Roberta12

Appreciate the people who have shared their recipes for a clear glaze. Getting a well fitting clear is one of the harder glazes to come up with.
For those new to mixing their own glazes, be sure to test the glaze for FIT before making up a big bucket. Glaze fit to a claybody is no different than fitting a pair of jeans. What fits my body won't necessarily fit everyone else's body. If you use a high expansion glaze on one side of a pot and a low expansion one on the other there is a good chance of the pot dunting / cracking.
If someone is looking for a clear glaze to use with or over stains or underglazes or some specific colouring combinations (like chrome tin pinks, reds, purples etc) then you need a specific type of clear glaze that is hospitable to the colourants. 

See 10-SEP-2020 update, second recipe, "Min's low expansion III"
Clay composition and crazing - Page 2 - Clay and Glaze Chemistry - Ceramic Arts Daily Community
I mix and sieve it, setting specific gravity to about 1.42, then adjust the thixotropy as needed*.
I like the glaze, having tried, adjusted, then abandoned several clear/clearish liner glazes before getting this one sorted.
Playing around with new recipes in coming years, likely, for my bag of Gerstley Borate will one day be empty, also the bag of Texas talc, and smaller sack of Petalite.
 
*I'm stirring clockwise at a repeatable speed.
Once the whisk is removed, I expect to see the mass of glaze revolving together at the same speed, for about three or four turns before coming to a stop, all together, and "bouncing back" a little bit.
Glaze that's not sufficiently "gel" will spin much longer, with several currents running at different speeds.
See Tony Hansen's article and video clip Thixotropy and How to Gel a Ceramic Glaze (digitalfire.com)

I think you got some great advice already.  I used Etsy heavily for years when it was new but they made so many changes, promoted free shipping and the like, and the fees got so high that I dropped them.  I use my own website on FASO (Fine Art Studio Online) so get you your own website.  Something within your budget that has ready to use templates can save you a lot of misery. 
You can always use places like Etsy, Ebay, or a gazllion other platforms for listing pieces to draw people in but ultimately I think you'll need to use social media as mentioned.  Instagram, Facebook, whatever.  I have almost two thousand followers on FB alone but I don't actually LIKE FB so I also do as much as I can with my website, an email newsletter, a blog, in addition to my art galleries and live events, workshops I host, etc.  It can go on and on but start simple and build a little bit at a time so you don't wear yourself out.  It's taken me years to build the following I have so keep client lists and try to invite your existing followers to your new platforms.  As they say, build your brand and carry it forward!
Good luck with it.  It's a lot of hard work whatever way  you go about it.  And if need be, HIRE somebody to do your website or photography for you.  You can always pay them in some of your work just until things are up and running.  Otherwise you'll have to learn how to do it all yourself like I have.

@ChristopherW
Ok I’ll take a shot. This was a favorite in 2018 and has been tested and used for a studio clear for several years I know of. Samples in dishwasher forever. Actually moved to new dishwasher as old one wore out. Test piece going on approx 800 wash cycles. It’s Gerstley so not so much a favorite anymore. Glazes often don’t travel well but you are welcome to it. Hope it works for you. This is one of those glazes developed taking the Katz course. The spreadsheet is his, but we have written permission by him to automate the sheet and redistribute. I think he has a new free excel sheet as well. Don’t forget use the 100% batch column.

The things being discussed here is are not necessary to good glaze formulation. I've been making durable glazes for 30 years without ever looking at a Stull chart or Katz's papers. Learning the basic of glaze formulation- fluxes, stabilizers, and glass formers- will serve you just fine, and allow for tweaking formulas to increase durability and adjust glaze fit for your clay body.
Commercial glazes are not necessarily any more durable. They all take testing as well. Clear glazes are generally quite safe if they're free of lead and cadmium, which most all glaze recipes being used nowadays are, and they don't have the heavy metals (colorants) in them that are likely to leach in a poorly formulated glaze. The benefits of mixing your own glazes are that they are much less expensive, and you can alter them as needed to fit the clay body you're using. If you know another potter that has a good clear glaze, by all means ask them for a recipe.

It’s worth noting that Etsy selling has never been a way for most users to make a full time living, but many do use it as a supplement or as one of many income streams. Also, don’t follow their advice on pricing your work. Because of how they structure their fees, you’ll have to start with your base price and add all the assorted percentages they charge. Use caution when using their forum for advice on running a business there. Many of the seller communities labour under the (incorrect) assumption that high prices will drive away customers, and that you have to have frequent sales and discounts. None of that is true. Cheap prices draw in deal hunters who will not treat you well. 

