curt

Hi Joseph, is this like a little hand-help open propellor gizmo that you stick down into the cup? Kind of like a hand blender but without the cover over the blades? Presuming you can just rinse this after each use in a small container of clean water nearby?

If none of the above works, try a one hour soak at around 800C (1470F) during the bisque firing. If organic matter in the clay is the problem, that is when it burns out (and is also before almost anything else in the clay starts melting or ceramic change starts happening). Make sure the kiln lid is cracked or all bungs are out, since the organic burnout process needs plenty of air to get completed.

Hi ZAN welcome to the Currie discussion. As my Currie tiles stack up I agree that organisation is important. I have looked at some of the individual tiles dozens of times over a period of years and it is good to know what I am looking at for sure. I find something new that I didn't see before pretty much every time. I have a feeling that my glaze software (Insight) could be a lot more helpful in this organisation, including producing hard copy printouts of grid printouts but so far it can't even produce Currie grids for testing, so not sure when we will get there. I noticed in your pictures that your small cups seemed to be full of dry powder. Did you decide not to use Currie's volumetric blending method, or is that something else? Also, how do you apply the glaze to the tiles?

Regarding currie tile design,... The ideal situation in my opinion would be to fire a SINGLE test piece which delivered all the information available on a FLAT currie tile, along with the additional information one gets from firing individual VERTICAL test tiles (and possibly even a flow test for each glaze). How to do this? This idea may sound kind of crazy, but it has been floating around in my head for a while so I have to let it out. Imagine that each of the 35 cells on a currie tile was (instead of a slight depression) occupied by a small square column, wide at the bottom but tapering slightly to the top, kind of like a square rook on a chess board, say 5 or 10 centimeters high. Each "rook" has a rather large, flat square top with a slight depression in the middle about as deep as a currie tile cell. All 4 sides of the square "rook" have regular horizontal lines measured out at regular intervals (say 1 cm each). And possibly each rook would have a depression on one of its 4 sides which an overly large ball of glaze might fit into. From the top, the test piece would look like (and function as) a standard flat currie grid, with the small difference that each cell would now be separated by empty air rather than clay walls. But each cell would be close enough to his neighbors on all sides to be easily compared with them in the traditional currie tile way by holding the whole object up to the light at various angles. The sides of each rook would provide the equivalent of a vertical tile test, and possibly a flow test for each glaze if desired. Excess glaze would simply run down between the rooks. If desired, deep lines could be scored between the 35 rooks so that they could be snapped apart later if desired. Glaze application for each rook could be done in the traditional way with syringes, spoons, etc.. But ideally glaze application would be done by dipping each rook in glaze, simultaneously applying the traditional currie tile flat top layer, as well as the glaze application for the vertical tile test on each side of the rooks. The holy grail would be to have 35 perfectly sized and well stirred cups ready underneath, so that the whole test piece could be dip glazed in one single movement. As I have suggested elsewhere, I think some kind of "stirring table" for multiple lab vessels like they have at hospitals and medical labs may be the answer to everyone's stirring nightmares. Aside from designing the mold, I can see a few problems with this. Most importantly, it would require enough glaze in each of the 35 cups to be able to dip the rooks. I don't have any issue with mixing up corner batches large enough to do this, but I think some do. But since dipping is a pretty standard glaze application technique to actual pots, maybe it is closer to what people want in a vertical tile test at the end of the day anyway. In addition, it would still require some hand work to, say, apply the striding figure, do scoring, etc. but given the time saved if this all works, that work would be next to nothing. Any thoughts appreciated.

