A new grandbaby!

I have a new grand-daughter that I want everyone to meet. Isabel Josefine was born at the end of February and here she is at 6 weeks. She's just gorgeous and looks just like her Mommy, my beautiful daughter, Andrea. Check out her Etsy shop and the beautiful photocards she designs.

Name that Glaze!

This is a test tile for a glaze I mixed last month as I was testing different colorants on a High Calcium Semimatte glaze from the Hesselberth & Roy book Mastering Cone 6 Glazes. The authors call this glaze "field mouse brown," but clearly it doesn't look brown at all and nothing like the example in the book.

I was not going to go any further with this glaze, but something about it made me give it another try so I mixed a 1000 gram batch and here are the results.

All I can say is Wow! I love this! I can't decide what color it is: it's black --or maybe it's very dark purple. It's got gray shadings --or maybe it's a very light brown. What keeps coming to mind is "Smoke."

And, clearly, it's not Field Mouse Brown! I think that I put a lot more cobalt carb than called for in the recipe... whatever it was I did, I hope that I can keep doing it.

Next step is to mix a 5000 gram batch and go for it!

New Green Glaze

Got some really nice outcomes from this firing. The base recipe is the High Calcium Semimatte from the Mastering Cone 6 Glazes book by John Hesselberth and Ron Roy. One of my favorites is this green (called "Spearmint" in the book). I especially like the difference between a thin and a thick application. The thin application (seen in the little cups and the berry bowl) has more orange/light brown tones while the thicker application (seen in the ring holder and the box) is more of an emerald green.