Callie Beller Diesel

If you were to put the sand in a tray, it would run the risk of cracking like any waster or cookie I would think. Not bad for the clay piece, but might not save on a lot of the cleaning. But if the piece is of a size where it’s practical, just using a whole shelf instead of a half shelf would do the same thing. You’d have to have a wide enough container to tip the sand into, but that’s pretty doable.

I think there’s nothing wrong with increasing your prices to reflect increased business costs, which credit card fees definitely are. But from a customer service standpoint, and even a general professionalism one, I think it’s better to just roll it in. 1) I don’t want to put myself or an employee in a position that sets up angry “what the heck is this extra fee? Are you trying to scam me?!” conversations. There is a segment of the population that just wants to fight with retail workers, and I have no patience for being on the receiving end of it anymore. It’s best to prevent as many scenarios like this as possible. 2) An itemized list of all of my expenses is really none of my customer’s business. They don’t need the gory details.

I don’t have the physical space to have a pug mill, so I make sure my slurry is really smooth before laying it out. Cuts down a lot on the wedging afterwards.

Our banking laws are different here, and we’re not allowed to add a POS surcharge onto card sales. I’ve always viewed credit card fees as part of my COGS, and just incorporated it into the sticker price. I’ve seen a few people offer cash discounts, but that’s becoming more and more rare. Taxes are taxes, and the government gets bent at me in ways I don’t like if I don’t collect and remit.

I lay mine on a thrift store bedsheet on the racking. Got the idea from seeing some folks who were digging and processing their own clay. They built wooden frames with hardware mesh that they then laid fabric on. The frames were stackable, so they didn’t need to take up a lot of space.

I do mine on wire shelves, not metal shelves. The idea is lots of surface exposure for water to evaporate from. (And you’re welcome. Glad it helped!)

I have really hard water. I have to descale my kettle probably twice a month, but I’ve never known it to affect my wheelhead. To get lime scale you have to evaporate a few gallons of water, not the amount you throw with. I used to get similar discolouration when I was using a cone 10 porcelaneous stoneware, but if you clean your wheelhead it doesn’t really form. I haven’t had any since I’ve switched to red clay. If it got bad, I’d occasionally take some 220 grit black sandpaper to it, but mostly it wasn’t an issue.

You can do this, but it can irritate your skin later.

@Pyewackette if you have a few dollars to spend on it, Rose and Matt Katz have several colleges level online glaze course that goes as in depth as you could like at Ceramic Materials Workshop, There are bundles, and options that allow you to do a lecture-only version for somewhat less money. They also have a podcast called For Flux’s Sake that has some good free info too.

To make the kiln taller so you can fire more pieces, or taller ones.

I live somewhere dry, so algae isn’t ever something I’ve had to deal with. But I’ve left reclaim in storage for years, when I was in between studio spaces. I just kept it in 5 gallon buckets with the lids on tight. Bags will work well as long as they don’t have holes and aren’t moving it around a bunch. If you’re slurry mixing your reclaim, you don’t need to lay it on plaster to get it to dry. You can hang it in an old pillowcase, or you can lay out a thrift store sheet on a wire shelf and spread your reclaim slip on that. Your slurry shouldn’t be completely fluid if you’re doing it up like this. If space is a consideration, you don’t need to keep your dried pieces, trimmings and wet slop in separate buckets. You can combine them into one. While bone dry clay does slake faster than leather hard stuff, it’ll all get there given time. When you say you’ve got wet waste clay, I assume that’s the pots that got too mushy, plus your throwing slop. You need to add the fine particles from the throwing slop back into the rest of the clay, or you’ll find your reclaim is short.

