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I've started making tiles and am successfully keeping them flat during drying by sandwiching them between pieces of plasterboard (drywall). All of my tiles are about 3/8" (10mm) thick. However, when drying border pieces, say 1" x 4" x 3/8", although they stay flat (in the z-axis), they nearly always bend upwards or downwards (in the y-axis). I'm using molochite-grogged clay appropriate for tiles and using a wall mounted extruder to make the borders. I'm drying the borders very slowly, say for a couple of weeks, but they nearly always bend by the time they've dried. Does anybody have any suggestions as to how I can stop this? I've tried using pieces of wood between the plasterboard to constrain the bending and butting many rows of the border tiles up against each other to try to keep them straight, without much success. I'm trying to make several feet of the borders at a time. There must be an established way to do this, judging by the amount of straight border tiles I see almost every day! Perhaps a dedicated type of drying rack? I've searched in vain to find one. Thanks in advance for your help.

I fired 20 4"x4" raku tiles today and all but 4 broke either during the firing or as soon as they were removed from the kiln. I did fire them propped vertically on ceramic brick so I could remove them with tongs. They were hand built tiles with leaf impressions using Standard Ceramics 239 Raku clay. They cracked in half or close to in half. What caused them to crack? (I have been doing raku firings for 40 years). Diane