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Hello, I have a figurative sculpture piece in a cone 5 white stoneware that I made poor Iron Oxide choice on. I put a fairly light Iron Oxide wash on over the entire thing as bisqueware, then fired it to cone 5. I'm O.K. ( or fatalistic) with about 90% of the surface, but the region of the head, which is a distinct area, is bothering me. There are some medals on the figures chest and i ran some super fine sandpaper over one and some of the oxide came up, the sanded area looks white. However that surface is closer to a burnished surface then the face is (I think) - so maybe the face absorbed more Iron Oxide? So I was thinking if I could sand off the face and... I don't know, some white glaze, or even try to underglaze and re-fire? My problems are a) I don't know how deeply Iron Oxide permeates a bisqueware piece, and b) I don't know when to stop messing with something. It may be I should just leave well enough alone. Just tried to put an image up but I'm not sure how to have a URL for an image, my carbonmade account isn't helping. Anyway, any sage advice would be appreciated .

Hi - I was doing a glaze fire to cone 5 last night, and due to a dumb mistake on my part, the kiln shut off an hour too early. My question is this: can I save these pots by refiring them to the correct temperature? Can I do this without reglazing them? Is it even worth it? Any advice would be appreciated! Thanks!

I'm not sure why some cone 6 glazes change color rather drastically when refired to a lower temperature, but maybe someone can explain. Specifically, Coyote Ice Blue glaze fired to cone 6 turned out the usual beautiful multi-hued blue, brownish at the breaks. Then I decided to put some low fire clear glaze on the bottom and refired the piece at cone 06. The result was an awful, mottled green and brown camouflage-like color. Yeechhh!! So I refired back up to cone 6 again hoping to recover the blues. The piece now looks much better - the greens are gone - but the subtler blues are also gone and there is more and deeper brown. As it happens, I did the same thing to several other pieces with different commercial glazes on them. All of them suffered significant color degradation after the 06 low fire, and recovered only a portion of their original color in the second cone 6 fire. With one exception: a bowl with a combination of Amaco Textured Turquoise and Amaco Iron Lustre looked pretty bad after the low fire but almost completely recovered its original color after being refired to cone 6. I thought it was safe to refire pieces at a lower temperature, but I am obviously mistaken. Any insights on this phenomenon would be appreciated.

I use Southern Ice porcelain, bisque fired then sanded then fired to cone 9 and sanded again, I don't use glazes. I have started making complex neriage coloured work, using the same clay body. I sometimes develop fine cracks that can successfully be patched and refired to cone 9 but the result is an all over tiny bloating of the surface. I have read a lot about bloating and the possibility it is due to over firing but don't really know what that means. I have twice fired thinner, slip cast work (from the same clay) without developing this problem. Could it mean I need to slow down the firing at one or more stages?