Callie Beller Diesel

The trick with anything you’re using to increase flow in a glaze is to add only a bit at a time, and mix extremely well before adding more. I would venture that if your glaze has hardpanned with darvan, you’ve added a bit too much.

Um. I feel this frustration deep in my soul. The truly maddening thing is that because of all the possible variables, if you’re learning about it on the free or cheap, it’s a long process. Glaze chemistry is not only the interactions between the individual atoms like it’s written on paper, its the working properties of the minerals they all come from, particle size and how it affects melt, and the physics that happen in the kiln accordingly. There’s a ridiculous number of variables involved, so a scientific method of breaking down each and every one of them is a vast undertaking. Most glaze chemistry for clay artists/potters can be encapsulated in the words of Inigo Montoya. “Let me explain. No, wait. There is to much. Let me sum up.” A bunch of stuff gets oversimplified, because not everyone needs the deep understanding of the science to make what they want to. Sometimes that oversimplification leaves room for expanded understanding later, sometimes not. For the free/cheap approach, reading Digitalfire and following the outbound links at the bottom of the page for expanded info is about the best we got. After that, paying $$$ for courses and books is definitely faster. Definitely don’t look for older chemistry books on websites that have free college textbooks*. It would be wrong, because it’s (sometimes) borderline piracy. College profs don’t recommend this. Nope. *cough* *cough* Library Genesis* cough* cough*

One random thought on the clay sticking to itself: maybe experiment with your attaching method. There’s a number of different ways to attach handles because sometimes it’s not the user, it’s the clay body. I’ve noticed that some clays need to be scored with a lot of slip used, and some only need to be scratched with a wet tool. The technique that worked best on the first didn’t work on the second, and vice versa.

I blame Etsy for the white background thing. White is fine for product description photos, but that style doesn’t get a lot of traction on social media anymore. I wouldn’t recommend using them as your first choice in that space. Insta is trying to be Tiktok so they’re switching emphasis to short form video, but that’s a whole other discussion. For jurying and documentation, you want no shadows, and you want the pot to appear to be hovering in space. If you do that on social media, It’s harder for people to imagine that pot in their space, because it’s not presented with context. So they look at a pot and think “oh that’s nice!” And keep scrolling. If you even take that same white background and create some shadows with a bit more sidelight, people can start imagining the piece on a shelf or in a space. If you add a single prop like a cutting board, they start to imagine it in their space.

Because I like throwing better than hand building, I bought the wheel first. I paid about $1600 for a brand new Brent C about 20 years ago, after I finished college and had to figure a way to work on my own. My city has good art centres, both public and private, so I was able to rent kiln space fairly easily.. I transported work for years before finally getting to a point where it was impractical for all parties involved. At that point, I needed to find a kiln and fast. In 2016, I got a $500 second hand Cress FT-31 that was built in 1982, and probably fired all of twice in its life to that point. It was more expensive to build the cement patio pad it sits on, but with the exception of the one misfire that was my own fault, it’s been steadily turning out work ever since. It would not have been a kiln I’d have chosen had I been buying new, but I find I quite like it. I don’t have space for an extruder or slab roller in my studio, and even when I had access to them, I didn’t use them much, so I don’t feel the lack.

Hi and welcome to the forum! I wish I had better news, especially for your first post. A cracking or crazing glaze is indeed a sign of it not fitting properly. If you were to do an ice bath/boiling water shock test, you’d probably find that even the areas that aren’t crazed will do so. The cracks may appear over time even if you don’t. Check with your instructor and ask if this is common, or if they’ve done those shock tests to bring out any possible delayed crazing tendencies. If it’s typical, you m’ll have to use a different clear. Doing some test samples to find one that works before committing to more precious work will save you some heartache. The good news is, now that you have practice painting the first set, the second time around will be better. If the instructor says it isn’t typical for these materials, occasionally with earthenware you do see a glaze firing that didn’t get quite hot enough to properly mature the clay body. That can can cause a clay/glaze combo that normally works to craze. Refiring might fix it in that one instance, but it’s the exception to the rule.

Yep, the Thunder Grey is the go-to for jury backdrops. Plain white backgrounds are pretty unforgiving to shoot on. It looks to me like you have your light source slightly above your subject and to the right. Did you use a bounce card to get more light onto the side of the pots opposite your light source, or is your source just angled really nicely? If not, a piece of white foamcore angled to reflect some light back in to that side would be the only other nice to have I can think of.

