How exaxly to make perfect slip or engobe ?

[Sepehrl]

I have a problem, I work with a red clay that has a cooking temperature of 950 to 1000, now how do I make a slip for it? I do not find any clay that is this degree of baking and is white

 

 

[Min]

Just to make sure we understand your question, you are looking for a white slip or engobe to put on red clay? The white slip or engobe will be brushed or dipped on and is not for slipcasting?

Welcome to the forum.

[PeterH]

I see that you are in Iran. Can you give us some idea of the materials you already have, and those you can get from your suppliers?

Here are two handouts from a reputable source, using ingredients readily available in the USA.
STA Decorating Slip https://www.vincepitelka.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/STA-Decorating-Slip.pdf
Table and Explanation of Slip and Engobe Composition https://www.vincepitelka.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Slip-Recipe-Chart.pd

@YanaAsh Can you comment on the availability of suitable products/suppliers in Iran?

[Sepehrl]

On 6/27/2022 at 12:20 AM, Min said:

Just to make sure we understand your question, you are looking for a white slip or engobe to put on red clay? The white slip or engobe will be brushed or dipped on and is not for slipcasting?

Welcome to the forum.

Correct

[Sepehrl]

On 6/27/2022 at 3:57 PM, PeterH said:

I see that you are in Iran. Can you give us some idea of the materials you already have, and those you can get from your suppliers?

Here are two handouts from a reputable source, using ingredients readily available in the USA.
STA Decorating Slip https://www.vincepitelka.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/STA-Decorating-Slip.pdf
Table and Explanation of Slip and Engobe Composition https://www.vincepitelka.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Slip-Recipe-Chart.pd

@YanaAsh Can you comment on the availability of suitable products/suppliers in Iran?

The traditional Clay is brownish and should be cock on 900 to 1000 , beside that there is something supplier calls Ceramic clay , Ceramic clays can be find in white and black color but after cocking both turn white , ceramic clays cocking temperature is 1000 to 1150 or something like that , I can not find any stoneware clay at least with a definition that I read in english , but this is a products I get access to .

 

So I like to use engobe technic for decoration on our traditional clay , but problem is I cannot find white clay with same temperature. 

[Min]

Linda Arbuckle adapted Daniel Rhodes slip and engobe recipes below. I would see if you can get the materials for the Cone 04 Wet recipe in the first column.

Are ceramic frits available to you in Iran? Any chance you can get Ferro 3134? If not can you get borax? It is often sold as a laundry cleaner. If you can get borax (but not the frit) swap 5% borax for the frit and dissolve it in really hot water and try a test with that. Don't make a big batch without testing it on your clay first. Get the engobe onto the clay as soon as you can. The drier the clay the more chance it will crack or flake off during drying and firing.

To make white you will need to add an opacifier, can you get any zircon based ones? You could use tin but it's much more expensive. Without the opacifier the engobe will still be white but not as opaque a white as with the opacifier. If you use tin use 1/2 the recommended amount of zircon opacifier called for in the recipe.

If you want other colours of engobe this link has the original recipes plus some colourants for other colours.

(I'm going to move this thread over to the chemistry section)

 

[ATauer]

On 7/3/2022 at 12:41 PM, Min said:

Linda Arbuckle adapted Daniel Rhodes slip and engobe recipes below. I would see if you can get the materials for the Cone 04 Wet recipe in the first column.

Are ceramic frits available to you in Iran? Any chance you can get Ferro 3134? If not can you get borax? It is often sold as a laundry cleaner. If you can get borax (but not the frit) swap 5% borax for the frit and dissolve it in really hot water and try a test with that. Don't make a big batch without testing it on your clay first. Get the engobe onto the clay as soon as you can. The drier the clay the more chance it will crack or flake off during drying and firing.

To make white you will need to add an opacifier, can you get any zircon based ones? You could use tin but it's much more expensive. Without the opacifier the engobe will still be white but not as opaque a white as with the opacifier. If you use tin use 1/2 the recommended amount of zircon opacifier called for in the recipe.

If you want other colours of engobe this link has the original recipes plus some colourants for other colours.

