glazing day

today I started to pull together two months work and glazed enough pots to fill the kiln.

I haven’t really worked out which glaze is going to work over all the porcelain inlay/dusting/layers. probably a thin coating of the barium glaze will be the most transparent, and therefore the safest. I have also tried it with my copper-tin-dolomite glaze, which gives anything from orange to black with rust and khaki in between. I put a lot of the copper glaze in this firing, hoping for the pale tinge of copper green which transfers onto the barium glaze, and which turns turquoise on the porcelain, provided I don’t over-reduce the firing.

in the front here is the first big pot I made in the recent series, with the scratch marks in porcelain like the chalk beach at West Runton and next to it and just behind, one of the pots I had drying in the living room the other week. with the barium glaze poured in the case of the big pot, and the copper glaze overlapped with my ash glaze which has a texture like suede, and makes a blue-anthracite cracked texture on the overlap, on the tall narrow pot.

kiln was packed and closed up by three in the afternoon, so I went for a late walk with the dogs . when we got back it was practically dark, with a wonderful golden glow in the west and the first stars just pricking through.