All in Glazes
Glaze making is an incredibly straightforward process but knowing where to start is far trickier. There are hundreds of available ingredients, and it’s not clear which ones you should buy first. The good news is that for cone 5-7 firings, you can do almost everything with 5 ingredients in the glaze base. These are the ingredients you’ll need to buy in larger amounts, so simplifying the base recipe allows you to have a selection of glazes without committing too much money or storage space.
I love seeing the results of glaze tests, but I hate the slow process of making dozens of different glazes and applying them to test tiles.. Thankfully there is a more efficient way, at least for tests that have continuous blends between two or more glazes.
I recently took a glaze recipe and adjusted it to suit me, and I thought it might be an interesting case study for what changes I made and why I made them.
Glaze making is an incredibly straightforward process but knowing where to start is far trickier. There are hundreds of available ingredients, and it’s not clear which ones you should buy first. The good news is that for cone 5-7 firings, you can do almost everything with 5 ingredients in the glaze base
This glaze recipe has very quickly become one of my favourite bases, and the variation with minor changes in colourants makes it one of the most interesting.
Recipes and explanation for the Limited Edition glaze I used for Valentine’s Day 2021, a pink base glaze with darker pink and white speckles.
Frit 3269 is a Boron source for firing glazes at cone 6, but it has one key difference.
There are some glaze ingredients that are volatile during a firing, even in a cone 5 electric kiln, and will evaporate and travel around the kiln. These pieces make use of that, with a glaze where the volatile colourant is removed from the recipe and placed nearby in the kiln to give a flash of colour during the firing.
The Pebble pattern is produced by contrasting glazes mixing and flowing over a stamped design in the clay. It's a very simple process that can easily be modified and applied to a wide range of pieces
The Peacock Eye pattern is produced by contrasting glazes mixing and flowing over a stamped design in the clay. It's a very simple process that can easily be modified and applied to a wide range of pieces.