The definition of proper really depends on how you intend to use them. Photos for juries have a very different set of best practice recommendations than something you’d use in a marketing email, which are different from your website or social media feed. The best practices for those situations are almost polar opposites. If you could tell us what you need them for, it’ll help narrow the field of advice a LOT. I can tell you a couple general things before you answer that though. The one thing that will apply across all photo needs though, is to adjust your white balance in post production. Your images look a bit on the green side on my screen, and its unclear if the shallow bowl in the second image is a brownish black, or if it has a bit of copper in the glaze mix. The thing that helps most people’s photography most is figuring out white balance. When you say this is “only” a 500 KB image, that’s actually the top recommended size for a website image. Optimal suggestions for websites are 200KB, and even smaller for things like email marketing. Slow download times due to overlarge images will cause website bounces and can affect your SEO rank in google. People might not open emails that require a lot of data to download, and social media platforms shrink the heck out of file sizes automatically. Computer screens only have so many pixels they can light up, so past a certain point the extra data is a hinderance. Unless your photos are going into a print publication, shooting RAW is overkill. For a lot of current practices, a few cheap props, tissue paper for diffusing window light, a good cell phone camera and Snapseed or Lightroom are sufficient equipment. And maybe an appropriate tripod/gorilla pod.

@Hulk you can still get leg warmers. If you knit, or have a friend who does, there’s lots of patterns on Ravelry. There’s lots of men’s fingerless gloves and gauntlets on there too. My midnight kiln checks involve an avocado print Oodie, a battery powered camping lantern and welding glass. My neighbours have questions.

I love the word no in business. It saves so much sanity.

Something that I did years ago to figure out pouring mechanics was to make a bunch of creamers with spouts, rather than entire teapots. You can do a lot more of them in a shorter time span, fit more of them in the kiln to test, and use less materials to make them. Once you’ve got the idea on a smaller scale, you can then work on making them larger. 10/10 recommend.

It was indeed a big blow, not going to lie! I was in a bit of shock and trying to salvage some sort of good when I took that video. It’s important to note that that was a very extreme example of bloating, not something you see a lot of. It’s also a good reminder that even us experienced folks can have giant mishaps sometimes! There was nothing salvageable in that load. Bloating in a clay body is really only different from a glaze in the initial stages of melting in that they’re located in different places on the pot, but that difference is a significant one. You can rescue an underfired glaze by refiring, as long as the clay body underneath isn’t going to cause issues. And many times they don’t! But adding more heatwork to those pieces would have turned those pots into slag. The pots in those videos are doing essentially what your underfired glaze is doing: partly melting, being stopped part way through, and trapping gas bubbles.

I had a colossal misfire a few years ago, and severely bloated an entire load of pots. I suspect I hit cone 10 because the cones were liquefied. I did post what that looks like on my IG stories so that others know what the cross section looks like. I do use my IG for commerce so the photo isn’t a link, but there is one in my signature below if you want to check it out. Click or tap on the Meltdown playlist at the top.

@Fromphylit is a most excellent place to start. There’s always going to be a bit of fine tuning of your firing cycle when you’re sorting out how to use new glazes in your reporitoire, but the info on Digitalfire is good. It’s one of the best free reference s the pottery world has.

+1 for using Duolingo as an assist. It’s a great app!

If you’re using a new-to-you material like underglaze that isn’t premixed with a medium, it’s a good idea to run a few tests to see how it works with your clay and firing cycles. Decorating products like that can be affected by application and the colour of the clay underneath, so what works for one person might not for another.

A 40% solution would be 40g of dry material to 100g (or ml) of water.

Ceramic folks talk about deflocculation differently than, say, a sanitation engineer would, and we are a bit inaccurate in our usage of the term. A fully deflocculated slip in the scientific sense is one that settles out quite harshly, because all sizes of particles are free to move through a solution, so wind up at the bottom of the container faster. What we are after in a casting slip or a glaze is controlled flocculation, but it’s longer to explain that to beginners or people who think they hate science. Sodium silicate is an unsubtle tool for adjusting a glaze or decorating slip. If your slurry went straight to pudding rather than flowing, you might have added too much without mixing thoroughly enough first to see the fluid state, or your clay could simply be one that’s already prone to gelling. Darvan may serve you better, because it’s got a wider tolerance for you accidentally adding a bit too much. Remember to only add it a drop at a time to your test cup, and mix for several minutes with some form of blender before adding more. Since you’re testing a found clay, you’re going to want to record how much you had to use to get repeatable results. If you’re using sodium silicate on a glaze with 50% gerstley borate, it will indeed send it straight to the pudding state. Darvan is your friend. If you want more reading, here’s the digitalfire article on deflocculation in casting slip. If you scroll waaay to the bottom, there’s loads of handy links to a nice deep research rabbit hole if that’s your thing. The same website also has info on testing wild clay.