(I'm going to move this thread over to the chemistry section)

 

Since these recipes are a bit out of date, I would not recommend putting talc into a slip, especially if you want the slip to be white! So many recipes like this and for white clay bodies are based on the talc we no longer have access to and any talc you could find these day would make the slip darker. I’ve never understood why anyone wanted to put talk into slips anyway, research has shown that talc does not act as a flux in claybodies as everyone has always believes, it follows that it would not act as a flux in a slip either. And there really isn’t much use for magnesium in your average slip from the talc either.  You might have better luck with getting a slip recipe to mature at your very low temperature by adding whiting, which will flux the hell out of it and also act as an agent to make it whiter. I would recommend starting very low, adding only 1-2% of whiting, and seeing how it performs before considering adding any additional. Likely 1 or 2% will be quite enough. You could also consider adding in place of the talc some neph sye. Depending on how white you want it, you might want to significantly change your clay ratios and have more like 50 kaolin and 15 ball clay, especially if your ball clays tend to have a lot of iron and titanium in them. With using fluxes such as frit or borax, whiting, and neph sye, I would not be worried that the kaolin would be noticeably more refractory than the ball clay. I use a porcelain slip with similar amounts of kaolin and ball clay and have no issues with flaking or crawling, and my recipe is supposed to work from cone 06-10, but it is always a good idea to test first with the lowfire clays which are sometimes more finicky about their slips, but I have used my porcelain slip successfully at cone 06. But I’m not posting the recipe for that one now because I don’t believe it would be the best for quite as low as you are going. Good luck!

[Min]

1 hour ago, ATauer said:

Since these recipes are a bit out of date, I would not recommend putting talc into a slip, especially if you want the slip to be white! So many recipes like this and for white clay bodies are based on the talc we no longer have access to ... I’ve never understood why anyone wanted to put talk into slips anyway, research has shown that talc does not act as a flux in claybodies as everyone has always believes, it follows that it would not act as a flux in a slip either.

With all due respect I disagree.

Yes, the Daniel Rhodes recipe is an old one; it is also has the benefit of being used for decades with success.

Given that the OP is from Iran one cannot assume they are using materials with the same composition as is available elsewhere.

Recipe for the ^04 wet clay slip I posted above contains 5% talc. Even if the OP's supply of talc contains trace amounts of iron it isn't going to alter the colour of the slip noticeably, far more likely to have the significant amount of iron coming from the ball clay. A zircon opacifier will negate any deleterious effects said iron might impose. 

Porcelain casting slip recipe I developed contains 2% talc. It does indeed act as a flux as my extensive testing showed me. Absorption figures dropped by 0.5% with the addition of it. At ^04 the talc could very well be acting in another capacity than a flux.

1 hour ago, ATauer said:

...any talc you could find these day would make the slip darker.

If you are referring to the new CimTalc that Laguna is supplying, analysis below.  Silica, magnesium, calcium and alumina, no iron.

Edited July 19, 2022 by Min

[ATauer]

14 hours ago, Min said:

With all due respect I disagree.

Yes, the Daniel Rhodes recipe is an old one; it is also has the benefit of being used for decades with success.

Given that the OP is from Iran one cannot assume they are using materials with the same composition as is available elsewhere.

Recipe for the ^04 wet clay slip I posted above contains 5% talc. Even if the OP's supply of talc contains trace amounts of iron it isn't going to alter the colour of the slip noticeably, far more likely to have the significant amount of iron coming from the ball clay. A zircon opacifier will negate any deleterious effects said iron might impose. 

Porcelain casting slip recipe I developed contains 2% talc. It does indeed act as a flux as my extensive testing showed me. Absorption figures dropped by 0.5% with the addition of it. At ^04 the talc could very well be acting in another capacity than a flux.

If you are referring to the new CimTalc that Laguna is supplying, analysis below.  Silica, magnesium, calcium and alumina, no iron.

I hadn’t heard of this new Cim Talc from Laguna. It definitely looks like a huge improvement on the options in the Western Hemisphere. From everything anyone on Glazy has said regarding talc and color by impression was that definitely the Eastern Hemisphere was also having large problems with getting talc that isn’t full of iron and makes things very dark. I respectfully disagree that talc, if using the most commonly available talcs in both hemispheres not including this new talc from Laguna for the moment, would not have an effect on the slip in terms of color.  I saw the huge, just incredibly HUGE difference when Continental Clay changed their lowfire white claybody which had been brilliantly white before (and also much much better to work with, when they changed to the new talc it became very short, prone to constant cracks, and was an absolute nightmare to use and build with) and they just put the new Am-Talc in it with no recipe change at all other than that and it went from brilliantly white, honestly whiter sometimes than a lot of their porcelains, to a dark ugly, just terribly ugly buff. It no longer worked with hardly any of the glazes my friends who taught with it had been using. Everyone in her class ended up putting white slip over everything or using a white glaze under any other glazes and even under underglazes, if they had forgotten to put slip on it. There were some significant challenges when texture, which I used a ton of and so did most of my friend’s students (which included my mom, which is why I know so much about this), as you wanted to be able to see the texture but still needed to cover it with white slip, and using white glaze didn’t really work because you couldn’t put that on and then do Mishima which was very popular in that class and a technique I use extensively.  