Once long ago Etsy was a good place for people to find your work. Now there's so much stuff on there and so much of it isn't really handmade that it's nearly impossible for your work to be found unless you have a very specific niche that people can search for. If you simply make good work that doesn't have unusual search criteria, it'll just get lost in the mix. A search for 'blue mug' will result in thousands of options. But if you have a blue mug with a mouse on it, then people can find you. Etsy works well as a shopping page that you can direct people to, though. Their interface is pretty easy to use, and everything is secure, but you may need to use social media and other means to direct people there. You'll have to math out what their fees  will cost you vs setting up your own shopping site.

Online stores aren’t less work than doing festivals or fairs, they’re just a different kind of work. Certainly less physical labour in terms of not having a booth to set up or tear down. But you have to be good at figuring out software, taking images and promoting yourself online somehow. Some people are really good at making social media connections, some people would rather have a root canal than play games with the algorithms.
As far as my personal opinion on Shopify vs Etsy goes, they’re comparing apples to oranges. Etsy is an online marketplace, and Shopify is a website building platform like Squarespace or weebly. You don’t go to Squarespace expecting them to drive traffic to you. But I’m not of the opinion that Etsy does a stellar ob of driving traffic to a given seller, and they change their SEO requirements frequently enough that no one can really make a consistent living off of it. 
Shopify is just focused primarily on e-commerce, and has a bunch of features that let it handle shopping traffic and security built in. If you build your own website on Shopify, you pay them flat fees and you own it as long as you don’t do anything illegal and keep paying them. You’re in control of your own audience, for good or ill. You’re in charge of driving your own traffic, whether through social meda, ads, your email list, SEO or other methods.
If you open an Etsy shop, they also focus on e-commerce and transactions are secure. But ultimately, they own the platform and you are subject to how they want you to run your business. You don’t have to go too far to find the cons of using Etsy. Some of the complaints are from people who aren’t approaching selling there like running a business, but some are quite valid. The way they run their external ads is borderline usury, the requirements for things like top seller badges are unsustainable and the fee structure is unnecessarily complicated. My accountant *hated* their obtuse reporting. But the reason I left was because the traffic they drove to my site didn’t result in any conversions in a 1 year period. The customers who bought were all from my own efforts (social media and newsletter).
 

Not sure if the rest of the world can see this, but now it's not on the BBC, maybe you can.
https://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-great-pottery-throw-down/on-demand/74088-001
First of the series was on a week ago, haven't watched yesterday's programme yet - so no spoilers please - but they were one of the best groups of potters so far - and this is series 7.  They could at least, all throw reasonably well.

People don’t buy pottery for aesthetics. I mean they do, but they’re buying your “eye.” It’s possible to buy white rutile pottery in my grocery store for a fraction of what I can make it for. But they buy my pottery because they like my take on that theme. 
 

@Bam2015 I like what @GEP said about stylistically original, and what @Kelly in AK said about making pots that are beautiful and interesting to the artist and what is pleasing to hold and touch.  @Mark C. comments about changing up what was pleasing to his eye and what actually was selling.  I will add that you have to know your venue and customer base.  I live in an area where function is the key.  I have had people pick up a bowl and ask what they could use it for.  It's not that they don't know what a bowl is used for, it's that they wonder if there is a specific function for a handmade bowl.  I always try to have an answer for that.  (mashed potatoes, oatmeal, applesauce), but my customers like color and pattern.  Maybe that's because what I like to make.  Circling back to what @Kelly in AK said.  You have to have your heart in what you make.   
 

@Bam2015 I like what @GEP said about stylistically original, and what @Kelly in AK said about making pots that are beautiful and interesting to the artist and what is pleasing to hold and touch.  @Mark C. comments about changing up what was pleasing to his eye and what actually was selling.  I will add that you have to know your venue and customer base.  I live in an area where function is the key.  I have had people pick up a bowl and ask what they could use it for.  It's not that they don't know what a bowl is used for, it's that they wonder if there is a specific function for a handmade bowl.  I always try to have an answer for that.  (mashed potatoes, oatmeal, applesauce), but my customers like color and pattern.  Maybe that's because what I like to make.  Circling back to what @Kelly in AK said.  You have to have your heart in what you make.   
 

