Callie Beller Diesel

@oldlady, I know the kind you mean. The big bulky yellowish ones. I’m saying use leather garden gloves instead, and just wait for the kiln to cool a bit more so that those gloves are the right tool for the job.

I think once you’re past quartz inversion, there’s a little more leeway for bisque than for glaze. The clay body isn’t as at risk by itself as the glaze/clay combo is. My usual rule of thumb is the same number of hours going down as going up. So if the firing takes 10 hours, it gets 10 hours undisturbed before I pull 2 peeps to speed up the cooling. Depending on the weather (my kiln is outdoors), I open the lid wide about 2-4 hours after that. I usually use a pair of leather garden gloves to unload with, as pieces are uncomfortable to touch, but they’re in no danger of succumbing to thermal shock.

+ for waiting for the kiln to cool a bit more, to the point where a pair of leather garden gloves will do. Those welding gloves are too bulky.

Document and get a lawyer. Get samples if you can. Being asked to spray a lead glaze with no PPE is in no way shape or form safe. This employer has NO excuse.

I think the key word there is appears. And on what your personal definition of success is. There’s lots of ways to succeed, but you have to decide for yourself what you think is a win. You’re not succeeding at life if you’re applying someone else’s metrics to yourself. Especially if your temperament doesn’t suit that image of success. The life of a pottery celebrity may or may not appeal to everyone. For those who love it, they get gratification out of being well known as a knowledgeable person in the field. I imagine there’s a lot of satisfaction to be found in supporting other artists in their journeys. Some people have no interest in teaching, and know that classes and workshops aren’t their thing. Some folks thrive on social media. They can curate what people see, so they seem confident and upbeat and like things are going well. If you hate doing in person markets because you’re overwhelmed by crowds, having that buffer between you and the general public can be just the ticket. But social media can be very bad for your mental health, so some who are in vulnerable places may find regular content creation to be unrealistic for them.

Not all the potters I know who are making a living are active on social media, but the social media folks are definitely the visible ones. Those not doing social media do have some method of marketing themselves and building an audience. Digital platforms have low barriers to entry, but they do involve a time commitment to get right. When I was first beginning to sell at markets, someone told me I should consider booth fees at smaller shows to be a marketing expense. Her logic was that even if you had a no-sale day, as long as you collected some email addresses, it wasn’t a loss. I think there’s caveats to that, but there’s a little truth to it. Having multiple income streams can definitely even out your cash flow, and can really help you weather changes in market circumstances. The obvious one recently was the huge jump everyone had to do towards online sales at the start of the pandemic. Those that already had some digital assets like websites, email lists and even small social media presences were in a bit better position to pivot fast than anyone who had to start by building a website.

@Ben xyz the good news is, that kind of image is ideal for printing. Line work is easier to transfer than something with shading or gradations. If using that style of image in your work is a regular thing, even if you only want the one particular image for a single project, the startup equipment isn’t too involved. You need a soft-yet-firm rib to push ink, a silkscreen like from ezprint or speedball, something to print on (newsprint, rice paper, gelli plate), and some underglaze. The artist that Babs mentioned, Shauna Pincus, does offer a VERY affordable online workshop on getting set up to do some silk screen printing with a gelli plate. The a gelli plate is a gelatin based thinger (technical term, there) that has the advantage of being able to conform to curved or irregular surfaces. It seems to give a really nice, sharp transfer. You can buy gelli plates, or make your own out of gelatine and I think glycerine, but I don’t have the recipe handy. Here’s the link to her course if you’re interested. If you’ve done any silk screening or have used an ez print screen before, Shauna does have a few reels on her IG feed at the moment that give a bit more insight into how she does it. In reading some of the comments on them, I notice that she’s planning some kind of workshop for the new year, but hasn’t sorted out all the details. I did find a mention that she does use underglaze as her ink, but leaves it out to dry a bit so it thickens into the right consistency.

I went to a Composite high school, so yeah, there were all the home ec/welding/art/shop/automotive/beauty culture courses available. The school was set up as a precursor for trades or college or both. (Beauty culture is what they called it, but if you went through all the courses, you would up as a fully fledged hairdresser or esthetician). That was in the 90’s. Programs like this are still alive. My 14yo takes foods and fabrication as electives in jr high, and loves them. It’s hard for me to look at this question personally without viewing it through the lens of adhd, which, is highly heritable. I come from a long line of folks who were very smart, and didn’t hold still with any particular grace. Before computers, you either did things with your hands, or you went crazy. My Oma used to tell us that she had to give my dad stuff he could take apart and put back together, or he’d do it to something expensive like the TV. My mom’s side is all farmers and other flavours of highly capable people. So knitting, sewing, pouring candles, fixing things, projects involving creative reuse were going on constantly around me. I didn’t realize not everyone did that until I moved out and had roommates.

