Callie Beller Diesel

Not as a side business, no. You’d have to be able to vet someone’s capabilities somehow. A bunch of that leads to me doing teaching, even if it’s only about kiln firing, and I don’t have the time or physical space for that. If someone I already know needs a firing, (emergency bisque or whatever) and I don’t have something scheduled myself for that timeframe, I have no problem helping out. Honestly, electricity costs in my area are pretty reasonable, and there’s 2 privately run clay studios that do beginner classes, 2 city run facilities that teach beginner and intermediate courses, and a handful of paint your own places that you can fire the odd piece at. There *could* have been some room for me to do some kiln for hire stuff during the pandemic, but I did NOT have the emotional wherewithal to be able to put a system together for that at the time.

Glass workers tend to have a much better grasp on this idea, as any cracking for them is a major deal breaking flaw. Crazing in pottery is in some instances an encouraged aesthetic. There’s a lot of instances where things that are considered flaws in glass are desirable in glaze. Glass materials suppliers will be able to direct you very easily in regards to combining blown glass frit with slumping glass, or even commercially available float glass. From the manufacturer’s specs that I was reading, of all the technical obstacles in this project I don’t think fusing a frit made from that particular brand of bar stock to float glass will be one of them. Getting it to the right grain/mesh size will probably be the most time consuming/labour involved bit, if that’s the method you want to try.

“We don’t know. Test it and find out.” Everyone’s *favourite* answer! I mean, it seems like it’s plausible. Try it! I didn’t mention to my glassblowing friend where I thought you were in Canada, I just asked if it was available in the country. So you might be looking at mail order anyways.

I feel like any diagram or 2D representation of my career path should involve crayons, lol! To say it was indirect for a good long time is an understatement.I did start off being pretty focused, and got a whole BFA in ceramics, but when I graduated, I had what I know now to be the crash that every gifted kid with case of undiagnosed ADHD seems to wind up with. So I worked a bunch of wildly unrelated retail or reception jobs for the next 14 years, and made pots on the side while Life Happened and Was Not-pretty (TM). After having a couple of kids and coming to the conclusions that 1)I make a terrible employee but an awesome boss, 2) since I can predictably earn a couple hundred bucks every time I resupplied the one gallery I was in, maybe I just needed to consistently get my work in front of people to earn some adult money. Once I had relaxed and begun to see opportunities and possibilities again, my work did some pretty rapid growth and development. I built a TON of new forms, I went from cone 10 reduction to cone 6 ox, and went from using a white porcelaneous stoneware to a red stoneware with white slip deco. I challenged myself to keep the qualities of the cone 10 work that I really enjoyed while incorporating some of the easy turnover and colourful elements that cone 6 offers. I don’t think I know of an artist that has had direct, linear path. We all seem to incorporate bits of our lives and our loves and our experiences into the work we make.

It would be very straightforward to make a decal by creating either a silkscreen from the photograph, or simply digitally printing one, and those you can fire on quite easily. But they’ve got a different quality than an image exposed from film, or as the OP is suggesting, exposing it right into the glass or ceramic substrate. My glassblower friend was out of town, but she got back to me today and said you can buy Gaffer from Colour Fusion in Toronto. They didn’t seem like they had any G-080 in stock, but they did have a back link to the tech sheet for it on the Gaffer website. That suggests to me that they may be willing to special order it. Edited to add: My glassblower friend was very intrigued about the idea, and said she’d make a few inquiries herself.

