ATauer

I’m in the hospital so I don’t have photos. And I really don’t see how photos would help, I’m not asking for suggestions on how to design the saucer, just trying to see if there were any ways I hadn’t thought of to avoid firing it three times. It will be completely glazed all over, so it should not weep onto anything, but he does know not to keep it on anything precious or if so to put a mat under it, like you would for terra cotta (which is also lowfired and I have many many commercial terra cotta pots with plants in the house and they do not weep ever. The only concern is potentially overfilling when watering and having the saucer spill over. I’m really not concerned that the saucer is going to take away from the Moon Jar. I will take some photos of it as just a Moon Jar for my portfolio before I send it off, and the way I’m picturing it in my head looks really nice- less recognizable as a Moon Jar but a very nice round planter with very interesting texture and a beautiful glaze even if it is commercial, with a low wide saucer that I think provides a nice accent for it, considering that very few people who are going to see his planter are going to be like “Hey, that was clearly a moon jar and now it looks like less of one because of the saucer!”. I think we sometimes forget that most people don’t know what any of those kinds of things are unless they are collectors. The saucer will be very visible, he wants it that way, and considering that it was my first moon jar I didn’t put as pronounced of a foot as I could have, plus some of that foot got broken in the kiln, hence it turning into a planter, so as it is just looking at it plain you don’t see a ton of foot as it is. In this situation a pedestal type style really wouldn’t work with it but I will keep that in mind should this ever happen to me again! I raku moon jars, which are not supposed to be functional but some people do want to use them as vases or planters, and I simply tell them it is not waterproof (although is very well waxed) but at least for planters you actually want some absorption and porosity, so someone may some day want a raku saucer to go with their raku moon jar and I will keep the pedestal idea in mind as an option.

The thing about only using as a body stain is something you can just ignore. I use stains a lot, hence planning on using the black stain to fill in the low texture and make the whole thing look darker, but I could definitely take a small portion of glaze and mix some black stain into it and see if it darkens it. No harm in that and I would learn something useful whether or not it works. I have never heard of anyone darkening a commercial glaze with stains, but with studio glaze recipes people will mix oxides and stains to achieve certain colors, so I think it has a chance! If it doesn’t work, or does but just doesn’t look that great, I know the three firing method will work so since no one else but you has come up with another way to try, I will just bite the bullet and fire three times, but fill up the kiln as much as possible with bisque or test tiles so it isn’t getting wasted, and possibly firing it a little bit hotter at cone 04 instead of 06 may even make the teal darker as well. I have seen teals get much darker, almost black, when going from 06 to 6, and while 06 to 04 isn’t too much of a change it is at least a little hotter. Thank you for the idea.

The Moon Jar has several chunks missing from the bottom, which the buyer knew completely ahead of time and doesn’t care, it actually provides just about the right amount of space for a planter with should have a hole in the bottom for water to come out so it should work very well. Also he is using it for his “pet” orchid, and orchids, as someone who used to collect them on a small scale, do not require a lot of water, so the saucer is really for him more for decoration and just to make sure even small amounts of dampness or water that flows through doesn’t damage his table. I realize more than he does that a Moon Jar with a saucer will look kind of funny to cermacists, but I believe if I make it to the right ratio it could still look good, you would just be missing the profile of the foot- that is part of why I am doing at least 3 versions of it- partly because they always say for commissioned work that you need to make three versions in case something happens and you won’t delay the order by having to redo it. I will be using a terra cotta flower pot saucer of the right size to help as a mold, then add the matching texture. I do appreciate why you think doing it at cone 6 would be better, and no I haven’t had the time to try the glaze at cone 6 and see how it looks, in general dark teals in my experience from cone 06 tend to get very very dark, pretty much black, when moved to cone 6 which is why I haven’t tried it. Technically I did not buy exactly the same clay, Continental Clay’s lowfire earthenware is just awful, I had to use it for two sessions of a class, right after the talc mine switch happened and unlike other companies they did not adjust their recipe, so instead of its former brilliant white it was a horribly ugly buff, we all had to put white slip or white glaze on pieces before we could glaze it usually because all the glazes available in that class just looked horrible with it. It also was terrible to use, very short, cracked easily, and was no fun at all- I convinced my mom to do one of the sessions with me and she continued after I left for another session where the teacher, who was very mad at CC for not alerting anyone to the change and they still advertise on their website that is a very bright white. So she switched to a cone 6 stoneware that my mom got to use for the first time something different and was blown away at how much better it was to work with. The other supplier in town, which I fell in love with their clays then made the horrifying discovery that 90% of their stonewares and even all their porcelains weren’t vitrified, most not even close to vitrified, but they had stocked up a lot of their very nice, so bright it is almost whiter than their porcelains earthenware so they could keep selling that while they worked on a talc free recipe that was still very white, and bought that, having heard a lot of good things, but not wanting to go back to lowfire temps as I am much happier with cone 6. I do have some cone 06 glazes that I had bought while in that one class, because they just didn’t have enough options I liked, and then very soon after stopped taking the class (well the teacher kicked me out, saying even though I had only been in the class for two 7 week sessions I was too advanced because I progressed super fast from doing a lot of self-learning, and that I should find classes with more opportunities, which I had already done when she sent me that email. I have taken a handful of classes but am almost entirely self-taught and also draw on my academic sculpture background from 20 years ago when I majored in metalcasting and mixed media sculpture). I plan to use up those lowfire glazes while doing raku, as in addition to actual raku glazes you can use any lowfire glazes and even sometimes use midfire or high fire glazes, although those require some special techniques and will look different as they won’t fully melt. I don’t remember how much the lowfire clay cost, it was pretty reasonable although as for all clays at MN Clay Co more than what Continental would sell. But compared to all the other clay I bought that I’m very limited in how I can use it because it isn’t close to vitrification and for the porcelain also isn’t translucent like they told me, that one bag of earthenware is a drop in the bucket for me. I can try and fill up the kiln more when I fire it, fire the saucers slightly higher at cone 04 perhaps so they could go in with a big load of bisque…I also bisque at cone 08 for raku and alternative firing, but I worry the glaze won’t melt enough. Otherwise everything else always gets bisqued at cone 04 so I think that should work. The other thing I could do is fill the kiln with a lot, and I mean a lot, of glaze test tiles, as I have a huge amount of new glaze recipes I need to try. So I think either way would solve the issue of firing and almost empty kiln- which I was partly worried about less from wasting energy that I was the change in heatwork that can happen when you under or over fill your kiln.