Kinda. There is a company that sells equipment to make OVERglaze or water slide decals. The printers they use technically can be obtained at Office Depot, but they’re the high end ones. The company sells the printers and makes the modified ink cartridges. But they’re $$$$.

If you want someone else to make transfers for you, there’s usually a setup fee, so only getting one sheet isn’t usually cost effective. The price gets more reasonable if you want multiple sheets. Forage Studios does have her printer back up and running, and Mariko does small batches of water slide decals for artists for a very reasonable price. But that’s overglaze, not underglaze. So much of it depends on the kind of image you want to transfer. Is it a logo, or a photograph with fine detail? Is it one colour or more than one?

I think when it comes to these really unbalanced glazes, it’s important to remember that not everyone working in clay is a functional potter. The balance of the community that chimes in here (including all the mods!) do tend to be making pots, so we tend to assume that as a default. But if you’re a sculptor, the flux balance is largely irrelevant, as long as you’re getting the surface you want. No one’s checking large scale sculptures for dishwasher safety or cutlery marking. (I mean, they could be. But that’d be weird.) Do I hope that folks work risk-aware and do things like wear PPE/be aware of ventilation requirements/all the things that will preserve life and limb? Absolutely. Do folks not do that sometimes? Also yes. Should we do our best to educate? Yup. We gonna get ignored sometimes? Yeah.

I only have one full round, and it’s in the bottom of my kiln. I don’t usually pull it out unless there’s been a glaze mishap, which I don’t get a lot of. If I’m testing, I don’t put them on the bottom layer. I’ve got joint hyper mobility in my shoulders, and I had SI joint issues (the attachment between hip and spine) in previous years. I’ve had to make a point of keeping my core strength up, and strengthening some mid back muscles to compensate for that. Engaging your core while placing shelves goes a long way for me, as did working with a good physio to make sure that I was addressing my own body’s requirements properly.

Well, I make my living from it, so, yeah. It’s possible! Easy? That’s a different question entirely. The methods to entry do vary depending on how and when you start. Tools and approaches that were available 20 years ago maybe aren’t now, but there are tools available now that weren’t here 20 years ago. The thing that helped me the most was making a business plan. It doesn’t have to be the same kind of plan that you’d take to a bank in order to obtain a loan, but you should lay out for yourself some goals and projections based on research. Figure out where you want your income streams to to come from. Some folks love teaching, some don’t. Some folks love doing in person shows a lot, and some prefer online sales and marketing. And keep track of whether or not a given venture is profitable. Just because you took home $1000 from a show (random number) doesn’t mean you made bank. How much did it cost you to get there? And are you getting paid for your time? All of your time? I don’t think it’s a great idea to just quit your day job and jump in at this point. Spend some time building your skills and building an audience. Start an email list! Even a small one of 100 people can net you a few sales every time, and that adds up. I know so many artists who were only doing in-person shows that had their businesses saved over the covid shutdowns because they had an email list. Build up your studio and supplies with sales from your pots over time. I didn’t start off my business by owning all my equipment from the outset. I did buy a wheel and some shelves, and just fired at a community centre for years. It took a long time, and was interrupted by life a LOT, but I outfitted my studio slowly and with cash. Keep your overhead low. Take the time to visit shows the year before you apply to them, to see whether or not they might be ones that fit your work. Make “show friends” with the other artists you work with, so that you can talk shop with them and trade intel. Those show friends will also be a source of support and encouragement, and community like that is necessary.

From that post: “This hasn't been tested for food safety and has an unusual composition, so assume it's not food safe unless you can prove otherwise.” Joe’s done his due diligence. If people just try it out without reading to the bottom of one paragraph, I don’t think that’s on him.

Keep us posted! I’d love to see how it turns out.