I think that if you were to substitute any glass powder used for colouring blown glass in for the India ink, the carbon print process seems like a really promising route. You could then simply fire the flat glass in a tack fuse cycle. A tack fuse is what you use in warm glass to bind 2 layers of glass together, but retain characteristics of both. This would give you permanence while minimizing distortion. (I’m not sure all of it can be avoided.) Tack fuse cycles are relatively hot and fast. The aim is to get the glass to the temperature where it begins “working” as fast as you can without cracking it, hold it there for just long enough for the 2 glass pieces to stick to each other, and then crash cool it to the nearest phase change so it stops working. You then anneal it slowly from there, and doing this combination of steps avoids both cracking and devitrification. The problem then becomes getting the image onto a not-flat surface. Slumping needs to be done at a slightly lower temperature than a tack fuse, but over a longer period of time. The whole point of a slump is to distort the glass, which will then distort the image that’s already adhered to the glass. So the question is then, how much will the image slip if you first slump the glass into the desired shape, use the carbon transfer method to apply a gelatin emulsion with an appropriate glass pigment and tack fuse the image onto the glass? Usually tack fusing cycles assume 2 layers of 3mm glass (I can say from personal experience 2mm picture frame glass does NOT slump or fuse nicely). But since the layer of pigment is not going to be that thick, the tack fuse cycle might be even shorter, which would also preserve image resolution. edited to add: If you’re using just regular glass colouring powder, you should be able to special order it from a stained glass supplier in your area. The companies that make stained glass also make powders/frit/ rod for glass blowers. Note that when ceramic people think frit, they’re thinking a fine 80 mesh powder. When glassblowers think frit, they’re imagining something Te texture of coarse sand or greater. You want to ask your glass supplier for powder.

Yes, the frit maker looks similar to the one we used. I think the one in that shop was homemade, but same principle. Most glues and adhesives are organic materials, and they’ll all burn out before the fluxes in either glass or ceramic become active. Photo emulsion also has a biological component, so it too will burn out. When I was working for Danziger Glass in Calgary a few years ago, we did some slumping and fusing, and I was never aware of an adhesive that would keep things together while in the kiln. You always had to work with gravity. I do have an ask in to a glass blower friend about a Canadian supplier for Gaffer, but I don’t know of anyone that pre-makes the frit out of bar for you. I can see this being problematic to do with photosensitive glass. I think the most direct method of working this material might be to find a glass blower you can collaborate with. But I will consult with my friend to see if she has any better ideas.

Sooo Cool!! For the first: From the couple of classes I took in hot glass, if you’re making your own pate de verre or glass frit, usually you’re pounding it out by hand somehow. At school they had a 4” steel tube with another really heavy capped off steel tube that fit inside it that acted as a very analog piston, or a tube shaped mortar and pestle. If you wanted, you could create powders out of rod or found glass. It’s a LOT of elbow grease. I don’t know if that was a tool specific to the shop I was in, or if they’re commonplace in other hot glass shops. The good news is that from looking at the tech data, if you were to place the rod into this style of crusher, you could probably pound it out without any issues around exposure. It seems like it takes a very strong UV exposure, or 2 days under incandescent or fluorescent lights to create the exposure. I don’t think you have to do it blind. For #2: I don’t know of an adhesive that would survive the strike fire to 575 C that’s needed to reveal the image, so the powder that you’d make from this bar would have to be fully adhered to whatever surface via the heat by the end of the firing process. This is possible if your substrate is glass, but I don’t think you’ll be able to get this to adhere to the surface of a ceramic object. Glazes don’t melt that low, and according to the spec sheet, Gaffer produces this bar to be compatible with most studio soda lime glass batch. While it does vary by manufacturer, glass batch COE is usually around 96 X10 to the negative 7. Calculated COE’s on a glossy glaze is somewhere around 7x10 to the negative 7. That is a really big difference, and it’s one of the reasons why I tend to go on rants when people ask how to melt marbles into the bottom of bowls. Glass at a 96 COE is incompatible with glass at an 88 COE, and will separate if you try and slump or fuse them together. That said. If you’re looking to just do exposures on a flat piece of glass, creating a powder from this bar would definitely be a genius way to go!

