Callie Beller Diesel

There have been a couple of people asking about this old supplier in the last year, so I went to check and see if Wayback Machine had any screen captures of this website. Unfortunately while they list the glaze numbers, not all of the images were saved. I think unless someone has a hard copy, we might be out of luck on finding a colour chart. https://web.archive.org/web/20060317182815/http://www.greatclay.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=CTGY&Category_Code=GGH

A couple of ideas to consider re: the rims: 1) Use a stiff, stable liner glaze that rounds over the lip of the piece. Really fluid glazes are going to break more over that slightly sandy texture. 2) If you want to use the fluid ones, your clay body’s (lack of) absorption appears to be quite good. You could give the finished rims a light polishing to take off the very high points with 220. 3) if you want to sand bisque as Bill suggests, do it wet with wet/dry sandpaper from the automotive section. Much better on the lungs and cleanup.

On my IPad, the facebook “add a comment box” is right in the middle of the page, obscuring text. The dropdown menu also tends to not want to disappear automatically: I don’t know if this is part of the template code, or if it’s something you are able to adjust on that platform. I don’t know if you need every click within your website to open a new tab in the browser. It’s a good idea to use that setting if you’re sending people to outbound links, but it clogs up a browser unnecessarily when navigating “in house.” The formatting on your blog page appears to have a spot that’s supposed to hold a thumbnail image or a logo next to your name. It’s showing as a question mark. Other than that, it functions like it ought to, as far as I can see. The format doesn’t have a lot of unnecessary negative space and everything is legible. Other suggestions, which you can take or leave as you see fit: Navigation-wise, I’d suggest clarifying for yourself what you want the website to do for you and how you want to structure your online presence. Right now you have a combo of casual/personal stuff that I’d expect to speak to an audience you’ve personally cultivated, and some more formal elements we learned in art school but aren’t super relevant outside of what I’d call an institutional art audience. (Gallery system, academia, etc.)I would suggest tailoring your website to whichever of those groups interacts with and buys from you the most. It makes it easier to write website copy and make design choices. If that audience is mostly institutional folks, tidying the bio and statement to be more in line with those expectation and moving your more casual stuff exclusively to social media. If your audience is more a group you’ve personally cultivated, consider removing the larger bio and statement, and leaning into the story you have in the Flower and Ash section currently. You can still incorporate your credentials into that writing, but I think that’s the piece that will land best with the wider public. It’s a lovely bit of storytelling. I also noticed a mention on your blog that you thought you should be blogging once a month as opposed to posting more frequently on FB. While blogs have a bunch of pros over social media, I think you should do whichever one you can make consistent. If a more casual FB post gets made every week or every couple of days, that’s better than a spotty blog you do because “that’s what real artists do.” Whichever audience you choose: -I’d pick one font for the whole website and using it throughout. It’s a small detail, but it’ll tidy things up a surprising amount. Right now the home page has 2 fonts, and the sans serif header and sub header are outweighed by the serif text font. There’s no emphasis on one piece of info as more important than the other. -The header image on the home page wasn’t taken with incorporated text in mind. If you don’t have an image you can crop to have 2/3-3/4 negative space in those dimensions so the text is the focus, it’s worth taking one for the purpose. Or changing some layout choices on that page. -The one place everyone should be really UN-creative is with your menu names. They should be as clear and concise as possible. Eg, Miss Elainie is a great name for a jewelry line…or maybe your cat, who might be instagram famous as your cheeky studio sidekick. While I 100% support a studio pet picture gallery if it brings everyone joy, if I’m new to your page or on a mission for something, the lack of clarity is a barrier to me finding what I want. The dropdown title should be Jewelry, and the subtitle on the page can be “Miss Elainie Jewelry Line” with a 2-3 sentence blurb. And of course, images. In that vein: -Studio is a bit too broad: I suggest retitling it “gallery” with listings of “Jewelry” “wood and raku” “new work” (when it’s ready), and consider combining “Before and After” into “Studio Shots” for a look at the artist in her environment. -Consider using the same format for all the gallery pages. Right now you have a slideshow for wood and raku, but all the rest are stationary gallery pages. Some of the transitions in that template are odd. -Under About, I love that you actually put your face on there! Not enough folks do. I don’t love the picture you’ve chosen though. You’ve depersonalized it by using a shot of your own computer screen. Please consider enlisting a friend to help take a bio pic during the golden hour. You’re such a vibrant person, and that image seems colder thanu the Lee we know here. -Unless you’re talking mostly to a Fine Art/gallery clientele, the expanded bio under About isn’t necessary. You can talk about some of your background in blogs or on social. -Your artist statement is extremely well written and should be on your home page, not buried under About. It doesn’t need to be formally titled as your artist statement if you do this. -Again about heading clarity, I’d retitle Flower and Ash in the dropdown to “Philosophy” or “Background on the Work” and have the Flower and Ash be the title of the page. -I think shop policies should be easy to get to, but not the first thing you see when you arrive on a website. Having their own header listing suggests you’re anticipating a bunch of problems right out of the gate. A lot of people have a footer menu now, with things like shop policies, an FAQ list and social links. If you don’t want to create a footer menu, put a “shop” header title in the policies spot for your eventual update, and put the policies under that.