I have a hard time imagining that best sellers could be ranked based on (implied? perceived? known?) preference for certain surface decoration and/or colors.  So many choices, so many makers, so many buyers, so many locations!! I'm now very interested to see what sellers here have to say! Also whether there is any insight as to whether location, time of year, sub-populations in the region, comments from buyers, other variables, etc. seems to influence what sells best. 

Agree that everyday functional pottery sells much better than sculptural or decorative ceramics. But “functional” alone will not automatically sell, there are plenty of functional wares out there that don’t sell well. It also needs to be pleasing to touch and hold it. And it needs to be correctly priced. Not too high OR too low. And it helps a great deal if it is stylistically original, i.e. customer does not look at it and think “I see a lot of pottery that looks just like this.” 

And then use the pots.
 
High boron in this glaze? Large amount of Gerstley Borate?

My “for what it’s worth” contribution to this discussion: 
The glaze I use the most is based on a MC6G semi-matte base, which I altered with talc and calcium carb to make it more matte. At one point, I calculated out the unity formula, and it was well outside of the range that MC6G recommends. But I’ve been using it for going on 20 years, and it has been rock solid. Even in cases where a customer brought back some 10+ year old bowls, where the glossy liner glaze was visibly losing its shine. These customers are heavy dishwasher users, and again these pots had been in almost daily use for 10+ years, but the matte glaze on the outside was exactly like day 1. 
Unity formulas, flux ratios, boron charts are all useful guidelines, but glaze chemistry has far more variables than us mere humans can test. No substitute for first hand experience. “Melt and see” is still an indispensable mindset. 

I'd tried extended bisque fire hold (~1500°F) for red, dark brown and black clays I was trying out (a few years ago), where the idea was to thoroughly "burn out" the stuff that will  burn out*. The hold did seem to help with the black clay, however, the main problem I was having with the red clay, fizzy bubbling, was most likely associated with too much heatwork.
I'd set up a powered kiln vent at about the same time.
Any road, my observation (notations were helpful here) was that random pits were greatly reduced in the white, buff, and other red** clays.
My guess there is that random larger bits/chunks of stuff that otherwise wouldn't completely decompose (and hence, produce gas in the glaze fire) in a regular bisque fire get more, or even fully burned out with the hold. I've left the hold in ever since.
I'm fairly sure I got the idea from reading GlazeNerd posts, thanks Nerd!
 
*The black clay, in particular, could bloat where the clay was even a bit thicker.
**I'm using a different vendor's red clay now, which isn't as sensitive to firing over cone five; it also throws better and is less prone to cracking during drying.

I’m currently in an interesting position of having to revise most of the 10 shop  glazes at a new teaching studio that weren’t properly tested before large batches were made. The person who chose them quit, or he’d have been fired. The glazes were all chosen entirely by the numbers: they all fall within the Stull recommendations, and don’t have weird variances in UMF. Most of them have easily traced provenance and have good reputations.  But one failed an overnight vinegar test, and three more require weird bucket flocculation acrobatics that are deeply impractical to maintain in a teaching studio. One is pretty pricey because it’s half frit. 3 of them contain gerstley borate, with no attempt to reformulate. They were all mixed to the exact same specific gravity. 4 of them ran like a track star because of that. Only 2 out of the 10 need no immediate work. The person who put this glaze stable together read alllllll the technical manuals, but had zero practical experience. 
But I was also taught glaze chemistry (*points flashlight under chin*)  in the Before Times when there was No Digitalfire! (Woooooo!)  Kidding aside. We were subjected to line blending every material in a chosen base glaze just to see what happened.  My left eye still twitches thinking about that level of abject boredom, and I think the prof may have secretly hated us all. I remember thinking at the time that we were all probably reinventing the proverbial wheel, and that a reference text of some kind HAD to be out there somewhere to narrow things down. I am deeply, deeply grateful that glaze calc software exists to eliminates a lot of that kind of needless pedantry, and material waste. 
Ideally glaze calc and empirical testing should be used together. 