In my former life, I used to be middle management in a health food/grocery store in an area with a pretty diverse cross section of humanity. Specifically, I was a Cashier Supervisor, and I have management training. In working the customer service desk there, I couldn’t even make up the things that happened! I have witnessed someone drop $1200 in vitamins and bulk items on the same day we had to remove someone tripping balls on crack from the store who was trying to shoplift very, very poorly. I have kept a straight face while witnessing someone checking the “energy signature” on a day-old muffin by holding it to her forehead (she bought it), and while someone was shopping with a pyramid on his head without a trace of irony. The guy returning 7 organic cabbages that had spent a week in his car in August did manage to bust my poker face though. It wasn’t hot by southern US standards, but 30*C was involved. So my threshold for weird is probably a bit broken! Serving demanding customers can pay off when they’re in earnest, but it’s helpful to ask a few screening questions to see what they’re after and to establish if you’re able to help them now, in the future, or not at all. To do this, you have to have your boundaries and service offerings defined for yourself. If someone is in earnest, I would have no issue with them wanting to check teapot pour, and would probably aid and abet this with my own water bottle. If someone is looking for a specific pot, I’ll ask a few clarifying questions and produce the best available options for them to choose from. It helps them pick faster if the choices are limited. If I know I don’t have the options, I’ll say so. I’ll either offer to put them on a list for when the right thing is back in stock, or send them to another potter who might have something that suits better. My philosophy is to help people find what they want as efficiently as possible, and to be of service to customers in my booth. People seeking things like discounts or to not pay tax are met with a professional responses (“I only offer price breaks on wholesale quantities” or “I do some nice things for repeat customers and my email list subscribers,” or “The price for cash sale is the same.”). Being of service does not mean undervaluing yourself. I do not tolerate abuse or cruelty though. I have only asked 2 people to leave my booth. One person made an exceptionally crude sexual comment that he then tried to say was “just a joke.” I replied “Jokes are supposed to be funny,” and gave him Mom Look Number 32b (Arched Eyebrow Variant). He backed away in embarrassment. The second lady I think didn’t have any idea what a fine craft market entailed, and had a very loud sticker shock response to a $35 mug. Like..REALLY loud. And rude. And angry. And personal. She used the words “Who the $%^& do you think you are!?” I walked up to her and said in a calm quiet voice pitched for her and no one else “This item is possibly not for you, but there is nneed to make a spectacle of yourself over it. You should leave my booth now.” Anyone being rude or mean to me does not mean I have to stoop to their level.

So outdoor shows aren’t really as big here as they are in the US, but I still travel out of town for a few. I don’t drive more than about 4 hours for a show, because too far out and the overhead’s too high for them to be profitable for me. I have a landscape photographer friend I usually room with at an Airbnb. We both prefer to cook ourselves. Her because she has dairy allergies that are hard to work around on the fly, and me because I try to keep costs low and I get really sick of restaurant food quickly. If I have time in the week leading up, I’ll shop for dry goods and most things, and then hit a grocery store in the town we’re in for things that require refrigeration on setup day. I eat a good breakfast before I hit the sale, and bring a thermos of tea, flask of water and another small thermos of soup for lunch. If it’s a long day, I may add a smoothie to the bag. I will occasionally get snacks onsite, but try not to do too much, because it’s too easy to eat when I’m bored. I try and stick to things I can drink in the booth, both because I hate being caught with a mouthful and I don’t like being stuck in a food line. Even with that, we still wind up doing a dinner or two out after the show closes for the day. I try and keep the travel budget to about $100/day for food and lodging.

It’s used more as a glaze ingredient, or in soda firing. When it’s in water it’s very soluble, so it definitely has an effect on rheology, but it behaves differently than sodium silicate. Like Min said, it’s better to use the ideal tool for the job.

Hate to point it out in case it creates a rush, but Ferro has closed some US manufacturing plants and is in the process of moving them to Mexico. There are interruptions in the availability of 3134 and 3124.

