Callie Beller Diesel

The first slipcasting project we were given in college involved making moulds from food items that were then to be made into decorative pots. Some things we found: Some softer items like peppers, zucchini and one extremely memorable fish head wound up partially cooked. Be mindful of the exothermic reaction of plaster, and how that might affect something like icing or candy decorations on the cookie panels. Some things were pretty brittle, and the weight of the liquid plaster broke the food item when someone attempted to make a case mould. Those items would have benefitted from having the texture taken by another method, like using plaster bandage as a base layer, removing the item and reinforcing the bandages with plaster. If you have to use the cookie itself, I’d be inclined to do a press mould rather than something you’d pour slip into. Stuff can and will get stuck in undercuts in the plaster, even if you use mould soap. Consider filling in some textures at least partially, or sealing the food item with a few coats of varnish. If you try to clean out bits from the creases in your mould before it’s fully cured, it’s pretty easy to damage the mould. If you wait until the mould has cured, there’s a strong possibility of something gross happening.

Again, it super depends on what the glaze normally does, and what you mean by regular. I also don’t know that I agree with the person that says burn through happens more frequently at cone 10. An example would be a glaze that is pretty opaque like a floating blue (either cone 6 or 10) that breaks and pools over texture. Something like that might not need any removal techniques. You can get some really interesting variations by putting a single glaze over a white clay body with some kind of iron based decoration, whether it’s a wash or a textured slip, or something else. On the other side of the possibilities, an opaque glaze that has a lot of saturated colourants in it (like a tenmoku for example), might not allow for any bleed through because the glaze just overwhelms the wash. If you want to use the underglaze to highlight texture but in a different colour than the glaze, that also has lots of fun possibilities. If you get elaborate with your tests, make sure you take lots of notes. Document stuff as much as you can.

Pink underglazes and stains that withstand cone 10 temperatures can often be killed by reduction atmospheres. You might have to play around with some chrome/tin combinations if the underglazes you’ve chosen don’t work. I couldn’t tell what mechanism is making either of the UG’s you mention pink, as the SDS sheets are too vague.

A few points in no particular order: -Most of the ceramics community will call oxides mixed with water a wash. Calling it a stain can be confusing, because stain also refers to a man made ceramic pigment. There’s a few companies that make them, but Mason is the most prevalent one in North America. I’m not saying your studio is doing it wrong, I only mention that because we see a lot of posters from all over the world here, so it’s good to establish definitions to limit confusion. -Whether or not a wash will show through a glaze depends very, very heavily on how it’s applied. How thickly the stain is applied, how thickly the glaze is applied, and how opaque the glaze is or isn’t will affect the end results. The base glaze’s chemistry and other colourants can also play a significant role. The maddening answer we have to give you is that because it’s very situation dependant, there’s going to be no getting around doing the testing. Our answers have to be a bit vague because there’s too many variables. That said, there’s some generalizations we can make, and there’s some interesting possibilities to watch for in your testing. -Cobalt is a very powerful colourant, and it’s easy to over apply it. Usually folks don’t use the carbonate as a wash, because it’s more difficult to tell how thick you’ve put it on due to it’s light lilac-ish shade. Cobalt oxide (which is black) is more visible, and can be painted like Sumi ink. It doesn’t tend to run or bleed, unless the base glaze is also pretty mobile. -RIO is one of the more common washes, and it highlights details nicely without being expensive. It’ll impart a rusty brown colour of some kind. If you apply it too thickly, it may cause any glaze applied over it to crawl. If you go too thin, some glazes will eat it. -Chrome can be pretty overwhelming as well. It mostly goes brown ish if uncovered, and if there’s tin in the glaze you cover it with, there’s a good possibility of pink flashing occuring. Pieces with chrome washes may affect pieces with tin glazes that are placed in the same kiln. -Copper goes a dull metallic colour if overapplied. If underapplied it will sort of vanish. It will be more black than green, unless covered with a glaze with sodium in it. Or if there’s a little sodium frit or feldspar mixed in with the wash. -Rutile won’t look like much, until it does. It is most often beige by itself. It might be beige with other things as well, but at cone six it *might* contribute to interesting crystallization/floating blue effects IF the covering glaze’s chemistry is right and IF the firing cycle allows it to happen. This one is a big “test it and see what happens” situation.

I don’t have any teapots documented, but I do make them on occasion. In terms of tools to drill holes with, my favourites are just drill bits. If I have a lot of holes to make, I’ll even use them in the drill. The trick is to wait until the pot is set up to a firm leather hard so that when you do the holes, the clay isn’t sticking to itself at all. Cleanup is negligible at that point. Waiting until the pieces are a bit firmer can also help eliminate some of the warping, because it’s easier to not accidentally distort things. Another approach can be to work really, really fresh: attach handles and spouts while everything is freshly thrown. Leave the body of the pot attached to the bat, and add your spout and handle wet. Throw the lid, and just let everything set up together. Use a blowtorch or heat gun on the flange so that the lid doesn’t stick, and when the pot has firmed up enough to cut off the bat, you have minimal finishing. With this approach, you likely aren’t including a built in strainer though. As a tea drinker I usually use a tea egg for loose leaf, and find it superior to the built in ones.

@GEP I tend to be paranoid about quartz inversion. That said, I’ve accidentally left the peeps out before, and I put them back in to ease the cooling through that 1063 F zone, but you could probably pull them again once you’re comfortably through it. Edited to add: I personally wouldn’t play around with a glaze firing doing this. I know from experience I get crazing that wouldn’t normally occur when I crash cool. But again, with bisque you’re not worried about that clay/glaze interface.

@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.