Hi and welcome to the forum! What’s the brand name on labels? We might have to do some googling to find specs to answer this properly. Overglaze powders aren’t sold as such in North America, although I have come across the occasional recipe for an overglaze. We also usually only get either Mason stains, or underglazes that are premixed. We don’t have ones that we have to add medium to. If you could let us know which brand of medium you’re using, that’d be appreciated too.

What I absolutely, absolutely love about Joe from Old Forge Creations is that he is so incredibly generous with his background information and processes. He shares all of this stuff on his page on glazy, so that you can replicate the results with a bit of your own testing. Thank you Joe! Here is the link to his recipe for FirstFive Flux on glazy, and the first note at the top says it’s not meant as a stand alone and it runs. If you scroll down to the Stull chart and UMF information, you can see that the silica:alumina ratio is very high, and that it’s in the grey zone, meaning it will likely craze. It’s got lots of boron in it, which echoes all of the things that have been said in this thread.

+1 for Alabaster being underfired at cone 5, confirming your firing temperatures with cones, and doing a drop and soak cycle to fix it.

I would speak to businesses in your area about the process. From my understanding about the US, it can vary by region, so it’s best to get info from someone close to home. As far as taxes go, find a recommendation for an accountant who knows how to handle creative businesses, and have them set you up with a system. Make sure this accountant will be available to answer questions in a reasonable time frame when they com up, and make sure the system works with your brain and work habits. I prefer to do my own bookkeeping so I can keep an eye on my income and expenses, but farm out my filing.

@PyewacketteSue’s $127 class is intended for people who don’t remember/never understood molar weight from high school chemistry. Which is a valid thing! Not everyone needs it in their daily. Her intro course is meant for someone who has never before mixed a glaze in their life, and really only covers the actual mixing of a glaze, how to read the recipe, and why we sieve things. From things you’ve said on the forum over the last bit, that one is NOT for you. She made that course because on facebook, there’s a lot of folks who start off using commercial glazes, or working in a studio where someone else does that, and they now want to start expanding their knowledge. From watching their assorted lives/listening to podcasts, I personally prefer Sue’s teaching style to Matt’s. They both love the material, but Sue is more patient and instructive, while Matt is more bombastic*. Sue’s teaching people how to formulate glazes for studio use, and Matt and Rose are doing a lot of work to incorporate colourants into UMF calculation softwares in addition to teaching people about glaze formulation. Sue’s class has lifetime access to her course, while the Katz’s give you 4 months to get through the course, and then you have to pay $20/month to their Patreon to retain access. I don’t know if you can turn the access on and off. You would come out of either class knowing how to make a durable glaze suitable for food use, how to use glaze calculation software, and how the materials all work together to do what they do. By extension, you could then expand your own knowledge in a self directed way. And if you can make a glaze, you can break it to do more exciting things.

I think Joe Thompson at Old Forge Creations is working on some recipes that mimic what the commercial “flux” products are doing.

Passingly familiar with both classes. Both teachers share the same philosophy, and I believe Sue has worked with the Katz’s as well. They did a presentation together at NCECA a few years ago. It depends on what level of glaze understanding you need to have in your work. If you’re starting up a production pottery and planning to make a living at it, the Ceramic Materials Workshop is the place to go. It’s $$$, but it’s excellent information. It is literally the advanced class. Sue’s course that you’ve linked to is still a few hundred dollars, but it’s more affordable. It’s also not as involved, although it will give even intermediate glaze mixers a solid foundation in how to incorporate the chemistry and math in their own work. She also has a really nice intro course if you’ve never mixed a glaze in your life. In terms of approachability, Sue is very available for technical help, and she does have a moderated facebook page where folks can go to ask questions and get reliable help. You’d get a similar level of assistance here, but from some different faces.