Vacuuming my kiln: I plead the fifth. Don’t do what I do, kids. Sieving: definitely as I make them, and if they’ve been sitting for several months unused. That latter doesn’t happen much anymore, but worth mentioning. I try and keep my buckets clean and wiped down because sieving usually winds up with more on the floor than I want.

A few years ago we had a contributor @liambesaw, who had ventured into making his own lustres, which admittedly aren’t china paints, but are related. He didn’t detail a lot here, but I do recall he built himself a laboratory fume hood in his back yard because the process created a lot of stuff that’s really bad for your health. So there’s probably some solid reasons for manufacturers taking over the supply end of things. That said, I do have an addition to the china painting resources. Melanie Sherman is an artist that offers both recorded and in person workshops on the subject, and at the time of writing, the recorded ones seem pretty affordable. https://melaniesherman.com/melanie-sherman-ceramics-workshops/ Again, at time of writing, she seems pretty approachable to questions about the craft.

Remember that just because a glaze is matte once fired, that doesn’t mean it isn’t fluid in the kiln. So re-melting it with a layer of underglaze is going to melt the underglaze into the surface of the first layer, which will probably leave a bit of a half melted surface. If you throw another glaze on top of that, you’ll be creating something called a eutectic, which is a fancy way of saying the 2 glazes are going to steal materials from each other in a way that will make them melt even more actively than the 2 do separately. This effect is usually more pronounced when you combine a matte and a glossy glaze. Could this be interesting? Maybe. Depends on the context. Could be a really interesting sculptural effect, but something that’s wildly impractical on a functional piece. Could this make a mess in the kiln? More than likely. If you try it, use a waster with a lip that can contain any runoff, and make sure the person firing the kiln is ok with you doing this. Will this fix a mug? Doubtful. But if it’s already wrecked, gaining information is a worthy endeavour. If you just want a mug that works, it’s going to be way less time consuming and frustrating to make a new one.

Hi and welcome to the forum! What I’m really finding in my own testing is that colourants have a much stronger affect on the possible durability of the end result than is often assumed. I had a similar experience where a base glaze has pretty good numbers on paper, but certain unexpected colourant additions made some tiles fail a vinegar test (iron!?). My flux ratios and silica balance are similar to what you have listed, and I’m currently running some line blends to see if I can keep the same colour response while increasing the silica for durability. Dishwasher tabs do contain a lot of alkaline chemicals, including sodium carbonate (soda ash), that will etch all dish ware over time, not just pottery. It dissolves the silica. So testing ware in a way for dishwasher durability in a short amount of time that isn’t also too heavy handed is tricky, I think. I think the digitalfire recommendations that it looks like you followed may be too harsh. I’m going to tag @Minbecause I think she had different recommendations about the concentration of the soda ash solution, but I can’t remember the numbers she used.

I only found the pencil thing happened once at cone 10, and it was under a specific glaze that I didn’t know could carbon trap.