It used to interfere a lot more than it does now. For years I had my studio in an unseated garage, which meant it was only functional for about 3-4 months out of the year because winter. These days I usually move my glazing upstairs from my basement studio to the cement pad outside my kiln shed for the summer. Currently debating the wisdom of that as I work my way through a glaze load that needs to be fired today! I am NOT cut out for 35-40*C. I am consoling myself with the idea of throwing mugs in the cool later this afternoon.

I am debating a ring light and a second kiln. The first, well, it depends on what happens in the next few months. If I make a drift towards video on social media, it’ll be handy regardless of the platform I’d be using. If it turns out video is the latest dopamine fix, I don’t want to be into it for a whole bunch of equipment. The second kiln is because I’m still having trust issues with my existing one. It’s fixed after the Great Meltdown of ‘21, but it doesn’t fire the same. But I lack the cash flow to do it until after summer. Which will translate to after Christmas between the busy season and kiln lead times.

Is gertsley more important when putting the colorant on top of a glaze? It very much depends on the colourant and the glaze. You’d have to test it. If you don’t have gerstley to hand, use a frit or other flux that’s already an ingredient in the glaze you’re brushing over.

@Wheel Have you tried reaching out to Skutt for the specs? You might be able to find replacement parts anywhere you find small motors and/or automotive parts.

To further what @kristinanoelsaid about commercial glazes sticking better: they work better because they have gums and other brushing mediums in them so that they go on more smoothly. If you have some CMC gum, or glycerine or some extender that they sell at the paint store, adding a little of that to some of your dipping glaze may work better than trying to get an unaltered glaze to stick.

@rox54 Some things like iron will flux enough by themselves, but other colourants are more refractory and won’t stick without adding a little flux.

Straight drugstore peroxide is usually sufficient. Or my grocery store sells a peroxide bleach in the laundry section that doesn’t have the washing soda or other stuff. (Superstore Green bleach for the Canadians.) The green stuff in your bucket is just character. Unless you have specific allergies. That one needs oxygen I believe, so you can also just skim it off the top and discard it. Freezing reclaim slop or attaching slip won’t present any issues. Not sure if it would affect casting slip.

Load determines the stacking. I need what I need when I need it. But if I’m making large serving pieces, I also try and include kiln filler in my production list. You always need kiln filler anyways, and it does help the bowls fire without warping.

Just put a lid on it. Helps keep it hot longer anyways.

Hi @Catatonic I’m moving your post into the Equipment Use and Repair section, so it gets more visibility. I see that you’ve also started some further conversations in This thread here that involves a kiln identical to your own. Let me know if you want to continue in that other one, or move the discussion over here.

I will wedge for anything over 3 lbs or so, but mostly just to make sure the moisture is distributed properly. Anything in the 1-2 lb range just gets cut off the block. Reclaim does need wedging, unfortunately. I don’t have a pug mill.

If your choices are pottery plaster or plaster of Paris, use the pottery plaster. PoP won’t stand up to the level of moisture and it’ll crumble. I personally lay a bedsheet over my wire shelves and lay slurry out on that.

I have one mentor who gave up clay years ago because he thought he had environmental allergies to the mould in clay. He found out 20 years later it was something else entirely unrelated, but he’d moved on to metalwork instead by then. His wife has been a full time production potter the whole time with no ill effects. In 25 years, I have never heard of any of the toxic moulds that are associated with causing major illness growing in clay. (With the caveat that I haven’t heard of everything.) Any information that I can find seems to indicate that whatever microbes grow in clay may irritate sensitive individuals, but otherwise healthy folks should be fine. People with compromised immune systems, allergies, those on sensitizing prescriptions, the elderly or infants may be affected. I cannot find any indication of a recorded report of a Stachybotrys infection related to pottery clay or even paper clay. Given that it has been a concern for a couple of decades now, enough people have been watching for such things that something should have cropped up by now. Any of the articles that focused on the science of clay and bacteria growth seemed either focused on certain antimicrobial properties of bentonite, or how to fix glaze rheology when your CMC gum has gone wrong.