Hey, you guys can have a bad attitude about commissions all you want, but I love commissions, with always the caveat that I have artistic control and final say- this is out of the ordinary for me as I don’t make functional work, I am a sculptor, so I would be endlessly happy to get tons of sculptural commissions. I’ve been working on trying to make that a regular thing for me. I’m doing this functional commission plus a set of 4 mugs for him because he is my friend and he bought my first piece, paying me more than triple what I asked for it because he said I needed to charge more for my work. I absolutely do not ever make mugs, I have a firm ban against them, but I’m looking forward to working with my friend to make a set he’ll like, while getting to have a lot of fun with surface decoration. But those will be the only mugs I’ll ever make. Maybe commissions for potters is different than for sculptors, I hardly ever hear other sculptors complaining about getting commissions, most are overjoyed. We in fact frequently are competing for them.

That won’t work, I’ve already stated that I tried doing that with the pot, the glaze is very opaque and nothing under it shows through.

This is a particularly good friend, so I do not consider that it is biting me at all, I’m happy to make it for him. And I love commissions and wish I could get lots of them- with artistic control. Making a coordinating glaze would take up way more time and make much more work for me than simply firing a third time with a mason stain wash, my only question which no one has answered is whether it is possible to put it on and wipe off the excess without wiping off the base glaze, if I tried to do it in one glaze firing. If the texture were any different I’m sure I could figure something out with wax, but the way this is done I don’t think that would work, or at the very least it would take me endless hours of very carefully painting very thin lines of wax on a rather large pot and it also doesn’t seem efficient. I was simply hoping someone had had a similar experience and managed it in one step instead of two. It doesn’t seem like it though, so a third firing it is. If I did what you suggested, I would also have a 25 lb bag of cone 06 clay that I have no use for that I spent money on, at least this way a good portion of it gets used and I can probably come up with some additional things to make out of the rest of the bag to fire with it. I also would have a nearly full bottle of 06 glaze that would go to waste as well…really not an efficient use of what I have spent my money on, when I didn’t know that I was surprisingly soon be able to fire to cone 8 if I wanted on 3 kilns that I had no idea I would own and be able to have my own studio and be making my own glazes as soon as I was able. My expectations were that I would have to take classes and pay to fire elsewhere and work out of a 4ft x 2 ft space at home for years, I’m very lucky that things changed rapidly and I was able to turn full time professional much faster than anyone could have expected. But that doesn’t mean I’m not going to use up what I bought before. Besides, you haven’t seen this glaze, it would take way more time to make a complimentary glaze that to just do an extra firing, I really am rather surprised that you would think that was a better route.

I expressed my extreme displeasure that this is a commercial glaze not one of my own that I make now. Therefore I cannot match it or alter it.

I had actually put two washes of different underglaze colors under the glaze when I made the moon jar, and unfortunately they did not show through *at all*. The glaze is quite opaque. I really wish it wasn’t!

So I had already watched half of this video, and have actually done this while doing majolica. But what about if you have a glaze on something very textured, and you put a black mason stain to get into all the crevices, and then want to wipe it off so it isn’t on the tops of the texture? Won’t that just wipe off the glaze you have on? See, I have this conundrum, I made a moon jar vase a while ago, and because my teacher didn’t pay enough attention- in fact she admitted she had worried the bottom might not be totally dry yet but she fired it anyway- so the bottom cracked and lost large pieces. I glazed it using a commercial lowfire glaze that I had bought because I didn’t like the options we had in that class, at the time we were using lowfire white earthenware, as soon as I moved on she switched to a cone 6 stoneware which drove me insane because I’d been begging her to do that after the talc change and she finally did it when I left. Anyway, it at least made a perfect planter, and an internet friend insisted on buying it for $100, telling me I needed to charge a lot more for my work. A while later, he commissioned a saucer for it, which makes perfect sense. The planter/moon jar has heavy texture created by a really large metal serrated rib. He wants the saucer to match, except he wants the teal color to be a little darker. Which, damn it, if I had been able to be making my own glazes then like I am now, would not be a problem, I could easily take a teal that I had made and make it a little darker and do a few test tiles. But since it is a commercial glaze, I can’t do that, and there is no way I can perfectly match the color, teals are hard enough and there are very few recipes out there for them. I know how to make them, I just can’t perfectly color match it and make it a bit darker. So the only solution I have come up with is to put black mason stain (I mix my stains 1:2 with frit 3124 usually) in the deep crevices, since I would be matching the texture. I believe that would make it look darker while still using the same commercial glaze. I plan on making at least three saucers to make sure I get the perfect one. I have been assuming though that in order to do this I will need to fire 3 times, bisque, putting the teal glaze on, and then putting the mason stain on and wiping it off the high points. I can’t figure out a way to do it without the third firing, because there is no way I can think of that I wouldn’t wipe the teal glaze off. And with the way the texture it, I can’t put wax or latex over it. Does anyone have any other ideas? The only reason I’m not excited about firing three times is at my home studio I fire at cone 6 except for my alternative firing. I’ll be using a very big kiln pretty much completely empty several times for this. I did buy before one of my suppliers changed their white earthenware recipe a bag for just this project, it is incredibly white clay so that at least is good. I have no idea what I’ll do with the rest of the bag, I don’t imagine it will take me a whole bag to make three saucers. And of course I can’t fire it at midfire because the glaze is cone 06. Ugh.

