RubbleRubble…

You show your age a bit if that title makes you hungry for a hamburger… No explanation though, just snickers… but this post isn’t about thoughts of another missed lunch… this is about opening the kiln on a rushed load of bowls and finding the telltale signs of… well a rushed load of bowls pushed through the bisque kiln. We all know what happens, but after a while, some of us begin to wonder whether the work needs to actually be completely bone dry or how dry does the work actually need to be to survive a bisque… even a slow bisque.

RubbleRubble…

I don’t think it’s as bad as all of that. I’m only seeing only one bowl with a foot efficiently reduced to grog, but that’s just the top shelf and I haven’t even started unloading yet.

RubbleRubble…

Variation of Blue Hares Fur

47.3 Nepheine Syenite
27 Gerstley Borate

20.3 Silica 325

5.4 EPK

2 Red iron Oxide

1 Cobalt Oxide (altough I sometimesuse cobalt Carb)

4 rutile

2 bentonite

This is a very versatile glossy blue cone 6 glaze that I've been using in my studio since 2006. It's very stable by itself and interacts well with my most of my other glazes, and more inportantly, it reacts beautifully with my standard white liner glaze creating wonderful optics breaking at the rim.

When applied thick, it produces an amazingly rich blue hares fur.

When applied thinly it produces a transparent iron blue.

This glaze begins to glass up at bisque temps, but can be taken to cone 7 quite well.

I'm most commonly using it to create my GhostBlue glaze for cones 5 to 7. The GhostBlue is a combination of my studio clear glaze with a thin application of Hares Fur over it to produce a transparent rich blue glaze that really works well with my cobalt slips.

A Handful of Racers

Well... for all my whining this morning about everything in yesterdays kiln load of work conspiring to challenge my preconceived expectations, there were a good number of pieces I did really did enjoy pulling out of the kiln.

These works still play the edge of what I need to come out of the kiln verses what I personally think is fun to hold and explore. Unfortunately, these are more often than not, 2 totally differing ideals. This point is actually becoming a point of personal internal philosophical contention, (but that is definately another post).

Cone 6 SDSU Texture & Crawl Glaze

Here is a real cone 6 gem...

25% Magnesium Carbonate
70% Nepheline Syenite
5% Kentucky Ball Clay (OM4)

This is the basic recipe of the crawl glaze that I've been playing with over the past few months. I found it buried in an old sketchbook scrawled in a corner of a page. It was from 8 or 9 years ago during a time when I didn't have any sort of studio access and was sucking up as much information as I could get my hands on. The recipe is attributed to a October 2000 Ceramics Monthly article on page 49, unfortunately I failed to note who the author was. (Hopefully someone can help me rectify that.)

This glaze is very temperamental and you need to place it in the kiln asap after dipping. The glaze will crack and begin to pull away but not quite fall... unless it's disturbed. It's very sensitive to thickness.The glaze will behave very differently based on what's under or over it.
Here's a link to a February post showing some of my experiments... http://fetishghost.blogspot.com/2009/02/test-yumoni-for-crawling-glaze.html

Experiment and have fun and please share any successes or failures you have.