Glazes
I am always on the lookout for good looking glazes that can be used for functional pots. By functional I mean able to hold up to years of the dishwasher, microwave, knife marks, and the normal bumps and clinks of the kitchen. I don't want my customers to have to hand wash or baby my pots.
I try to abuse my own pots at home as much as possible. So far I haven't seen any hazing, cracks or other defects.
GlazeTeaDust
Tea Dust started as a recipe posted in molecular terms by a Taiwanese ceramicist interested in classic Chinese stoneware glazes. It's an iron saturate glaze with some nickel. Rutile and oil spot glazes are used over for accents.
GlazeTeaFlow
If you put a low melting point (cone 1) clear glaze underneath Tea Dust you get Tea Flow. Tea Flow is very dependent on the glaze application and it's hard to predict what it will look like from firing to firing.
GlazeToast
Sandstone is a thin application of a strontium matte glaze which uses Redart clay for color.
GlazeIronRed
Iron Red is an iron saturate glaze with bone ash giving the tomato red color. The same rutile over glaze as Tea Dust is used for accent. Yes, I tried the "flow" treatment, and it looked terrible.
GlazeRasberry
Raspberry is Ron Roy's chrome tin glaze straight from his book on Mastering Cone 6 Glazes. It's a very deep pink that fires just fine at cone 9.
GlazeTurquoise
Turquoise is a alkaline copper glaze that's as blue as possible without crazing.
GlazeMing
Ming Green is a modified version of Dock 6 Pottery's glaze, with some added boron frit and half the copper. It's mostly Cornwall Stone, which is mined in southwest England. I've tried substituting out the Cornwall to no avail, so for the moment I have to pay for bags of rock shipped across the ocean.
GlazeWhite
White is Ming Green without the copper and with 3% praseodymium stain.
The search for good glazes can be frustrating. There are herds of great looking but unusable glazes out there, glazes that craze, are under fired, leach copper, crawl, are half manganese, use lead, cadmium, barium and so on.
There are also many expressive glazes and surfaces that may look great on a "living room" pot but you wouldn't really want to eat off of every day. My goal though is to make pots that work well with food and are durable.
I mix my glazes from raw materials and fire to cone 9 in an electric kiln. I use a mixture of relatively unprocessed materials, such as Redart clay, and manufactured ones, such as Ferro frit 3134.