I started out with more material knowledge, because my first glaze chem instructor taught the class more like cooking than like chemistry. I drove the man nuts because I wanted more scientific answers, and he didn’t have them to give me. I started off with Clay and Glazes for the Potter, and did a few longhand UMF calcs. I’ve always had a good grasp on proportion and ratio math, which is all we’re really working with. I didn’t get too in depth with the math then, because I did’t have easy access to materials analyses to do them for everything. This was also around 2000-2001. I really disliked making so many test tiles, because while there’s something to be said for the hands on method, repeating the same thing that’s been done and documented so well somewhere else seemed like a waste of time. But I didn’t really know where to access that information. Where I’m at, no one was really using glaze software in my earlier days. It existed and I knew other people used it, but no one I knew personally did. I enjoy chemistry and I wasn’t satisfied with what I knew, so about 10 years ago I sat through all of Tony’s tutorials on Insight, and figured out how to use it. I still have a subscription there, but at the time I found the learning curve on the software steep. I found Glazy much easier to figure out, but at this point I don’t know if that’s because I already knew materials and how to use one glaze calc software already. Both those programs do have manuals that teach you how to use them. That said, I like Digitafire’s database better, because it’s got more materials provenance and links to some additional information. I think if I was starting out all over again, I’d want to start with a high school understanding of chemical reactions being a matter of proportions between the individual molecules, and the idea that if a glaze falls within certain proportional ranges, it *should* behave in a certain way. Also, acknowledging that the math will narrow down your test field, but not eliminate it entirely. I’d then move to Glazy as a software, but go and read about each material in my chosen glaze on Digitalfire to understand what was going on more. I’d also add Hamer and Hamer to the reference list. If I wanted to go beyond that, I’d take Matt Katz’s course.

Shelf protectors like that are sometimes called wasters because they’re not expected to survive. If you’re making them out of a stoneware you know to be more refractory than the earthenware you’re testing, shrinkage isn’t going to be a big issue. But consult with the head tech person at your studio to see how they want you to work that. It’s their equipment, and they may have preferences. If you liked Tony’s articles on glaze and clay experiments, you’re gonna love the materials listings he’s got. Here’s the link for talc, and the why’s and wherefore’s of its use in ceramics. https://digitalfire.com/material/talc . It’s usually added to low and mid fire clay bodies to help with thermal expansion/glaze fit, but there’s other stuff too. Digitalfire is a godsend to us all, as is the Glazy calculator. You’d also like the Potter’s Dictionary by Hamer and Hamer. Although that book is a bit of a spend, it’s worth every penny.

“Should be vitrified” isn’t “I tested it under my own firing conditions to make sure”. Stuff is getting into the pinholes, and possibly under the glaze. There is an ick factor here for sure. If this is just a personal piece, you might try re-firing it to see if the pinholes needed a little more heat work to clear. It’ll also burn out those black spots.

I went from initial intro to clay in HS straight into a college program, so early on I was taught to consider whether or not any given form needed trimming, and if so, why. My instructors also tended to frown on too much trimming as they said it was a sign of poor throwing skills. There’s a lot of technical reasons why that last might not be true, and lots of pottery making traditions where that attitude would be considered patently absurd. There’s also some forms that are easier to make or are more structurally sound if you throw them thick and trim afterwards. Think very wide serving pieces with a shallow interior curve. But if you’ve got a nice box of pre-prepared clay formulated for throwing, you don’t need to trim a foot ring onto every mug you make unless it’s a design element. Recentering a piece takes time, and if the design is served well by simply rounding the edges and smoothing the bottom with a silicone rib, why take on the extra work? It’s less work in the long run to get your walls and bottoms even in the throwing. I was taught to view foot rings either as a functional necessity (to allow drainage on a berry bowl for instance), or as a pedestal to elevate or give visual lightness to a piece. A consciously chosen design element. I do put foot rings on most serving pieces, and a couple of teacup-inspired mug designs, and any bowl with a curved interior. I find other ways of finishing the bottoms of other mug designs, storage jars, or anything with a more angular transition from horizontal to vertical. Any flat bottomed pot still gets some form of finishing, it just might not be with a Do-all.

It’s a problem with trying to teach strangers anything on the internet, for sure. We need to know where people are starting from to give them useful-to-them instructions, and not everyone starts from the same place. Just like any other thread on this forum, I hope anyone who needs more clarification will tag the poster they’d like more info from.