Thank you for the book recommendations, I’ll get them from the library immediately. In terms of non-ceramic art, I’m pretty boring favoring Van Gogh (enough to spend over $100 on a mug where the artist impressively copies his and others paintings. And it wasn’t even Starry Night, so when she eventually has that for sale again I’ll fork over another $100, for mugs that are too much works of art for me to use because I know I’ll break them. It’s displayed along with another mug and a teapot I’m all afraid to use) and Monet of course, as a sculptor I was incredibly obsessed with Rodin, despite not being a figurative sculptor like him, but his ability to convey emotion in his pieces is unparalleled. Of course he was rather an ass it turns out, actually forcing his assistant, sculptor in her own right, and long time mistress into an insane asylum for a few years, I think because she was getting so good and getting recognition he was threatened. I actually consider her, Camille Claudel, to be my favorite sculptor outside of ceramics or my other medium glass. I find that I am developing a huge huge range of influences in ceramics and glass with current artists, top for ceramics for me are Beth Cavener (again another figurative sculptor!) and Rosette Gault, who invented paperclay which is what really got me from just using clay as an intermedium model to be casted into metal or glass, and obsessed with ceramics. I love her work. I’m using the save feature on Instagram a lot, and go back through the different categories I have set up when I need inspiration (what I come up with rarely has much obviously in common with the work that inspired me, but I guess if I would go back to it I would find some details) or just to enjoy the vast amount of makers that I adore their work. I’m not sure how much I steal really, not much of my work even references historical ceramics, although I am going to be attempting a body of work of cone 6 majolica on black stoneware once I find the right white glaze…there are some great glazes but black stoneware is finicky especially about Superpax for some reason. I just hadn’t seen that done, and I plan on leaving part of each piece unglazed so that it is obvious it is black stoneware and not terra cotta, including some carving and Sgraffito, with more modern abstract majolica paintings. Obviously leaving parts of the piece unglazed or carved is not traditional majolica, but it looks gorgeous with the contrast between the majolica and the black clay and if I don’t do that I won’t be showing that I’m spreading majolica from its roots. My other work is 100% different, lots of large scale sculptures that have to be put together after firing them in sections, doing medium and even some small paperclay handbuilding that explores the limits of paperclay’s fantastic abilities, including a lot of building with slip or with textiles that will burn out. I also have a series I’m making dipping ripped pieces of paper from my days as a biology professor, using up the huge pile of corrected tests and labs I have. I name them after biology tests and labs, but the writing burns out in the kiln and it leaves incredibly thin vessels mostly so far that are translucent. I have a whole deep meaning behind it but it is stuff about academia that no one is going to guess, sadly. I love a huge variety so I use colored clay with my paperclay, have a very small selection of molds that I throw away after so many uses, for strata casting different layers of colored slip and then carving into them. Everyone is different then and I polish them usually instead of glazing. I used colored clays in a huge variety of ways, including just inlaying it in various random shapes onto other colored pieces, I like making Nerikomi but when I make loafs I quickly get bored of using the same slices so have to mix it up, and feel stifled by kind of the rules of colored clay so I’ve been doing some stuff I haven’t really seen anyone else do but that’s always a lie, someone else has always done it. I have some artists who I am obsessed with their work, but other than some people particularly in raku, pit, and saggar firing most are emerging artists not that much ahead of me, so I don’t want to name names. I’m starting to think maybe I need to steal more! While some of the work I am doing has some roots or precedent, it is mostly in the construction method, and not what I actually do with it. I’ll be very interested to read those books! Especially as I am arranging for several residencies this year with a few really rather high reaching goals for the spring and summer, that if I don’t get this year I’ll be really really busting my ass to get the following year. Really interesting points you’ve brought up. I’ll have to start looking at my work and trying to see if I find a little Monet in it etc!

It has been a couple weeks, and I just checked US Pigments where I have always found the best prices for tin, and it is $35/lb, actually down from a few months ago when I bought it for $40 (my local suppliers are sky high and dreaming anyone is going to buy tin from them at the prices they are charging). Irritatingly, Stannous chloride, obviously another form of tin I use for fuming in raku, is $45/lb at US Pigments. The place I drive 4 hours in my neighboring state to buy Stannous Chloride at $30/lb is out of stock (obviously I make the drive to stock up on some other things as well, they do a lot of raku including demonstrations every Saturday so they have Cobalt sulfate at an unbelievable price that they will actually drop if I buy 5 lb at a time, well worth it, plus then I don’t have to drive there as often. None of my local suppliers have ferric chloride and Dakota Pottery Supply can’t ship that to me like they could a lot of other things because it is so corrosive to metal none of the shipping companies will touch it. Thankfully a gallon lasts a while. They also sell pyrophyllite for the most ridiculous rock bottom price of any place I have found it, and again my local suppliers don’t have it but if they did it would be quite expensive, and I use 10 of it per 100 batch of my porcelain and plan to put it in the white stoneware I’m developing next, so it is worth it to drive there to save that much money when I need to buy 50-100 lb at a time. Plus my grandma’s is half way there, so I can break up my drive visiting her, and usually at least one of the 4 hour trips just do two hours and sleep over at grandma’s and break up the driving time). So I don’t know if the tin scare was just that, or if the suppliers just haven’t received their new more expensive stuff. I can’t predict US Pigments at all, they may very well have a huge stockpile of tin and plan on undercutting everyone by a lot. Or I should buy a bunch now just in case, which I’d rather not do. On the fence about the Stannous chloride- one other place has it for $30/lb but their shipping is so damn expensive if takes away any savings. I’ve got a lb of tin at home, and a jar of tin from a grouping of oxides I bought along with some tools and stuff at a potter’s estate sale. The husband clearly had no idea what he had. I did give him a fair price for all the stuff I bought, but I got bottles that have to have at least a lb of copper carb, cobalt carb, manganese, and tin. Two lb seems like a pretty good amount to me, on the other hand I’ve been collecting a ton of recipes with 1-5 tin in them, and for some reason I don’t totally understand it seems like every raku recipe has tin in it and I don’t know why, it isn’t needed for opacifying and due to the lack of educational materials on how raku recipes work, I don’t understand how tin makes copper lusters and a lot of the multi-color recipes work- I will be making some test tiles without tin to see how they change. Red lusters and turquoises that turn to gorgeous oxblood copper reds in reduction in the raku kiln I get, the copper needs the tin to essentially be a lowfire copper red. The rest I don’t get and hope my test tiles come out fine, because the amount of tin I will be going through with raku is going to bankrupt me. I just wish there were some decent articles explaining the chemistry!

