Thursday, April 15, 2010

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.


Sunday, April 4, 2010

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!

Friday, April 2, 2010

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.