Okay. To add a third option that has nothing to do with Mac or Apple, and is available on Android (version 9 and higher) and IPhone, I’d like to introduce the Snapseed app. Most people take their pictures on their phones these days, and having an editing app right where you work is very handy. It’s a google property, so it’s ad free and no cost. I personally find very intuitive to use, and it has a very low learning curve. Unlike programs meant for desktops, it doesn’t have a lot of functions you don’t use frequently, and as a result is less confusing. If you’re writing your post on a desktop, you can do the typing on your keyboard, and after you save, log into the forum from your phone’s internet browser and edit your post to add in the photo. *most newer phones will offer you the option of choosing your file size when you go to upload the image. Small or medium works just fine.* But. If your phone doesn’t do that, you can resize your pic like this: Download snapseed from wherever you get your apps, and allow it to access your photos when prompted. 1. Before you open your photo, tap the three dots at the top right corner of the screen. 2. Settings>Image Sizing, and select 800 px (the default is no resize). That’s the # of pixels on the largest side of your image. Making this number small will only affect image quality if you try to print this picture off. The resolution on your computer screen shouldn’t chang, but smaller images load faster for those with spotty internet. 3. Return to the menu and open your photo. 4. The option to export is at the bottom. It offers a few ways to save. I usually “save a copy,” so I can edit the original multiple ways, but save works fine if you don’t need the original for anything else. 5. Your smaller image will be saved in your photos file. If you want to crop or do other edits, I can do other tutorials in the business section, but I want to keep this simple. (shameless dog content credit goes to Bruiser, the Boston pug X studio “helper”)

My home has forced air heating, so my studio has a heating vent in the ceiling. Because my studio is pretty close to the furnace that blows air through the whole house, I have to keep things pretty clean. As much as everyone seems to hate mopping, it’s gotta happen on the regular.

I assume you mean G200 feldspar. I’m basing this answer off of that assumption, but if I’m wrong, let me know. The analyses of Custer and G200 are similar enough that it’ll be pretty close just doing a 1:1 substitution. The sodium and potassium are close enough that it shouldn’t matter, but there’s differences in silica and calcium that may have a minor effect. An exact adjustment (or as close as I think it’s possible to get would be): 51 Custer 17 silica 13 gerstley borate 9 whiting (calcium carb) 10 dolomite 4 zinc oxide I rounded the batch numbers for easy measuring. The silica:alumina ratio is as close to identical as I can get it, the flux ratio is identical, and the Stull chart position are identical. If you were to add some epk to this recipe, it probably wouldn’t craze as badly.

I have a Brent C, circa 2004. So far, I’ve wiped it down a lot.

Nearest one to me is about 20 minutes, but that assumes you aren’t going through the industrial area when they’re backing and loading cars in the train yard. This causes many a long traffic line because of the one lousy intersection. But if I go to the supplier, it’s usually a good 4 hour errand, because the place I get shipping supplies and the place I get my bags and tissue are also on the way. Plus you have to allow for the gossip time while you’re there, the Tim Horton’s run, etc etc.

That’s a lot of soda ash, or things that dissolve into soda ash. Adding any composite cleaners to your reclaim is probably not going to go smoothly. Thank you for sharing the experience @carissman, and I’m sorry that happened!

I have just the link you’re looking for! https://help.glazy.org/guide/calculator/#automatically-importing-recipes If you scroll down the menu on the left to the Calculator, the drop down under that has an example on how to substitute local materials into a glaze recipe and adjust the formulation so it matches. It’s fantastic that potters from all over the world can share recipes, but we don’t have access to the exact same materials everywhere.

I am of the find a base and adjust it so it does what I want school of thought. Since I use Plainsman clays, if I get my recipes from Digitalfire, more than half my work is already done. That said, I’ve been poking around Glazy a bit, especially because I’ve been looking at Joe Thompson’s work. He’s left some very generous information in his glaze notes. (That’s @OldForgeCreations)

They have a number of different calcium borate frits on the market. I know Ferro has had production issues in the last year and they’re still sorting some things out, but there should be a number of alternatives in the UK. Worst case scenario, you can use Ulexite or Colemanite, but I believe common practice is to calcine it first, or it’ll cause glaze spitting. If you have any familiarity with glaze calculation software, you can use glazy.com to substitute in another frit and maintain the chemistry. If you don’t have any familiarity, post the recipe here and let us know which alternative frits your supplier has available, and one of us here can do the reformulation for you.