In my exhaustive search for epoxies and varnishes and sealers that won’t yellow (I make large scale sculptures that have to be fired in sections and put together after glazing, doing cold finishing to cover the seam and match colors and glaze glossiness) I found every day thing yellows except aliphatic polyurethane. Now, your situation that doesn’t matter because they won’t be exposed to UV light. But they are great waterproofers, they withstand chemical attacks so well they are used on murals to protect from graffiti, so they would not degrade from any acid rain getting into the soil or any other chemicals. They are waterborne and not made of petrochemicals, don’t put of VOCs (or at least so low they aren’t detected). It is what I use to protect my outdoor sculptures, especially ones made out of adobe. The only real caveat is you should reapply every 5 years, which with what you said with the plants growing over them might not be possible. But I’d also guess, knowing what I know about these chemicals, that being face down in the dirt would lengthen its effective time and that I believe the waterproofness lasts a lot longer than the rest of its properties. You could also do what someone else suggested with flipping them over and coloring them with honestly anything, and then you would be able to reapply this if you felt you needed to. You could also do a little study and leave some that you don’t reapply and so how they do. There are not very many products made of this stuff, it is usually used as a topcoat for epoxy or concrete flooring or ramps, so it can be hard to find it in other than very expensive gallons (two part product, it has an activator). I have found that Lowe’s in the US carries a quart size version, which is very affordable. I’ll be experimenting with whether I can just mix portions of the two parts together so I don’t have to use all of a container up at once with the gallons. I would also look definitely into how vitrified your clay is and the ASTM’s porouness test. It is generally considered that it is ok to have up to 5% absorption in clay that is outdoors in freezing weather, but you should remember this is really based on bricks and they will still have a huge amount of spalling even if they are within the guidelines. In order to avoid that I prefer to vitrify my clay to 0.5% or less and seal it, as it would be horrifying for me to have one of my 6 foot sculptures that took so much work have chunks fall off it ruining them forever. You aren’t really in that situation. But, vitrifying and sealing would be my suggestion if you don’t want little chunks of your collars coming off over the years…it wouldn’t be terrible, but I’m sure you want them to stay as nice as possible…

MC6 is an excellent book but skips quite a bit of information. I think you would find some of the things you are missing by reading John Britt’s Midrange guide, and Robin Hopper’s book is fantastic, even if it is a bit out of date and still has some stuff in it that we absolutely wouldn’t do today. It will especially help your color development. I enjoy Linda Bloomfield’s books, especially her Special Effects Glazes, although her books besides that one can be more heavily on recipes but do have background information you need first. I’m forgetting the author, but the New Ceramics series book Developing Glazes really helped me learn more about testing glazes, doing biaxials, triaxials, quadraxials and introduced me a little to Ian Currie’s methods. The only thing I found frustrating about the book was its constant inclusion of lead in lowfire glazes despite being written around 2013 when all other glaze books of the period had firmly left lead behind. If you really want to dig deep, read Ian Currie’s book…but I think that may be something you might want to keep until you have more of handle on things. Spend time on Glazy- when you have an account a feed will just show up that you can narrow down to recipes or to blog posts (I recommend doing both, the blog posts are fascinating and I have learned a ton about glaze chemistry from them. Also by spending time looking at recipes you are interested in, or just the feed, you will see a rich comment conversation for many of them that often have multiple people problem solving or answering someone’s question that you didn’t know. It seems overwhelming but I managed to teach myself glaze chemistry well enough to be ready to start teaching introductory workshops on it within just a few months- and that wasn’t me deciding I was ready, a mutual glaze nerd was the one who told me I was far and away ready to start teaching basic glaze classes, and maybe even some specialty ones like using silicon carbide in oxidation or changing cone 10 glazes to cone 6. I was completely shocked when she told me that as I felt I had so so much more to learn (and I do) but once you dive into it the information comes fast and steady and you can pretty quickly pick up a lot of information. * Do make sure you research your colorants, know their toxicities and routes of exposure, read MSDS sheets on them, and then after that…don’t freak out. Most you really aren’t going to get enough exposure to or be handing in such a way as it has a route into your body*. Check out the episode of the podcast For Flux Sake with the toxicologist, it is really good. I did it by checking out every single glaze book from the library and reading all of them, even the ones I wanted to throw on a fire for having very incorrect information. I spent (and spend) a huge amount of time on Digitalfire, it is like Wikipedia, you look up one thing or just go read the lasted blog and get sucked down a rabbit hole of page after page and learn a ton of information. And Tony Hansen is a real sweetheart, if you are confused by something on his website just fill out the contact form and he will email you very promptly and thoroughly answer any questions you have. I found that out because I was frustrated that the information on pyrophyllite and mullite said that you could substitute a certain amount for the silica or some of the feldspar, but there were not even vague guidelines, and I had a hell of a time finding guidelines elsewhere (eventually found that you can substitute basically as much of either of those for the silica, not the feldspar, as much as you want, including completely replacing it, but it is more common to do about 50:50.). Tony immediately went to work using Insight to test various potential recipes with how much pyrophyllite or mullite you put in, and what effect it has, so he’s actually putting in a lot of work to come up with good guidelines. Ceramic Materials Workshop is hands down probably one of the easiest and fastest ways to learn a lot of what you want to know, not that it is a complete education. I felt I had learned enough on my own that I didn’t need their big intro course Understanding Glazes, so I chose their on demand Cone 6 Workshop which when you compare the lectures between the courses they are extremely close, with Cone 6 being a little shorter. You can sign up for the Intro course for lectures only or several times a year (like this July!) they do it with a full experience, labs, pre-lecture readings, meetings every two weeks with the Katzs for questions and chatting. I’ve never heard anyone say they regretted they took it, or really much of a bad word about it. I signed up for their clay class lectures only because I needed the information right exactly then, but they allowed me to upgrade for this July so I’ll be able to do the full class with labs and so forth, and while I managed to develop a pretty great porcelain recipe from just the lectures, I’m planning on developing a white stoneware and maybe also a porcellanous stoneware, although I’ll probably just mix my whit stoneware and porcelain together to make it a lot easier! If you don’t want to do that, I do believe if you sign up for a pretty low amount per month of the CMW’s Patreon there is a zoom open chat with Matt Katz towards the beginning of each month where you can ask tons of questions. It’s an affordable way to get face time and actually get your questions answered, unlike the lottery that is For Flux Sake. I’m planning on doing it after I have finished my clay class since I will have face time there. But I will probably only sign up for a few months at a time, when I have burning glaze questions. You don’t have to do it the full year. I have only actually so far done about 30% of my CMW cone 6 workshop, but that is because I skipped around instead of going in order to get the lectures I really needed answers from at the time, which was fantastic, and now I’m starting from the beginning and trying to mostly go through it in order, with plans to rewatch some of the ones I watched first. It is not the only way to learn by far, I definitely learn stuff from the CMW courses but a lot of it I already know through lots and lots of reading. It really is the cornerstone of learning glaze chemistry. There are some great resources on YouTube, John Britt does a fantastic free glaze course that he continues to add videos to and he is great at explaining things, and loves demos. And he will go over a lot of the real basic stuff, he does not skip that, so that might be just what you are looking for, as just like his books he really covers things but he gets to expand on his books a ton with his series. I highly recommend checking him out. For glaze software, honestly if you can get a refund on HyperGlaze try to, just using Glazy and opening up some extra features by becoming a patron (preferably through paypal- I just paid my whole year at once for $20 and I know it is going to an incredible nonprofit and that Derek Au is not making any money of it, quite the opposite actually). Glazy usually has enough of what I need, but the best glaze software is definitely Insight from Digitalfire and it is extremely reasonable, plus they have a free desktop version. You would have a lot less head butting with either of those options, you just need to know with Glazy that you want to be a supporter so you have access to Target & Solve, and a couple other great features. You can also put in the cost of your materials and calculate how much a batch of glaze is going to cost you. Sorry for the long post, I just had major surgery and can’t fall asleep, and it seemed silly to break up each topic into its own reply to you. I hope some of this helps. It seems really frustrating now but you will be totally shocked at what you will know in a few months. You’ll be a rockstar, especially with such an enquiring mind.