About 6 years ago I made the switch from cone 10 reduction to cone 6 oxidation, so I can share a few observations about that. I also don’t think cone 6 has any more or less problems than cone 10, but they are a different set of considerations. I find I have to be much more aware of “bucket behaviour” for cone 6 glazes than I did with cone 10, for instance. But with cone 6, the turnaround time is faster, which is pretty satisfying. I don’t know if the same holds true in Australia, but I found that my clay got exponentially less expensive, but my glaze materials got more costly. But I buy more clay than glaze stuff, so. It took a good year of testing to refine things to get to where I felt like I understood what was going on. Learning about the different changes that happen to ceramic materials at different points in the firing helped enormously, so I think you’re on the right track with focusing on learning how to fire your kiln properly. Understanding how heatwork affects glazes is pretty helpful. Switching to cone 6 made me a better chemist and gave me a lot more understanding of my materials. I found that focusing on firing the clay body to proper maturity solved most of the glaze problems that I encountered at cone 6. Often the focus at cone 10 is only on the glaze. If you’re making functional work, you should do a bit more due diligence around testing for porosity at cone 6. Sometimes what the manufacturer recommends on the box is not what you get out of your own kiln.

I’ve noticed that the quality of plastic that the store with that big orange logo have been selling lately for paint mixing seems to be lower. They’re not as thick as some of my old food service buckets, or even the buckets that drywall mud comes in. Could be covid related supply line issues, could be the fact that they took BPA and BPB out of some things a few years ago. I’m not saying the removal was a bad thing, because the stuff is bad for folks. But it did make plastics more, well, plastic. Could just be that corporations are being cheap.

Drop and hold does work for bisque too, if you feel like it hits temperature too fast.

It’s usually only an issue with some of the colours that are harder to get via oxides. Greens, blues and blacks you can probably use just about anything with. But if you wanted to do some stamping with one of the pink or violet stains, its something to keep in the back of your head.

Magnesium also will mess with stains that are killed by zinc. It only gets an offhand mention on the Mason reference guide, but there’s a few spots on Digitalfire that Tony Hansen talks about it in passing as well.

The top google search for sds mason stain 6600 leads to the one on the Mason website. SDS or MSDS sheets by law have to be available for free upon request, so most suppliers just put them on their websites.

Almost certainly. It could be worth going back and playing with it. But I’m biased. I do a lot of white glaze on dark clay, because I like the contrast. If you want to narrow it down properly, change only one variable in the firing cycle at a time. Try the slower bisque, and see if that makes some or any improvement. If that helps but doesn’t fix all of it, you could then look at glaze firing holds.

I disagree slightly with Neil. If you have not done thorough shock tests on your glaze to bring out any possible delayed crazing, these conditions can do that for you. I have a friend who was transporting work for a Christmas show and left it in their vehicle overnight. They opened their stock boxes to find that all their wares had crazed when they came back up to room temperature. As long as you’ve tested for crazing and your clay and glaze combos are compatible, you should be fine though.

According to the MSDS sheet, mason stain 6600 has a specific gravity of 5.2. That’s higher than the values listed in the wiki for things like alumina and silica, but it’s a bit lower than, say, tin or cobalt. That higher density of the stain *MIGHT* effect that 2.6 number if it was present in the recipe in larger quantities. But given that you’re only adding 3% or so to the glaze, I don’t think it’ll change the combined density of the dry ingredients very much. You’d have to math it out to verify though. Pieter mentioned lead and tin because it’s not uncommon to use 10% tin (sg 6.85-6.95) in a recipe to opacity it, or use lead in double digit percentages because it’s a flux. He did not mention cobalt oxide though, and it has an SG of 6.07-6.66 according to his numbers. Cobalt oxide is typically only needed in tiny, single percent quantities, so it’s effect on that combined density value would be less.

The reason you don’t find definitive answers about whether or not a specific material is or is not food safe is that it depends on what else it’s mixed with, and in what proportion. The specific firing conditions can also play a part. Each combination of materials is a little different, and that affects the properties of the end of the result. The absence or presence of any one material in a recipe does by itself not indicate whether or not a glaze is a good one to use on dishes for food service. To give more specific answers, we have to get into chemistry numbers and parameters. We can do that here, and will happily if you want, but I like to check first before infodumping. Food safety is also a bit of a misnomer. Most people come into it thinking that it means things aren’t going to leach out of your glaze and poison you off. That happens a lot less frequently than you might think. The greater concern when making food ware is durability. You don’t want your glaze wearing off in the dishwasher, you don’t want it crazing or scratching easily, you don’t want it staining or to be hard to clean, and you definitely don’t want it to change colour or texture over time. If the durability requirements are met, the likelihood of leaching falls drastically.