Use India ink on the larger crackles, and soak them in tea for the secondary pattern. Apply the ink when they’re freshly crazed out of the kiln, and then do the soak a few days later.

About the only thing I can think of to add graphics that will stay would be to add decals or underglaze/slip at the usual leather hard/green stage and bisque it on before the pit fire. It won’t guarantee the ash and other stuff won’t mute or blur them, but that could look pretty cool. I didn’t do enough pit firing to be able to dial in specific colours, so someone else is going to have to weight in on that part.

Sand or other temper like grog, chicken grit, large mesh feldspar, etc will indeed make a clay body less plastic. As to the clay body pictured, I think the colour has less to do with the underlying material and more to do with how it was fired. If I had to guess, I’d say it was pit fired. That’s if it’s clay at all.

The least intuitive part of collaring is the part where you have to speed up for it to work better. Other than that, some things to keep in mind are to make sure you do a small pull or a pass with a stiff rib in between collaring passes.

Cracking can have a lot of reasons. If you find your reclaim is cracking more than fresh clay and all other forms of user error have been eliminated as possibilities, there’s 2 possibilities that come to my mind. First, it could be that the reclaim has more throwing slop/fine particles in it. If there’s no trimmings or dry bits added to it, or you’re just drying the throwing bucket leftovers on the plaster wedging table overnight, you wind up with all the stuff that is plastic, but also shrinks a lot. If this is the case, save your throwing slop to add to larger batches of reclaim. If you don’t wind up with a whole lot of reclaim, you can repurpose it as decorating or casting slip. I know a lot of us feel strongly about waste, but it is ok to discard some in the trash if you really don’t have another use for it. The other possibility (and I experience this with Plainsman M390) is that it may be a clay body that really needs to be slurry mixed to get useable reclaim. Some clays have a diverse particle mix, and if they’re not blended well, you wind up with issues.

Hi and welcome, I’ve moved your post into the buy and sell section, so it’s easier to search. Some more details about the kiln would also be helpful, such as the size and model number off the plate, as Cress and other manufacturers usually make several models of kiln. If you need assistance uploading a photo or 2 that shows the state of the brick and the elements, those are usually the most helpful. If you need help resizing, don’t hesitate to DM me and I can assist.

@Shark Easy is subjective. I personally have no problems adjusting glaze flow, but we’ve also heard from lots of folks who feel otherwise. Adjusting glaze flow does take practice and it can be easy to mess it up, especially if there’s a lot of different solubles working on the glaze slurry. While the conversation here started going towards more processed materials, the OP specifically referenced a very soluble form of household borax. It can take very little material to accidentally over-deflocculate a glaze and turn it into a completely congealed and unusable mess. And then your materials savings are gone, because you have to throw out the batch.

Hi and welcome to the forum! La mayoría de los miembros del foro son de habla inglesa, pero tenemos muchos colaboradores internacionales. ¿Tiene software de traducción en su navegador o le gustaría algo de ayuda con eso? It all depends on how much barium you’re trying to replace and why it’s in the recipe. Large amounts of barium can be used to create a matte surface, and it also gives some glazes a distinct colour response, especially in reduction firings. Are you able to share the recipe and let us know what you need the glaze to look at?

Another avenue could be to add some zircopax to the recipe of your choice. Usually you don’t want it in a cobalt glaze because cobalt is pretty opaque by itself, but if you have a base glaze that works in all other respects, that could serve to get rid of any pooling.

Hi and welcome to the forum! Pinned at the top of the Clay and Glaze section of the forum, we do have a list of articles and websites on processing wild clay, as it’s been a pretty popular activity in the last year or so, and lots of folks have been asking. Here’s a direct link. If you’re dealing with a smaller seam of clay in your yard, it’s possible there’s a mix of a few different clays with different properties. If you want to use it regularly, it’s worth digging the amount you think you’ll need and slurry mixing it thoroughly so you get consistent results. At 1250 C (cone 6) feldspar should be behaving like a flux in a clay body, not a refractory. Kaolin doesn’t usually have significant amounts of sodium or potassium, so if you need your clay to warp/melt/bloat less, that would be a good place to start.