Wow, thank you for finding some of these things. The prices for Strontium and Barium are fantastic! Much much lower than what I was expecting, having only found like 1 oz bottles of them being sold for ridiculous prices. Dakota Pottery Suppliers usually sells Stannous Chloride for $30/lb, they just can’t get any right now, so ClayPlanet is probably right, the issue with them is in general even for a very small light order their shipping is outrageous. I’ll have to pretend like I’m buying it and get to the part where it shows me how much shipping will cost, and compare how much the total cost is to US Pigments, which sells Stannous Chloride at around $45/lb, which really surprised me because for most things they are so much cheaper than regular pottery suppliers. I think they have Bismuth nitrate maybe, but I need Bismuth subnitrate, and I have no idea what the difference is, if any, but don’t want to buy it unless I know it would work the same. Bismuth is reasonable enough, about the price of Tin, just a little lower, although from what I know about the availability of Bismuth is should be a lot cheaper, it is not as rare as Tin! It just isn’t used very much! I’m slowly working on a long term research project with a ceramicist with decades of experience who was previously a molecular biologist (I was a veterinary epidemiologist) so we get on well in terms of having strong research backgrounds and a strong interest in doing art research. I have a dream of developing a glaze that can be applied by torch without any firing in a kiln, without cracking the surrounding sculptures or doing any of the myriad problems we have to overcome. I make large scale sculptures that I have to cut into sections to fire in my kiln and do an exhausting process of epoxying them back together, hiding the seams, color matching an glaze or terra sig or whatever, and then put a cold glaze over it to try and match the rest of the piece. Unfortunately all the cold glazes on the market turn yellow, sometimes within a year, from UV light exposure, and I hate hate hate the idea of that happening. I started a blog question about it on Glazy and was basically slammed by almost everyone, most saying there are plenty of ceramics in museums that are priceless artifacts that have a yellow tinge, and young artists are too obsessed with the idea that their work will be in a museum- I do not actually think my work will end up in museums. I mean who doesn’t secretly hope that a little, but I’m realistic. I just simply don’t want any sculpture of mine to have the seams become completely obvious after all that work because of the cold glaze, and have anyone who has bought one or is displaying one have that happen. I will probably write into contracts that if that happens I’m allowed to come remove the cold glaze and reapply, hoping that by then there will be some truly non-yellowing products on the market. My co-researcher has done a lot with Bismuth and doesn’t understand why it isn’t being used in art ceramics (it is definitely used in industry) as it is next to lead on the periodic table and has most of the same properties that lead did with glazes, but without zero toxicity! So far trying to make some glazes with Bismuth and borax applied with a torch has just given us black gooey messes, but we are learning. We both know it will be probably years before we are successful and that it is most likely we will fail completely. But we both believe if we could invent it it would make life so much easier for sculptors like me but also have lots of other applications. I know of someone who applied raku glazes by torch to a 6 ft sculpture just after it had been fired sometime ago, I have no idea what his name is though. Raku glazes have a high chance of some of them working, the problem with them is the crazing & generally poor glaze fit/durability. But we are kind of starting with them, using Bismuth instead of boron frits or in addition to them, just as a starting point in our long line of experiments. We know all the things we have to keep in mind, making sure the surrounding clay doesn’t crack or worse, and so on, there is a long list! But we are ignoring those mostly at the moment until we get a glaze that actually works, and then we will target shoot all the ancillary problems. I also am not as worried about the thermal expansion and cracking as some people on Glazy were, because I believe if the rest of the sculpture were gently warmed with a torch and wrapped in ceramic fiber blanket and if the torch is not held too close to the sculpture and is moved constantly, it will be fine. I see people using torches on raku ware all the time to try and bring out colors in glazes if it didn’t come out of the kiln the way they want, or to heat up ware that was glazed fired and they want to glaze it again and fire it again, and a couple other random uses. As long as you constantly keep it moving and don’t focus on one place, and hold it about 8-12 inches away it is rare that they cause something to crack. Well, I have managed with the help of some of you to get this thread quite off track from my original post! But in a great way where I have gotten some very helpful resources and ideas and tips. I probably should try and steer it a bit back toward my interest in essentially watercolor painting on porcelain with soluble salts…I’m guessing despite Arne Ase’s book (especially considering it is worth $5000 at most sellers) it didn’t catch on too much. I’ve had a hard time identifying anyone who does or has produced work like he did, and really the only person I know who is using soluble salts a great deal at all is Marcia Selsor in saggars…I’m trying to remember from the article she wrote, I have read it several times, but cant’ remember what kind of kiln she uses. It would certainly be helpful to connect with her and hopefully get some more tips, but essentially for the most part what she is doing is in reduction no matter what kind of kiln she is using, with probably some level of oxidation if her saggar isn’t completely sealed which I don’t think she does, so while I will hopefully get some tips on using soluble salts in saggars and in pitfiring, I don’t know if she can help me with using them in straight oxidation. I feel like someone, somewhere, must have tried that. If the soluble salts were significantly cheaper I wouldn’t care and would be fine doing lots of test tiles and test pieces to figure out what salts can produce what colors and what colors I can get by mixing or layering them…it would just be nice to have some information to go on so I don’t spend a bunch of money on something that produces a color I hate and will never use, or worse, disappears, as some of them did in reduction. We really need more information on soluble salts in the literature and hell just on YouTube.