And here we come to it, the rub. 
Glazy has been a godsend to me, and I’ve yet to see anything bursting that bubble. I learned glaze chemistry and calculation thirty years ago in college, and used it loosely, only to evaluate recipes. Now, as then, I rely heavily on materials knowledge and gross ratios to come up with what I believe will work. Glazy allows me to put my guesses into a context of what has worked in other places for other people, and reduces (not eliminates) the testing. For materials that don’t have a published chemical analysis, or materials that have the same name but varying compositions (this talc vs. that talc, “ potash spar,” “boron frit,” or my local clay) there’s still guesswork. 
It takes much less effort to arrive at a data point that before would have been tedious to find, even with previous glaze calculation software. Glazy rests on the shoulders of everything that came before it and I don’t discount that, but we live in good times. Three cheers for Derek Au. 
I, like @Roberta12, look for that sweet spot on the UMF chart, nudge my glazes towards it and wait and see how the pots look after a few years in my kitchen. The only faster way to test seems to be alternating baths in strong alkali and acid (good old lye and that potent 30% vinegar @PeterH mentioned in another post). Like the weatherman, we haven’t arrived at perfect prediction, but it’s a lot better than it used to be. 

20 oz mug, 1 lb  (base isn't as narrow as it looks in the picture)

The Bright Angle, in Ashville, NC might be someone to call? You might also try KleinReid in New York.

Drop and hold seems to be working/helping in glaze fires for me as well.
I'm also holding in bisque fire, ~1500°F for an hour, powered kiln vent on throughout, which also seems to help.
"Seems" on account of variables, aye.
Some of the clays I've tried are a bit more sensitive to too much heatwork; some are very sensitive to too much heatwork. 

I am not a hold person as to me it simply adds heatwork. In a practical sense there are folks who fire one cone lower but add a hold to get to the next cone heatwork without the peak temperature. In that case firing to cone five with a fifteen to twenty minute hold often gets one to cone six. (Usually verified with cones)
Why do that? Some glazes do not like higher peak temperatures. Some underglazes change color significantly with peak temperature. It is a pretty functional way to fire a cone to two cones max higher without hitting the actual peak temperature. 
Firing higher or for longer has never healed pinholes for me, often made them worse. Drop some temperature and hold however has helped on s some of my pinhole situations.
whatever works for you and your desired glaze results is likely the best answer. Whatever is done, I strongly suggest  always nice to have cones in place so you genuinely know how much heatwork was done. As to suggested time, 15-20 minutes generally gets you to the next cone.

I tried to explode a cup in the microwave. The test was to see if a cup with water absorbed into the body would explode when microwaved. My cup got really hot, but did not explode.
I started with two nearly identical cups made from a white stoneware with an estimated absorption of 3.7% as previously measured with test bars. Each cup has a foot ring and was glazed inside and out with a clear glaze. The foot ring and the bottom area inside the foot ring was not glazed.
One cup was set aside and was not subjected to any water.  It weighed 433.9g.
For the other cup, I kept it upside down on my desk and kept filling the area inside of the foot ring with water for a few weeks. My thought is this would simulate water absorption from being subject to multiple rounds in a dishwasher. Periodically, I would check its weight. After a couple of weeks, the water absorption stabilized and the weight of the cup went from 426.0 grams to 441.8 grams, a gain of 15.8g or about 3.7% (which matches my test bar estimate). This means it absorbed about a tablespoon of water. It did not gain any additional weight/water with more time beyond a couple of weeks.
Then, I microwaved both cups (both empty) at the same time in a 1.4kw microwave with rotating platform for 15 minutes. I very quickly measured their temperature after each minute of microwaving. The cup with absorbed water reached a maximum temperature of 433F. The cup without absorbed water maxed at 250F. Neither exploded. The cup with absorbed water crazed, but no other damage.  The cup with no absorbed water did not craze and was not damaged. The graph shows the temperature in degrees Fahrenheit over time in minutes.
After microwaving letting the cups cool, I remeasured their weight. The cup with water applied went down to 425.4g indicating that all of the water was boiled out. The cup without applied water was 425.3. After microwaving, both cups weighed a less than their original weights.
So, I was not able to explode my cup. This does not mean that your cup won't explode. This was for one particular clay and may not be representative of other clay bodies.  If others have time, it would be interesting to repeat the test with other clay bodies.
Notes: Microwaving empty pieces is not recommended because it might damage the microwave oven.  I use an old microwave that I don’t care if it breaks. I used an infrared Infrared Thermometer Temperature Gun to be able to very quickly measure the temps. If you decide to repeat this experiment, note that I got 30F difference between the top and the bottom of the cup and averaged the reading.

Any container going into your next bisque will work. I wouldn’t trust commercial terracotta, just on the basis you don’t know what temp it’ll melt at for sure.