Rae Reich

Oil might help your foot pedal and governor to work smoothly, but not advisable to have it on surfaces that come into contact with your clay. #0000 Steel wool should smooth out the wheelhead surface. Lubricate with a little water while rubbing out irregularities, rinse well.

@Hulkhas a good solution for your situation. He uses blue tape, used for masking woodwork when painting, to tape off where he wants the glaze to end and peels it off while the glaze is still slightly damp. You could do that, brush your glaze on the lower portion, remove the tape and proceed glazing the rest of the pot. @Babs carpet covered bat works well, too, allowing you to slop on glaze at will while the pot sits on the dampened carpet, then turning the dry pot slowly by hand on the carpet to rub off accumulated glaze at the base. I would moisten and trim off any chunks of glaze with a fettling knife or trimming tool before turning on the carpet. Waxing the bottom before glazing could help to keep any glaze from seeping under the base and sticking.

In addition, rims are usually compacted more in throwing.

I have had some success with mixing a little of my clear base glaze into the underglaze colors. Also, I’m not sure why one would bisque to a higher temperature when that makes the ware less porous and absorptive Wouldn’t that tend to make the underglazes bond less well to the clay?

@Roberta12Good answer!!

A second person to hold or wipe might help, if possible.

Iron and manganese don’t sound like sparkles. Could they be referring to pyrites? I wedged vermiculite into my cone pad clay for quicker drying and less shrinkage. The sparkly surfaces of the pyrites survived low firings.

So beautiful! I really admire the way you approach problem-solving - experience and experiment. It’s wonderful to get new information about the many things clay can do

You might try slightly dampening the black areas of the bisque before applying the glaze. Blot with a sponge for small areas or a quick dip in water.

A description of using silica sand in a saggar for support of fragile work during firing ^

You can make a custom one and bisque it while making more branch tests.

Oh, that is a lovely green! It looks enough matte, though, to use a liner glaze with it on food surfaces. A white with tin in it could blush nicely at the lip of a vessel. (Use a liner because a matte glaze doesn’t clean as well as a gloss and can harbor bacteria over time, not to save the user from leaching-chrome exposure.) I think you’re right that the cobalt, besides modifying the chrome, also helps to keep it from ‘browning’ or to rescue a brown by sending it toward blue - like the little-bit-of-cobalt “cheat” in copper reds that rescues an uneven reduction red from ‘snot green or bleached white to soft blue (I learned this from a Tom Coleman student).

I wonder if some of your breakage during firing is due to the irregular shapes of the branches, so that they do not rest their weight equally on the points of contact with the shelf. Maybe a shallow, silica sand filled tray to nestle them in so that they’re resting on the sand all along their lengths?

So much care and thought has come from long experience and patience. Porthos are sculptures to be proud of and that mane is really impressive! Thanks for sharing more details.

Absolutely beautiful, @Hyn Patty!! I really appreciate the look behind the scenes into the mystery of assembling that challenging pose. Thank you for sharing and inspiring. (giggle) Fabio tail! How do you scale your creations?

I like a broad shallow bowl with room for wetting, scraping both hands at once and for pulling handles over. I throw pretty dry, using slip/slurry and a chamois. Big water bucket for more washing and rinsing of tools. I just recently got one of those paint buckets with a handle, for painting, and then saw them being used by potters. Too narrow for me!

Remembering my student days, the experience of actually handling pots made by acknowledged fine potters was given to us by a teacher who brought us in contact with contemporary fine potters. Consider a collection donation, documented as well as possible, to a favored school with a ceramics department. A “library” of pots available for reference would be wonderful inspiration. (I’m assuming that most of the works that we have accumulated are not ‘museum quality,’ but what we could afford.)

I’m not too worried about “the youth,” @Pres. I saw a young potter on the Great Canadian Throwdown describe the coil-building technique as “like a 3D printer.” . Clay adapts to people and our needs. I’m starting to look for inheritors for my stuff. There are also our collections of significant (to us) pots - I’ve begun to redistribute some.

@Katie S Is the porcelain cast dinnerware?

Sponges, chamois, plastic, all sorts of tools over the years in our ceramics lab recycle in college. Those chamois really disguise themselves! In commercial clay, a supplier, who was gradually going out of business, ran their rusting pug mill to the bitter end. We found chunks of rusty pugger in nearly every bag. No major injuries, but a challenge to throw. I was able to complete an 8” vase while leaving a 1/2” square of pugger in the wall, about halfway up, even while ribbing it out (carefully) as much as possible. We were curious about how it would fire. The fragment melted out and left a trail of mostly iron down the side beneath a tidy hole. ;p That Franklin Adams clay was really nice and a dream to throw, even so.

A thicker rim will hold its shape better, if you can work that into the design/construction. Q: is it strictly necessary to have a perfectly round rim? The intriguing soft appearance of your sculpture does not, to me, require a perfectly circular rim.

Nice work! I like the color, glaze technique and surfaces.

Plates take up a lot of kiln space! The skills to make consistent, flat, even-bottomed thrown plates need as much repetition as the other forms, so as many failures as need to be expected can be ‘time and kiln space’ expensive. I like hump-molded slab plates with a foot ring of a coil added . Foot ring can be thrown on if the mold is attached to a bat. Remove from mold immediately before clay begins to shrink by flipping it over onto another bat. I put a few sheets of newspaper (please support your local newspaper!) or dispenser-type heavy paper towel on the drying bat so that the plate can shrink/dry without sticking to the bat. Placement of the foot ring can help or hinder the flatness of the finished plate. Look at many examples carefully to make the best choices.

@Reza Hosseiny, that will depend on if your gold luster matures enough at ^019. Generally, that rule applies to planned application of layers. You might try for a temperature a little closer to the previous one, if you have that much control over your firing.