Callie Beller Diesel
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Posts posted by Callie Beller Diesel
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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.
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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.
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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.
- blackthorn and Pres
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On 6/7/2021 at 9:18 AM, rox54 said:On 6/7/2021 at 8:59 AM, Callie Beller Diesel said:
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.
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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.
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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.
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Just put a lid on it. Helps keep it hot longer anyways.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Your best bet really is to do an absorption test and find out exactly what that looks like under the firing conditions you want to use. We can tell you all day, but you wouldn’t be the first one of us that need to hold a thing in our hands to truly understand a lesson.
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I originally fell in love with fuel firings of all kinds. When I went to college, all functional work was done at cone 10 reduction, and cone 6 wasn’t really a thing. Salt, soda, wood firing, even raku. Any time I could heat up some pots and throw something dirty at them, I was a happy kid. The chemistry is cheaper, and you could still build a small gas kiln in your backyard. I turned down a number of offers to come get a gas kiln out of someone’s yard when they were moving after helping a friend secure one. Sigh.
Ten years after graduation, I still hadn’t been able to set up a business though, because gas kilns are regulated under the same section of the code as industrial boilers and fracking equipment (custom built appliances). Because of a few workplace accidents, they started actually enforcing the rules around custom appliances. If I build my own kiln, it’ll cost about 20K including a mandatory CSA approval sticker before someone will hook it up. I can’t even buy burners if I don’t have a gas fitter’s ticket. If I import a prebuilt one from the US, probably about the same cost, last time I priced it out. There are a couple of places to rent gas kilns available to me, but it’s prohibitive to do that as a business.
I wound up learning cone 6 chemistry because gas kilns weren’t feasible to use anymore. It was either not make on the scale I wanted to, or change chemistry. I resisted it for a long time because I had put so much work into making at cone 10, I didn’t want to loose that time investment. When it became unavoidable, I decided to challenge myself to build work that was durable, had rich surfaces that I could appreciate, and still had a focus on good form that is one of the strong points of atmospheric firing. A bad form with a brown glaze is (insert your own colourful euphemism).
I have found that cone six presents some interesting challenges for me that I really enjoy. Before, I was making so that I could enjoy the process. Now, I’m interested more in the finished results. The clay is cheaper, but the glaze chemicals cost more. I have found that cone ten had left me a little complacent with my chemistry because I was relying on heat to solve a lot of problems. Learning cone 6 has made me a more technically adept potter. I have a lot more material knowledge now, and that really helps with testing. When I first began potting, I had to learn to love brown, and I was always a little sad there wasn’t more bright colours to contrast with the earthy tones. Now, I can shamelessly indulge in pink and yellow in addition to green and blue. I can have the contrast between the subtle earthy texture of my red clay, and highlight it with some bright colours that were previously a lot more difficult to achieve.
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@Missy just as a heads up, zinc oxide is used as a flux. The other oxides you’ve listed are colourants.
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I put a full shelf on the bottom, on 4 x 1/2“ stilts. I use half shelves above that. My kiln is on a square stand, not on a metal plate, so the stilts also line up with points on the metal stand underneath the kiln so I don’t crack the bottom with uneven weight. So far so good.
- Pres and Bill Kielb
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@DiJ It might be worth an email to Simon Leach to see if he knows of anyone making them in the UK. There may be some family or student connections he has.
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I have a certain amount of cleaning incorporated into my work cycle. Mopping happens after reclaim, glaze or trimming days, because those things generate the most dust. I find if I don’t work tidy, I can’t concentrate. I have a hard time filtering out visual clutter. Or at least the wrong kind of visual clutter. I’m not a minimalist by any means.
l don’t have a schedule for equipment maintenance, but I do keep an eye on how things are working. I’ve got a set of elements and some other kiln parts handy, because I don’t want to be caught out if and when something goes wrong. The last thing I need is to have to wait 3 weeks for replacement parts to be shipped. Note to self: your next kiln will be a model that’s actually serviced in your own country.
This time of year, I’d normally be pulling my booth setup out to see what needs spiffing up, or if the sign need to be repainted. Spring shows were cancelled again this year, however, so that part of maintenance won’t happen likely until July. The farmer’s market ought to be a go.
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@BabsNo hakeme. Just a white glaze.
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I’m very glad my college profs chose to acknowledge that handle pulling looks extremely suggestive before the demo and encouraged us all to get it out of our systems beforehand. And then proceeded to be very professional from there forward. And did NOT make any passes at anyone exhibiting talent in that area. That’s really gross.
I had one guy make a comment to me (in front of his girlfriend, no less!!) about Ghost. I gave him some really hard, uncomfortable wordless eye contact until he backed out of my booth, suddenly less sure of his amusement value. I remember watching the movie as a teen and thinking that the pottery thing was clearly set up for the actors, but that the point was the romance, not the clay. Being a teenage girl at the time, I appreciated the romance part.
Getting back to the original question, I didn’t find clay until my last year of high school. It’s a bit romantic, but not in a weird way.
I took an extra year of high school because I was late in deciding what I wanted to do afterwards. I had tentatively decided on physiotherapy, because it sounded as likely as anything else, and I didn’t really relish the notion of an office job. I was taking a bunch of additional science classes so I could set myself up for the best possible success there, given that I’m not athletic. I hadn’t taken any art classes up to that point because I’d chosen band and drama as electives, and I was told I needed to round things out by taking sewing and typing. Also, I have never bee particularly good at drawing, so I didn’t think I’d be any good at art. But with a full course load of science, I needed something fun in there, so I signed up for Art 10 (grade 10 level art). My school was experimenting with the quarter system at the time, so the experience was pretty immersive, because you only had 2 classes at a time but you were in them for half the day. Not great for Bio or Physics, but ideal for Art, and I wound up taking 20 and 30 level too. They were also playing around with a more self-directed model that year, so couple that with a well stocked art room, a teacher who was a practicing artist herself and who believed in fostering creativity and the idea that “artist” was a legitimate profession; lots of local artists brought in to do regular demos and talks (including a handful of potters), doing a job shadow with a local potter, raku firings as often as we could get the stuff together for it...and I fell in love with clay. At the spring Open House tour to ACA (now Alberta University for the Arts), I remember going through the clay studio, and thinking that it felt like Home. I came home from school that day and before even taking my shoes off, I announced to my parents that I was going to art school instead. Their response was “My day was fine, thanks for asking.”
QotW: How do you feed yourself when working art shows or festivals?
in Int'l Ceramic Artists Network (ICAN) Operations and Benefits
Posted
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.