I thought I had kept up with all the Glazy blogs showing tests, but I missed this one. Glad to find that the 1200 mesh that I have is the best performing! Very interesting data. Absolutely awful glaze though, color wise! I had found out from various sources that I should only use 0.15-0.3 SiC and that recipes that have 1% I should be wary of. A little absolutely goes a long way! Thanks! I’m very intrigued about the comments about boron carbide replacing frit, I will have to look more into that since boron in frits is such a pain with copper reds. At cone 10 even but especially at cone 6.

So far for saggar firing/pit firing I haven’t had much problem with them soaking into my bisque too much. I bisque at 04 so it isn’t terribly porous. I bisque at 08 or 06 for raku but not for my other alternative firing most of the time, specifically because I don’t want the salts to absorb too much. I do love CMC, I use it as a glue with my glass work so I was amused when I got into ceramics to find out how it is being used so differently here, but also recently finding out that it is actually the main/only ingredient in most wallpaper pastes! Very versatile stuff. I have no objection to using it in general to paint on, mostly right now I am spraying or sponging on in order to still allow for flashing from the combustibles and to make it look like the color fumed on to it naturally…instead cheating and making sure I get color! My guess at least with copper sulphate is that if it is put into the right glaze it would mostly stay in the glaze and only a small portion would become soluble. Mostly because Tom Turner used it and mentioned nothing about having problems with it soaking into the clay or out of the glaze, and in fact his test tiles with the copper sulphate in my opinion are brighter and more beautiful than the copper reds he got with copper carb. Rather off topic…I am a huge evangelist for paperclay. I try not to use any clay that isn’t paperclay when I can help it. But I’m super allergic to mold and I also like to mix up big batches of my own recipe of porcelain with cellulose and store it as slip or soft slabs, instead of making small amounts as I go that I would use up before it would go bad. Because duh duh duh, I found out that 0.02-0.2% of copper carb by the clay’s dry weight mixed in is the best preservative ever, way more effective than bleach without the dangers of bleach. It is such a small amount in the clay that there are no toxicity issues with handling the clay bare handed, it doesn’t color or flux the clay, and it can make the clay last 2 years or longer. Copper carb is definitely not as expensive as cobalt, but it is still about $9-12 whether I get it from US Pigments or my local supplier, and it adds up when adding it to large amounts of clay frequently, whereas my 3 lb of copper carb would otherwise last me several years if just used in glazes. Copper sulphate on the other hand I found 2 lb free in my basement left by the previous owners just as I was starting to do alternative firing, so the timing was incredible, even using it a lot that 2 lb is going to last a long time. And I’ve looked it up at my local DIY stores to see how expensive it would be to buy once I run out there versus at my supplier, and it is sooooooo cheap….10-20 lb of it for dollars. I believe any copper substance would act as an effective preservative, but I’m wondering if using copper sulphate in my clay would be too dangerous, even at the small amounts. I’m not sure what its solubility would do to my clay, if anything, and whether it would be caustic or absorb through my skin, which is of course what we worry about when it is more concentrated….would definitely welcome thoughts especially from anyone with more experience with it. I’m a recovering scientist, but my 4 years of chemistry classes did not cover anything that would help me with this!