I think in the case of a slip, even 5% of the talcs that are currently available worldwide would have a negative influence on the color, it seems like it has an outsized influence on color. As for its fluxing capability, I’m going off the data presented in the CMW clay class where Matt Katz did several studies firing claybodies with different amounts of talc in them compared to a control through a whole firing range appropriate for lowfire clay (I think up to cone 2 or maybe a little bit higher just to have the most amount of information) and found absolutely no change in both absorption and density, this was repeatable across a number of attempts, different claybodies, and different studies  and it was plain as day from the data that talc did not act as a flux, it did not ever, even a tiny bit, change the absorption or density measurements. Compared to what you describe seeing in your own clay, that can’t really hold up because it did not have density measured as well, it was not tested through a range of temperatures, and we don’t know if it is repeatable, or if the change you observed had anything at all to do with the talc…when I was talking to the owner/clay maker of Clay Arts Center in Tacoma and brought up my problems with the supplier I had at the time locally having horrifically high absorption rates even for porcelains at cone 10 he said that even with his own company the absorption rate they post is considered what you will find *within up to +/- 2%* because it can vary quite a bit depending on a lot of factors, the kiln, what temp or heatwork it was really fired to, exactly how you did the absorption test…if most people took the time and tested their own clay at the same temp/firing schedule a number of times over a month or something they will likely find variations in their results, that is just a normal property of science, in science we actually find it suspicious if we are getting no variation in our measurements because something with the experiment is probably going wrong then or if we are looking at someone else’s data we worry that it was falsified or that they did something wrong with measuring. A drop of 0.5% in absorption can happen absolutely naturally, or because of numerous factors including the temperature of the water that day, it is really quite a low drop in absorption that when testing my own recipe for porcelain I would have just tossed that data out or considered it a normal variation versus attributing it to what I was testing (amount of feldspar, amount of frit, amount of both, cone temp fired to, amount of whiting, etc). For absorption, unless we are going from 0.5% to 0.0% in a porcelain and it was extremely repeatable, I would need a lot of convincing to believe it was related to the talc. Since you said it was due to the talc, I’m assuming then you were testing a lowfired body, which have as a characteristic quite high absorption rates which means a change of 0.5% if the natural absorption is 7%, 10%, 15%, 20+%, I would need as I said a loooooot of convincing that it was repeatable and that it was due to the talc and not anything else in the testing process, and would likely have considered what would be, if actually due to the talc, such a minuscule change for such a porous body, to be not much different then what Matt Katz’s data shows- that it really does not flux and cause the clay to become closer to vitrification, because going from 11% to 10.5% is not actually going to affect anything and is not enough fluxing to be worth doing, barely enough of a change to really consider it fluxing. 

It especially is not then providing enough flux to make it useful in anything, so I would stick with my advice that the talc is not going to provide the fluxing that the slip needs and therefore it would be better to use different materials in its place, especially as worldwide, other than this new Laguna talc, no one has access to a talc that makes things white. If it had properties that were helpful enough to merit its use, I might consider the amount it is going to dirty up my slip worth it and use as much Zirconium silicate as I needed to make the slip white, but it really doesn’t have any use so…and while ball clays may have as much or more iron in them compared to the talc, in practical use that doesn’t seem to fire quite the same when you compare clays with a lot of ball clay in them compared to clays that used the new Am-Talc for their lowfire whites and found that their clay had become way darker than what we typically see with a similar amount of the lighter firing ball clays. Also, since ball clays vary so much throughout the world, I have been finding through conversing with people all over the world on Glazy that a lot of places, including I believe the Middle East, have some ball clays that have a lot less iron and titanium in them compared to the ball clays in the US. England even is an example of that, their ball clays for the most part are significantly whiter firing then American ball clays, just like their kaolins. So I would not assume immediately that Iran doesn’t have access to some possibly quite light ball clays, some of the ones I have seen on Glazy have less iron and titanium than a lot of the popular kaolins. 

