Friday, February 5, 2010

Glaze Tests -- Phase 1

My pottery group at Manassas Clay decided to test some new glazes this session. I have been meaning to try some of the recipes in Mastering Cone 6 Glazes (Hesselberth & Roy, Glaze Master Press, 2002), so I chose to try the High Calcium Semimatte Base 1 on page 86. In their book, Hesselberth & Roy present several glaze recipes that they developed, which pass their safety and durability tests. I did not venture too far afield in these tests. I mixed the glazes presented in their book and a few other options where I tweaked the colorants. I did 10 tests in all and now I will narrow down the choices to move on to the next step of testing, which is to mix 1000 gram batches of the glazes and fire them on a pot rather than a test tile. These are the ones I've chosen to move on to the next step (all the test tiles can be viewed on my facebook fan page). I welcome and look forward to feedback with respect to the colors!

3 comments:

Suzanne said...

I really liked 3 of your test tiles. In no particular order, variegated blue slate, oatmeal and 2% copper oxide. What a great pallet of color. I have been wanting to do some test tiles from the Mastering Cone 6 glaze book too. Thank you for the inspiration. I would love to see them on a light brown and dark clay too....do you have any of those:)

Anonymous said...

Beautiful results, love MC6:)

Graciela Testa Lynt said...

Suzanne: I only tried them on BMix. My only concern is that so many people are using these same glazes, but they do lend themselves to different results depending on the clay, the water and the firing. I'm going to try other colorants and maybe mason stains too...