I have seen Tom Turner’s reds, but he was firing at cone 9/10, whereas I have to fire at cone 6, and the boron used to get copper reds at cone 6 interacts a lot with the SiC, so it is much more tricky and there are many fewer recipes, and unfortunately I have been warned against just taking a gas reduction recipe and adding SiC to it because of the boron. Really I have to lower recipes from cone 10 to cone 6 yet do it without using a ton of boron, in order to have enough recipes to try, and finding ways to do it without having too much boron so far has not been very successful for me. Which is why I would really love to find a way to fire them in a reduction atomosphere in a saggar somehow. Things could be worse, I can get some very gorgeous oxbloods with raku by putting the raku into reduction for 30 minutes once the glazes start to melt, and a lot of the copper glazes will turn gorgeous oxblood colors that I usually just spray with water after taking them out of the kiln and allow them to cool, and don’t do post-fire reduction. It is the only way right now I can get fairly consistent copper red colors I love, though I continue to experiment with SiC. It works wonderfully with celadons and Juns, I’m not sure why it has so much more difficulty with copper reds. When I have more time I plan to do some biaxials and triaxials and attempt to develop my own cone 6 SiC copper red that is actually oxblood, instead of the handful that are on Glazy that are frankly pretty awful colors. Glazy surprisingly doesn’t even have very many good looking cone 10 copper reds that I can try to bring down to cone 6. I might try instead trying to bring Tom Turner’s recipe in his paper down to cone 6, he has frit 3110 in it which is rather odd to me for a cone 10 glaze, that frit has so much boron that I would guess the glaze would fire a LOT lower than he was doing, I am very curious why he chose that frit. So I’ll do a test tile first with just the glaze the way it is and see if it already fires to cone 6, and if not swap frits, add some more zinc oxide, and switch to neph sye. I just worry as always that I will have too much boron. Which is why I would do some biaxials and triaxials increasing other fluxes such as the zinc and the whiting, instead of the boron, and see if I can get it low enough. But if I change the feldspar, the amount of zinc, and the amount of whiting, not even considering the boron, it might very well produce a very different glaze with totally different colors and textures…the perils of glaze chemistry! It is really too bad we don’t have any chemical reduction agents that don’t react pretty violently with boron, because otherwise then there would be a lot less problems. I’m wondering if what I need to do because of the foaming/blistering of the SiC with boron is have a much longer drop and hold and slow cool than I normally do, I normally do for almost all my glazes Digitalfire’s drop and hold and slow cool, if I extend those holds maybe the glaze will have more chance to smooth out, more time to offgas which affects the color etc. That, or do what Tom Turner discovered, striking them- so fire them normally, then throw them in my next 04 bisque, as he says in his article that when he did that he got much brighter colors and I think too a smoother glaze. Of course, he was striking from firing them at cone 9/10, so I don’t know if there would be any difference if it had originally been fired at cone 6. Lots of things to consider and take into account when testing.

Thank you, the articles are fascinating. I use 1200 mesh SiC which seems standard on Glazy, I get it from a lapidary shop that sells it very affordably, I actually do sculpt in glass (casting and fusing) but my glass equipment supplier only has SiC that goes to 800, and a lot of us on Glazy feel that is still too coarse, you can see it. I fire at cone 6, the highest I can go in my kilns is cone 8 unfortunately, and there aren’t a lot of cone 6 copper red SiC glazes yet, most of the ones I’ve found don’t even look nice in their pictures. I want the kinds of oxbloods Tom Turner was getting! I’ll definitely have to try out my copper sulphate as I have a ton of it and it is so cheap, and it sounds like it may make even better reds. The difficult thing with trying to get a cone 10 copper red recipe down to cone 6 so I can use SiC with it is SiC is not a fan of boron, it tends to bubble up a ton and will ruin the glaze, but there aren’t a lot of other ways to lower the cones of the glaze without adding more boron than it can take. And for some weird reason a lot of cone 10 copper red recipes already have quite a bit of boron, which is odd for cone 10 recipes in general. I have a lot of experimenting and lines blends to do…there is one or two quite good SiC appropriate copper red recipes at cone 6 that work, I want more though. And what I’d really like would be the ability to make them without SiC- there are often just too many issues with SiC with copper reds. With celadons and Juns SiC tends to work wonderfully, you would never think looking at the glaze that they weren’t done in a gas kiln. But copper red is just a lot more difficult. That’s why I’d love to figure out a way to make them in a saggar without the combustibles sticking to the glaze.

Thank you! Yes, I’ve actually already been experimenting with foil saggars in addition to clay and metal ones, and soon (first in a pitfire before I try it in my kiln) I am going to try paperbag saggars covered in paperclay slip- I’ve heard some interesting things about them! They seem to last up to temps that are surprising. And since I’m obsessed with and make 90%+ of my work out of paperclay, I have plenty of its slip laying around. While I don’t have very many soluble salts, I do have ferric chloride, cobalt sulphate, and copper sulfate, and then of course with the saggars I put in all the various things, copper wire, steel wool, copper netting, yarn soaked and dried in salt, old cat food, banana peels (my family is not loving me saving weird food scraps and leaving them on a pile on the stove so they will dry out for my next firing), some seaweed that my mom buys as snacks that I can’t stand the taste of, fresher seaweed from the Japanese restaurant two blocks from my house (although definitely not the same as what other people tend to describe who live on the coast and have access to fresh seaweed, kelp, driftwood etc…makes me very jealous!), some traditional colorants like copper carbonate, RIO, sometimes a very small amount of cobalt carbonate but that is too expensive for me to use as much as I would like- the cobalt sulphate is great, I’m so excited to get blues, but it definitely has different coloring than cobalt carb. I bought a book in the fall on saggar firing in electric kilns, and was so excited, because while I love doing this kind of saggar firing at that time I really wanted to be able to fire copper reds in reduction without using SiC, as I’ve found a lot of the copper red SiC recipes don’t end up with the kind of glaze I’m looking for, and may have black areas around the edges or even within the glaze. Unfortunately it turned out her book said you absolutely couldn’t put glaze in the saggar, and to protect her elements she was very limiting in the amount of things she would put on her pots in the saggar- no salt of any kind, not even in tiny amounts, no soluble salts, just a few different oxides and some various combustibles. It was helpful to read that she did one pot in a saggar for a year, every day, to learn as much as she could about getting the results she wanted, and has continued to do so since then, without any problems with her elements degrading. I’m a little more willing to take some risks with putting in maybe some small amounts of Epsom salts and some sodium soaked items that have dried, as well as the soluble salts, as my saggar firing kiln is a tiny 18 inch high kiln I got for free that it turned out was manufactured to only go to 1800*F! So I’m actually happy to have found some use for it with those lower temps (it is also a kiln sitter), I also use it to make Glazed Composition (the new, less offensive term for Egyptian Paste, but it is really mostly being used in museum circles so potters haven’t caught on to the new name yet for the most part) since my recipe for it has a broad range of about 010 to 06, and while I’m intrigued with the idea of making much larger sculptures with Glazed Composition, right now I’m still getting the hang of sculpting with something so non-plastic so everything I make is small enough to fit in my tiny I-was-too-new-and-uninformed-to-buy-a-kiln kiln. That was my long way of saying I would love to find out more about the person who fired copper reds in a saggar in an electric kiln. I had found a thread that is archived from a few years ago where someone posted that he had produced a very decent copper red in a saggar in an electric kiln, with picture of the pot, he claimed he had only put a small amount of powdered charcoal at the bottom of the saggar to produce carbon monoxide, and a small amount of RIO to provide some oxygen as needed for the reaction, dozens of people commented wanting to know a lot more information but he only posted twice at the beginning and then disappeared, leaving lots of hanging questions. Most people really did not think that it could be done the way he said he had done it, but no one posted that they themselves had tried it with any success or failure. I’ve been tempted to try it myself later in the summer, and just see. I was very strongly planning on converting my old big Skutt I got for free that needed a complete rebuild pretty much, into Simon Leach’s downdraft conversion, but one of my mentors talked me out of it, especially as the only reduction glazes I really want to have fun with are celadons, Juns, and copper reds, which does not seem enough to merit having a gas kiln other than my raku kiln. I still long sometimes for a gas kiln. Celadons and Juns are much easier to get good results with SiC or with “faux” recipes, copper reds though just don’t look as good with SiC. So if I could make them in a saggar I would be ecstatic!