Oh, and just to address the last point of your I think I didn’t address, in terms of at 04 talc acting in another capacity than flux, the only reason in claybodies to use talc other than the supposed fluxing which I still maintain does not happen, is it is an ok material to help with thermal shock. It is used in a lot of raku claybodies, I have never seen any data to back up that it works for thermal shock but it used to be popular in the older raku books for recipes for claybodies to have some talc for thermal shock (although a lot were also using it back then to try and make the claybody white while using a lot of fireclays and stoneware clays, which obviously doesn’t help with that anymore) or possibly just as a pretty inert filler for some clays, that wasn’t really supposed to do anything. I would say that the thermal shock reason probably doesn’t apply to slip, while the filler reason could but I think that this recipe really does need that talc replaced with one or more of the suggestions I gave in my last post, as I do not think the talc is a good ingredient and that it could be actively harmful (if it makes his slip less white, and he has to use more Superpax, which is refractory, then that could make it less effective or not work at all at the temperature he is trying to use it for. So it is not at all a benign choice). It does have the benefit of decades of being used but that doesn’t mean with materials changing that it may need to be significantly updated or no longer used, that happens with ceramic glazes, slips, claybodies etc all the time. It’s part of the lifecycle as it were of ceramics. Just because something worked 30 years ago and was working well for a while after that, doesn’t at all mean it works now. 

Personally, considering just how much fluxing he needs to have it work at the temp he is using, I would strongly suggest in place of talc he use whiting. Maybe not the entire 5%, testing will determine how much he needs, but he needs so much fluxing 5% is a possibility. And it has the added benefit of making slips whiter and interacting with the kaolin in such a way that it might be beneficial because of that too. I would say I would see how much whiting it needs and any few percents left either just leave it below 100 (and just recalculate to get it to add up to 100%) or put in a few percents of neph sye as that couldn’t hurt and might help, having some R20s in there might not hurt. )

[Min]

54 minutes ago, ATauer said:

I saw the huge, just incredibly HUGE difference when Continental Clay changed their lowfire white claybody which had been brilliantly white before (and also much much better to work with, when they changed to the new talc it became very short, prone to constant cracks, and was an absolute nightmare to use and build with) and they just put the new Am-Talc in it with no recipe change at all other than that and it went from brilliantly white, honestly whiter sometimes than a lot of their porcelains, to a dark ugly, just terribly ugly buff.

There is a new Amtalc? Did you mean Cimtalc? 

54 minutes ago, ATauer said:

Since you said it was due to the talc, I’m assuming then you were testing a lowfired body, which have as a characteristic quite high absorption rates which means a change of 0.5% if the natural absorption is 7%, 10%, 15%, 20+%

No. It is porcelain a slip as I said above. I'm don't think of lowfire as porcelain. 

54 minutes ago, ATauer said:

Oh, and just to address the last point of your I think I didn’t address, in terms of at 04 talc acting in another capacity than flux, the only reason in claybodies to use talc other than the supposed fluxing which I still maintain does not happen, is it is an ok material to help with thermal shock

At ^04 it is also very beneficial to prevent crazing. It's why the vast majority of lowfire clays have historically been based on 50 talc : 50 ball clay.

54 minutes ago, ATauer said:

For absorption, unless we are going from 0.5% to 0.0% in a porcelain and it was extremely repeatable, I would need a lot of convincing to believe it was related to the talc.

No. I went from 1.6% down to 1.0 - 1.2 And yes I ran many tests, thanks for asking. I'm happy with my results and don't need to convince anybody, thanks.

[neilestrick]

Talc is not going to react the same in low fire bodies as it does in high fire bodies. Those are two separate conversations.

4 hours ago, ATauer said:

the only reason in claybodies to use talc other than the supposed fluxing which I still maintain does not happen, is it is an ok material to help with thermal shock

Talc is used in low fire bodies to improve glaze fit/ reduce crazing.

 

[ATauer]

4 hours ago, Min said:

There is a new Amtalc? Did you mean Cimtalc? 

No. It is porcelain a slip as I said above. I'm don't think of lowfire as porcelain. 

At ^04 it is also very beneficial to prevent crazing. It's why the vast majority of lowfire clays have historically been based on 50 talc : 50 ball clay.

No. I went from 1.6% down to 1.0 - 1.2 And yes I ran many tests, thanks for asking. I'm happy with my results and don't need to convince anybody, thanks.