I’m not one to throw a lot of teacups off the hump, but I do all my jar lids like that, and I never get s cracks. I make a shallow form with a large “foot” that gets trimmed into a knob, so there’s some similar principles at work I think. I’ve used this method on lots of fine toothed clay bodies, including B-mix which can be notorious for this kind of thing. I try not to throw with too much water, or let it linger at all in the bottom. I don’t spend time going back and fort across the bottom of the pot, but for lids I do use a flexible metal rib to get the curve I want, and to remove all slip. I use a heat gun to stiffen up the rim enough that it won’t adhere to the jar gallery and let the pieces dry together for most small jars, but larger ones I’ll let stiffen up for a couple of hours before I put them together. Doing this makes them dry very evenly because of the trapped humidity on the inside of the jar. I almost never have to cover them overnight. Unless the weather is unusually dry, if I throw them sometime in the afternoon they’re ready to trim the next morning. For teacups, to replicate something similar I’d just flip them as soon as they’ll hold up to it, and let them dry upside down after trimming if the problem persists. When I trim them, they also get a good burnish on the knob side of the lid with a silicone rib at the end. This step is for aesthetics and might not contribute a lot to crack prevention, as I didn’t get them before I started doing it. But maybe worth a mention

Thank you for the updates! We always love hearing how things turn out. May the firing go well.

Just an addition to Min’s comment, as we’ve been having copyright discussions in relation to other things. You can type out the recipe, and you should give proper accreditation, but you shouldn’t post photos of the book page it’s on.

I’ve also found that having a shipping included price on the website eliminates confusion. I never use the words free shipping, because shipping isn’t free, and especially in Canada you can’t afford to just eat any part of it. Back when I had my etsy shop, they were beginning the push for all vendors to have “free” shipping. I was annoyed with the whole thing, and thought that people were smart enough to recognize that shipping charges would be extra, and that it wouldn’t affect buying behaviour. I was so annoyed, I decided to run a test in my own shop just to prove it. I made listings for my mugs, some with shipping included and some without. I wound up eating crow, because people absolutely bought the $60 mugs over the $40 + $20 mugs.

The maddening answer to just about everything in glazing is “it depends.” IF it’s available to you, clear glazes are usually much easier to apply thinly and evenly via dipping. If it’s not, then brush away. If you’re mixing 2 glazes, this can often result in special effects that are partially due to running. When starting out you might only want to apply 3 layers in total, however you want to divide it out. Usually you don’t need a clear glaze over other glazes, unless you’re hoping it’ll do something interesting. If that is what you’re going for, make sure you have a waster or a cookie under your piece to catch any drips. Cleaning kiln shelves is not fun! Learning how to apply glaze is another skill that takes experimentation and practice to get the hang of, and it’s a good idea to do some test tiles before you start glazing your favourite piece. Recommendations on the label should be considered starting points. Your idea of a thick coat and someone else’s might not be the same thing, and you have to play around with it a bit to find your sweet spot. Generally clear glazes want a thinner application than other things for best results. An overly thick clear glaze will go a bit cloudy. This effect is more noticeable on dark clay or underglazes than it is on lighter coloured things.

Some clay bodies tend to not like being refined multiple times like that, especially if they’ve got a bunch of free silica that hasn’t been taken up by other oxides in the melt. You have to baby these clay bodies through quartz inversion accordingly. So +1 for everything already said about foot rings, kiln packs and firing speeds to get pieces through that zone more evenly.

Some of it will also depend on the recipe of the glaze. The various flux materials can have different effects on some colouring oxides. For instance, if you put a copper wash over a white clay body, a clear glaze with a lot of sodium will give a more blue turquoise. But if the main flux is boron, we’d expect it to tend more towards green. Manganese might have a more purplish tint to the brown if there’s a lot of calcium. Things like that. I wouldn’t expect a wash that’s over a glaze to react with a wash applied under the glaze, unless the glaze is especially thin or unless the glaze firing is especially long.