue) and used Resin Bond.

 

Resin Bond, AKA Rez-N-Bond, Methylene chloride is the clear winner

 

I used Aluminum Foil as a temporary backing material in the ceramic.  I then pored the crystals in and used a bottle with needle applicator to add the Resin Bond. I added a little Resin Bond to the raw edge of the unglazed ceramic As long as you don't use to much Resin bond it should set up in seconds. Resin Bond works by a capillary action for those of you who may not know... Less is better. More will cause the plastic to dissolve and take days to get hard.

 

The Crystals stick extremely well to the unglazed pottery with Resin Bond and the finished results look exactly like they should. This is probably the same method that was used.

 

My best guess of why it is not used today would be that Resin Bond is a little more controlled than it used to be. It is still available to the plastics industry, but not so much to the general public. It seems to have undergone a change around 2013 when some unknowing uneducated bathroom re-finishers died using Methylene Chloride because of the confined space and an excess of Methylene chloride fumes.

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