I am talking about the talc that we have available in the US right now, not Cimtalc, that this past fall all clay manufacturers had to switch what talc they would use and could sell because the mine that we had all been getting very nice white talc from was sold and the company prefers to use all the talc for its own products and not sell any of it. It was a huge, huge thing in ceramics that I think would have been hard to miss, as suppliers all frantically tried to change the recipes for their lowfire whites or stop selling a lowfire white altogether, people freaked out about what it would do to glazes but because of the way talc works in glazes and really doesn’t contribute color to it (it may affect colorants, that is different) it mostly didn’t make much difference, but some glazes have been sensitive to the new talc that we have been using since this past fall. That is what I have been referencing, the new talc we all use I believe is called AMTalc for brand, although I haven’t paid a huge amount of attention to the name of the mine of our new talc I just ask my supplier for talc and since there is only one that is what I get. I am certainly not talking about Cimtalc which I just heard about in this thread and appears to be a brand new product from Laguna that hasn’t even made its way to Glazy talking or using it yet. 

If talc reduced crazing and helps with glaze fit in lowfire clay bodies I would love to hear what the chemistry of that is. If it is just having a ton of magnesium I would be rather surprised that lowfire bodies, which often when they are wild clay do quite well without talc and still are able to fit glazes, but the idea that 50% of the body needs to be magnesium in order to fit glazes and not craze doesn’t sound right to me. 

I’m rather at a loss about why you would need talc in a high fire porcelain slip and why you would have even been measuring absorption for a slip (or even how, if you were drying it out to solid dry clay and firing it in order to measure absorption I would want to ask someone like Matt Katz if that really measures the absorption of the slip because they are in two totally different states, one with a lot of water, and I don’t think the absorption would at all be considered accurate or applicable to the slip. I don’t see how you could possiblly measure absorption in a slip nor why you would want to, or how it would be helpful. I’m not trying to tell you to take the talc out of your slip, I just don’t believe that it does anything for it. If your slip is working for you then I usually tell people not to change what they are doing. I am simply trying to help the OP with developing his slip by listing the reasons why it would likely not be helpful and actually harmful for his slip and what I would recommend he use instead of it. When recipes that were written when clays that no longer are available or feldspars or frits or the mines have changed and the product, like talc, is incredibly different than when the recipes where written, they shouldn’t be accepted at face value and I honestly don’t think the slip that was recommended that we are all talking about is a good slip for the OP’s needs. Just because it worked for decades at higher temperatures does not mean it will work now even on the recommended temperature let alone the temp the OP is trying for. I think we should be finding other slips or recommending ingredients for a slip based on today’s reality. 

[neilestrick]

@ATauer Some good info HERE.

[ATauer]

On 7/19/2022 at 7:37 PM, neilestrick said:

@ATauer Some good info HERE.

I know to go to Digitalfire when I need information but I am confident (and Matt Katz reiterated today in our clay class group meetup we have every two weeks that talc does absolutely nothing at low temperatures, that it does not act as a flux which is what everyone was saying it would do, and he has the data to prove it and I have seen that data and it is absolutely convincing. Talc does not flux lowfire clays or slips- Digitalfire is behind the times with not having that information available and also claiming that it does flux when there was never any data bothered to be collected on it before to prove that it worked.) As I said talc, outside of glazing, has some weak to moderate ability to protect against thermal shock so is used in some raku bodies and it behaves slightly differently at high fire but there are generally better things to use at c10 than talc for those situations. And here we have extremely, extremely low fire so the talc is not going to help in a slip and as I went over all before is likely to actively be harmful in some ways and others just act as a completely inert dirty filler. Thanks, but I did not need to be shown the page about it on Digitalfire, I am well versed in talc’s chemistry and in fact have newer more accurate information than Digitalfire has this time (nothing against Digitalfire, I love it, I email Tony Hansen back and forth, I go down extreme “Wikipedia” like holes with that website, but it doesn’t have everything and in fact Tony and I started communicating because his entry on pyrophyllite and kyanite were not complete enough and left me with questions still on how to use it, since his page just said that some amount of pyrophyllite could be substituted for silica or feldspar (turns out actually just silica, not ever feldspar) but completely vague on how much and what ratio to substitute it and I filled out the contact form at the bottom asking those questions and he emailed me right away to get more information about my questions and what I would like to see on that page, and then started working on Insight modeling various clay bodies with substitutions to come up with some answers (luckily I had found out in the mean time you can just substitute as much pyrophyllite for the silica as you want, depending on how strongly you want its properties, including completely substituting it for the silica. I subbed half of it for my silica in my porcelain recipe and it has been pretty perfect, if I ever start to feel like I need better fit with glazes amongst other properties I can easily tweak it.) Since then he has been a great source of information if I have questions about stuff that is not easy to find on the internet or in books. 

