Studio Update; Week of 1/9/23

This was the first official week back in the studio after spending a couple weeks back home with family. For the start of this next studio push my top priority needs to be glaze testing. I almost have everything down for a finished product that feels just right, but I am having a bit of a glaze problem. My base glaze pinholes a little bit. A lot of this is probably due to the dark clay body I am using but since I like to suffer, of course this is my favorite clay body to use. I am going to try and troubleshoot it on the glaze end. So I made a bunch of test tiles and got to work with some glaze chemestry. My first goal in reworking the glaze was to use a flux with higher fluxing power. After breaking the recipe down into a unity formula I was able to understand that this is a calcium dominated glaze with a fair amount of alumina and silica, so it is important that my rework of it matches. I could have done some of this on glazy and saved an hour or two but I am a little rusty on my glaze chemistry so I wanted to sit down and work it through so that I could really make sure I understand. Plus it's kind of fun in my opinion. So with that I got two new recipes that I am going to try, as well as a fourth recipe where I add 1 to 3 percent zinc oxide to the original recipe to try lowering the surface tension of the glaze. I can also troubleshoot with firing as well. I can try to hold at the top temp. during my glaze firing to help some of these impurities surface, I could put a hold on my bisque fire too, and the drop and hold technique was also suggested. Anyways, all that to say... I'm gonna figure this shit out and I'm going to figure it out within the next couple weeks. This week I also bisqued a batch of mugs and plates, started working on some new mugs and some small cup sets. I am going to hold off on glazing until I have that figured out, but at least I will have a lot of work to push through once I do. I also set up a date to test out a cone six residual soda with GH, we are shooting for the end of February.

Image 1: A mug in progress

Image 2: a Cup Set in progress

Image 3: test tiles drying out for the bisque

Image: 4 - 5 Reworking Sue's Clear into a unity formula

Image 6: Reworking the Unity formula into a new batch recipe