Thank you, I have actually read Marcia Selsor’s article a number of times, and it is very helpful, but because of space limits there was only so much information she could give about the colors the soluble salts make in a sagger, which it sounded like in the article hers was partially oxidized- not completely sealed so the atmosphere was completely reduction. It would be great if she would let me know where she buys her chemicals….I’m putting off silver nitrate until I’m really good because it is so expensive and I’ll just waste it on some ugly pots in the beginning! Since she is getting colors that do have some reduction, but not complete I wonder if she would be able to give me an idea which salts make certain colors in oxidation in regular firings. She very kindly included a list in that article of some of the salts and what colors they would make at what temps, but specifically for saggar firing. Which I will be doing a whole bunch of as well, I already was into saggar firing but her article really got me more excited about being able to have more color! I very much want to paint on porcelain panels and tiles in particular with the salts as well, Arne Ase really gave me the bug for doing watercolor effects, and nothing can do these kind of watercolor effects except the salts, Certainly underglazes and stains/oxide washes can’t approach this! Okkkk…only posted once before so let’s see if I can find out how to send message to someone.

I am just getting into using soluble salts for pitfiring, saggar firing, and raku. I am having a really hard time finding most of them- I randomly found from the previous owners of my house that they left a 20+ year old 2lb bottle of copper sulfate, which is great, and I got a pretty good deal driving 4 hours to Dakota Pottery Supply to get some cobalt sulfate. They were out of stannous chloride, I did buy a gallon of ferric chloride. Steven Branfman’s books on raku have a very small amount of information about fuming during raku, he gives some recipes called Biz’s Peacock Blu and Biz’s Ruby Red that have the same materials just different ratios- Stannous Chloride, Strontium nitrate, and Barium Chloride. He also has Biz’s Opal fuming recipe which is Stannous chloride and Bismuth nitrate. I am having a very hard time finding most of these materials. US Pigments has Stannous Chloride for quite a bit more than Dakota’s Pottery Supply usually sells it for, but the others US Pigments doesn’t have. Googling I have found some materials, and other soluble salts (I have been reading Arne Ase’s Water Color on Porcelain) in very small amounts for very high prices. I’m interested in doing fuming as well as using some of these soluble salts to paint/glaze on to porcelain…Arne Ase’s book is great but he did all his testing in reduction and I can only do oxidation, and he also tended to use slightly different materials than I have available..like cobalt chloride instead of sulfate. If anyone has some suggestions for chemical companies that may sell some of these I would really appreciate it- I am not having good luck with finding them for the most part at pottery stores. If any of you have done the raku fuming with Biz’s various concoctions, since the book gives me pretty much no guidance and just says to experiment- well I love experiments, I am a scientist, however these are very expensive materials so I’m less inclined to just do a bunch of guessing until I hit on the right way to do it and when those fuming recipes will actually make the colors they claim, so any advice on the best way to use them would really be appreciated. For a lot of these salts I intend to spray or paint or sponge them on to bisqueware before putting them in saggars or pitfires with other colorants and combustible materials to try to get a variety of beautiful shades, to fume glazed and maybe unglazed ware in raku, and if I can find enough to decorate porcelain with them…at that point I definitely would have to do some experimentation to see what colors they make in oxidation. Thanks for any help!

I will be starting to use a porcelain recipe I developed myself in most of my work- most of which is sculpting, including a lot of large scale sculpture, but I also want to use it in raku and pitfiring. I know the hazards with it- 90% of the time the clay I use is made into paperclay, and paperclay is noted for doing well in raku and alternative firing especially with porcelain. I also have half my silica as pyrophyllite which should help with the thermal shock. I am also considering sometimes wedging porcelain with raku clay, as I do also use raku clay as well it just isn’t as smooth as I would like particularly for things like naked raku. What I would really love is to be able to go to Great Lakes Clay which I have read about in so many books and use their raku porcelain. It is a real shame they closed as I would be willing to drive to Chicago to get materials I can’t get locally. When they closed did they publish any of their recipes or even give any hints into how they made such a beautifully white, smooth, grog free raku porcelain? I’m still experimenting with my porcelain recipe and it will probably take months of tweaking before I am completely happy with it, but my goal towards the end of the summer is to also develop a white stoneware recipe that can be used for a variety of things including as a raku body, while somehow magically managing to have it be actually white. But I’m excited by the challenge. If anyone has any idea about the recipe Great Lakes used, if they sold it to anyone, if anyone even just was told a vague story of some of the things in the recipes…anything would be helpful. Thanks!