Callie Beller Diesel

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.

In the documentation for that calculator, it does state that the “constant” value of 2.6 for Sdry can be inaccurate if your glaze contains a lot of a dense material like tin. But outside of that, on a practical level, it does work. I have used that particular one to fix glaze batches before, when I found out the hard way I’d inadvertently left out a material. It might not work well for fixing something with minuscule amounts of a glaze ingredient that has a very strong effect on the glaze, but for most things, it should. I’m thinking of chrome tin pinks, or something with fractional amounts of cobalt or silicon carbide.

Going fast or slow will give you different results. Whether or not those results are desirable depends on what your end goal is. This is complicated by the fact that there’s more than one path to a given end. Understanding the changes your clay and glazes go through at different stages in the firing cycle can help you decide what speed is ideal for your situation. When considering speed, you also need to look at the thermal mass you’re trying to heat/cool. Each clay body/glaze combo is different, so there’s not any universal rule that everyone should use at all times with no exceptions. As far as clay bodies being sophisticated, there’s a limit to what you can do with materials that are dug out of the ground. We always have to deal with some LOI (Loss On Ignition) values of materials, and those vary according to your clay’s composition. Whatever clay you’re using, quartz inversion needs to be eased through to some degree or other, unless you like cracked work. I know from experience that the clay body I use (a red stoneware that matures around cone 6-7), that it will more than tolerate a fast bisque cycle, and nothing comes out cracked or broken. But my glazes will pinhole or have a bunch of micro bubbles in them. If I go slow and allow more time for the organics (chemically bonded carbon, sulphur, etc) to burn off, the glazes look way better without having to resort to a multiple step glaze cycle. In contrast, a friend of mine uses a white earthenware, but fires it multiple times. Because each firing increases the amount of mullite crystals in her clay body, she has to be increasingly conscious of quartz inversion. She can fast bisque with no problems, but she has to ease her final decal and china paint firings very slowly through that 500*C (ish) zone.

@Juxtaposie Jenand @Ben xyz I should qualify that you may have to play around a touch with individual stain/frit proportions, and the texture won’t be identical. As always, make some tests before committing to anything you need to put out into the world. The equal parts mix will work for many stains, but some may need that proportion adjusted, as some are more refractory than others. Also make sure your frit is compatible with your chosen stains. You can check the requirements on the Mason website reference guide and find the oxides that frits have on the digitalfire materials list. Some stains will have their colour killed by magnesium or zinc, some need higher calcium for best results, etc etc. Making sure that those materials are present in your frit will help set you up for success.

If you want to make your own ceramic printer’s ink similar to something you’d use with a brayer for litho printing, mix equal parts stain, frit and epk or china clay. Slake it in glycerine overnight, and mix all the lumps out. It sounds like Roberta’s method with the sponge might work better for you though.

The red clay I use likes a slow, well ventilated bisque. I take it to cone 04, but I think the slow part is more important. The black clays I’ve tried all seem to be even more picky than my red. In my experience, a way to hedge your bets is to also do a slow first part of your glaze fire, similar to the description in Min’s post.

The thing that I’ve found helps the most with a wide, flat bottomed form is to surround the upright parts with assorted small items or even spare kiln posts to create a heat sink. It slows the cooling rate of the walls of the pot enough that you don’t get that level of cracking. As others have noted, your images didn’t quite work (dm me if you need some assistance resizing images). If the forms don’t have a foot ring, adding one could be another solution to the problem.

Issac Button was a machine. Just casually wearing a shirt and tie under his coveralls, pouring glaze in 25 lb bowls smoking a pipe the whole time.

@Pir Physical mixing doesn’t determine whether a glaze is flocculated or not. Pinnell gives a good non technical description that gives a useful mental image of what’s going on. I think the point it’s failing you is how he’s describing the particles as either repelling or being attracted to each other like magnets in space. It’s not the particles that are repelling each other, it’s the fluid they’re suspended in that’s doing the work. Remember this whole thread started with a glaze that was too gelled or flocculated. That was affecting application, which in turn was probably affecting how the glaze turned out. Solubles leach out of certain materials (or can be added on purpose) to make the glaze particles hang out together more in the bucket, and that makes the glaze go on in that “fluffier” house of cards way. Leach 4321 has the opposite properties in the bucket as the glaze that started this thread. It has nothing particularly soluble in it, unless you’re using Neph Sye instead of feldspar. Nothing’s slowly dissolving out of the dry materials that would change how they stay floating over time. Because this glaze has enough clay in it, it can stay suspended well enough for dipping and you can get a reasonable enough application if it’s just well mixed. But because it dries slowly though, it shows every drip mark and application imperfection after it’s fired, unless you feel like scraping it all smooth like Florian Gadsby does. (No thanks.) So unless you add something to the bucket like epsom salt solution or even a little vinegar, it’ll still hard pan if you leave the bucket undisturbed for a while.

Having worked with Leach 4321 a bunch, it will settle out again if all you do is stir it. If you add a few drops of a saturated epsom salt solution and mix well, it stays suspended better. It also won’t form that charming rock-like layer if you have to leave the bucket sitting for a few weeks. Be very careful to only add small amounts and mix thoroughly before adding any more. You can gel the batch if you use too much.