Having been watching the momentum build in this thread over the last few days. Great work Joseph. Loving the vibe here. I have thought about and commented on many of the same issues you and Joei are raising now on currie tile design earlier in this thread. Might be worth looking back at some of that discussion. Also, I have lots of pictures of currie tiles in my gallery on CAD, including of the blank I use which may provide ideas. Here are few thoughts on how to get more information out of each cell each glaze. 1. Currie himself applies an extra pass of glaze in part of each cell in the form of a striding figure to show how well each glaze is melting down. See his book for more explanation. 2. For "mountains" he has put three small parallel ridges of slightly different heights in the upper left (right?) corner of each cell for glaze to break across. 3. I have added my own vertical score to the bottom of each cell, between the legs of the striding figure, to assess how well each glaze will heal over. Again, see my gallery. I find each of these modifications very informative for every glaze. Your discussion here has generated some additional ideas about a currie tile redesign. I am away from the computer for the next few hours, but will try to set them out shortly. As one general thought, though, the goal in improving currie tile design in my mind would be to add the benefits of some three dimensionality to the currie tile WITHOUT sacrificing the great information its two-dimensionality already provides.

If you only ever want to do ONE currie tile per glaze once in one firing in one kiln, I agree that Currie's suggested amounts may seem like a lot. However there may be a few reasons that it is not as excessive as it may seem at first glance. First, many of us - including Currie himself - use the same glaze on several different types of tiles in multiple firings in multiple kilns. For example, If you review the rest of this thread you will see people talking about multiple currie tiles made of different clay types (eg, porcelain, light stoneware, irony red body, etc) and oxidation vs reduction firings, first in test kilns and then possibly in larger, production-oriented kilns, etc.. In my own experience, I have fired the same currie glaze on up to four different tile types in both reduction and oxidation for a total of 8 different tiles using the same glaze (or was it 10? Similarly, if one wants to add colorants or other modifiers (eg, titanium) to create a whole additional run of currie tiles from the base mixtures, better to have too much base glaze rather than too little. Also, I believe it is easier to thoroughly mix and homogenise the 35 individual cups when there is more than a few mils of liquid in each. This will give better application and better results, particularly for cells that quickly settle out. Finally, if glaze application into the individual cells on a tile is too skimpy, the fired glaze surface in each cell may be too thin to be representative of actual use on a pot. Also, having insufficient glaze in each cell will prevent the part of currie testing which indicates how glazes melt down, break, settle, craze and/or heal over. Before we get too obsessive over a few mils of glaze "wasted" in tests, probably want to think how many buckets of glaze we have poured over mediocre artworks that should have been melted down and recycled.... perspective...

Ah, those cells are actually repeats of cells 31 and 32. Since I didn't expect much to happen in that part of the tile I monkeyed around with cells 11 and 12 by adding another glaze to see how it would bleed into the basalt glaze, which is what you can see happening just at that top edge. It didn't bleed at all as it turned out, I think because the other glaze was too stiff.

Thanks Pieter. Now that I have realised the photos are actually appearing with the correct orientation (cell 31 is bottom left hand corner) could you identify the cells you are asking about again? (Because cell 25 of the tile is not actually in any of these photos)

Was going to post these in the recent oilspot thread, but since they ARE Currie tiles.... The pictures are not that great, so it may help to click on them and look at them with more magnification. This is a basalt glaze I have been experimenting with lately. Was not looking for oilspots, got them more by accident. For you currie tile aficionados out there, I apologize that these images were uploaded upside down, so that the lower left hand corner of the currie tile is actually in the upper right in these photos. (Edit: whoops, now it looks like the photos are right side up!, so the lower left hand corner is in fact the normal cell 31) Also sorry that my other experiment of using a piece of old kiln element as a makeshift prop for one of the tiles did not work. Stacking currie tiles is not something I have mastered yet as one look at my gallery will reveal.... Both tiles fired in oxidation at cone 10 in the same firing. Interesting to see the impact of changing the amounts of silica and clay on the size and look of the oilspots. This first one is on a whitish stoneware body. The second one is on an irony body. both tiles were in the same firing. The body type did seem to make a subtle difference, my best guess is because of the iron in the body adding to the iron in the glaze.

Nice work