But his entry on talc needs updating. And I maintain we should stop fighting about talc for gods sake and just help the OP develop a slip that will work for him. 

Here at least are the two slips I’ve invented that work down to at least cone 06, both of them. The porcelain slip is whiter, without the need for much or any Zirconium to make it white. https://glazy.org/recipes/195664   https://glazy.org/recipes/234589  .  The porcelain slip might actually work better for you as it has a decent amount of frit in it which may help lower it to the level you need. If it were me and I still needed more fluxing to get to that temperature I would try 1-3% whiting. It really doesn’t hurt to try and it did wonderful fluxing for my cone 6 porcelain body, while making the clay whiter and more translucent (which wouldn’t be an issue here). 

[Min]

On 7/19/2022 at 5:02 PM, ATauer said:

I am talking about the talc that we have available in the US right now, not Cimtalc, that this past fall all clay manufacturers had to switch what talc they would use and could sell because the mine that we had all been getting very nice white talc from was sold and the company prefers to use all the talc for its own products and not sell any of it. It was a huge, huge thing in ceramics that I think would have been hard to miss,...

Cimtalc is available and the new go to talc in place of Amtalc. We had a discussion about it when it became available here starting in April of last year.

8 hours ago, ATauer said:

And I maintain we should stop fighting about talc for gods sake and just help the OP develop a slip that will work for him. 

 

Absolutely, please feel free to post talc related comments in the thread I linked on the subject of the new talc above. I don't think anyone here has been "fighting", we are respectfully in disagreement on some points.

If we keep the conversation on topic and more concise it should be easier for the OP to navigate.

 

[ATauer]

On 7/21/2022 at 10:29 AM, Min said:

Cimtalc is available and the new go to talc in place of Amtalc. We had a discussion about it when it became available here starting in April of last year.

Absolutely, please feel free to post talc related comments in the thread I linked on the subject of the new talc above. I don't think anyone here has been "fighting", we are respectfully in disagreement on some points.

If we keep the conversation on topic and more concise it should be easier for the OP to navigate.

 

Just a last word about talc, that Cimtalc got brought up during our biweekly hangout for my CMW clay class, and Matt Katz said it was basically garbage, and that we would talk more about it later (I know he doesn’t talk about Cimtalc at all during the prerecorded lectures so I’m hoping he will be talking about it during a future hangout). None of the students in the class were using it, and I’ve seen no mention of it at all on Glazy, everyone is using Texas talc/AMTalc for glazes and freaking out about the news that soon that won’t be available either, but no one seems to think of Cimtalc as a possible replacement. Instead people are talking about all the talcs throughout the world that could be shipped here. I have no idea what is going to happen with talcs, I try as much as possible to not use it in glazes at this point, and I refuse to buy anything from Laguna. They are a terrible horrible company (long story). I will have to hope that another source of talc will become available or I will have to change the few glazes I use that have it in there. 

[Mark C.]

(everyone is using Texas talc/AMTalc for glazes )-not anymore

This product is gone like many that come and go in ceramics, whether glazy has it in recipes is a moot point

There are other talcs out there-I use sierra light  in many applications  but not all.

In. ceramics it best to stock up on materials that you know you like and need

I have enough texas talc to last my career as well as other materials that now are long gone.

I have been thru at least 4 talcs that are no longer available  in the past 50 years

and that's just talc not to mention all the rest of the long gone materials.

 

Edited July 24, 2022 by Mark C.

[Sepehrl]

Thanks everybody 

I find kind of solution that works for me , 50% clay dust and 50% titanium or 50% clay dust and 50% opak ( it's a white glaze we called it opak ) 

 

I'm gonna try other ways you recommend if I can get my hand to materials , we have some powder called talc , we prevent clay from sticking to other things , if it's a right talc you guys taking about 

[Min]

@Sepehrl, glad you found something that works for you. Thanks for letting us know. There is a lot to digest in some of the posts above, let us know if you have any questions.