New Glaze Tests

Glazing is the one pottery task that I have struggled to embrace.  I am always worried that I have messed up a beautiful piece and there is not much you can do about it.  In addition, waiting 24 hours to see if you did screw up is excruciatingly painful for a person not blessed with patience.  I have found that documenting my tests is making the process more bearable, even fun.  The tests below are done on a medium dark stoneware clay.  Some of the colors we use regularly and others are new.  As always, if you have questions or want recipes, just ask!

This is one of our favorites.  It is Celestial Blue over Red Gold.  It is drippy and runny often drips on our shelves.  But, if we are careful it makes beautiful pots.

 Red painted over Red Gold.  This combination is pretty stable and doesn't run.  It does vary in the redness.

 I was pretty excited to try this combination and a little disappointed in the results.  This is Moss painted over Red Gold.  It started as a stripe of paint, and as you can see, ended up a blob of color because it ran so bad.

 This tile is Celestial Blue.  We use this as an accent color a lot.  It is nice alone or on top of other colors.

 This is Tom Grey Red.  We love it alone or with other colors layered on top.

 Scapes.  This is a glaze combo that starts with Tom Grey Red as a base and has orange, red and blue layered on top.  It is slightly unpredictable as it can turn out with very vibrant colors or muted with lots of gold like the tile on the left.

 This is the most interesting test I did.  I think we may have mixed the glaze wrong.  This is called Field Mouse Brown.  It looks very black except for where the glaze broke over the number.  We will be mixing and testing this again.

 Spearmint with some alterations.  I love this color but it didn't photograph very well.  It has some hints of blue green in it.  I think we will be mixing another batch and see if we can lighten it up just a little bit.





This is Everglade.  It looks a lot like the Gun Metal Green that we already use.





I am already working on the tiles for my next glaze.   I am hoping in the next month or so we will have some new colors to put in our Etsy shop.

Pottery Snobs

Last night the hubs and I were part of the Archie Bray ceramic stroll. It was a blast and we met potters from all over the world. Some had some very kind words and others not so much.

I very much admire the potters who work and live at the Archie Bray. They have helped us artistically and also technically with our pottery woes. Because we are such newbies to the pottery world it isn't uncommon for us to take a piece of pottery to the Bray and ask what went wrong (thanks Josh!) or to ask about chemicals and why we can't get a color right. Most of the potters at the Bray are true artists, love their work and are humble about their own fabulous pieces. Their works are meant to be statements about society, fantasy, personal torture and other various topics important to the artist as stated in their bios. Some of the work is so beautiful that you get lost in the piece but is often too beautiful to fit into and survive my mountain life and some of the other work is, well, difficult to interpret. However, whatever the clay becomes, I always look at the work, ask questions and try to soak up as much "artistic" mojo as I can.

Because the Bray walk brought so many people from all over the word, I encountered my very first pottery snobs. Elitists in the pottery world who believe that if you do not have the correct education or have not studied under the right master your work is crap and you have no right to share it. A woman actually came into our display last night and picked up a mug that my husband worked so hard on and said "can you believe this "tourist pottery"". I was stunned and felt bad for the hubs who was very proud of his mug and actually did have some tourists asking to buy it. Correct me if I am wrong -- but people have been making mud pots for hundreds of years --functional pots that hold water and food and I am pretty sure that none of them were eating out of a sculpture of a human with a rat head holding a spear.

So there it is. Maybe I am the pottery snob. I want to hold my pottery and use it in my everyday life. And while I will never purchase the human rat sculpture, I will admire it for the artistic statement and the work that went into creating the piece. I would never walk into someone's space and dismiss the work they created and were brave enough to share with the world. Maybe it all just comes down to good manners and being polite and wondering who raised these rude people anyway!