This recent gas firing was one of the most anticipated of my pottery career. Not only did I have several dozen pieces in the kiln, most were glazed with recipes that I had mixed from scratch. Traditionally, it's a good idea to test glaze recipes on tiles before applying them to actual work, but since we fire Big Al so seldom, I went ahead and glazed nearly all of my work with un-tested shino, wood ash and fake nuka glazes.
The results? Some good, some not so good. On the whole, I'm really happy with the shino pots.
The wood ash provided both exciting successes and rather heartbreaking failures. This is to be expected, though. I learned a valuable lesson with this recipe—respect the fluxing powers of iron oxide!
The fake nuka was rather disappointing with the exception of one pot. I am going to give it another shot, though, as I suspect it might look and feel better in the soda kiln.
I like that shino.
ReplyDeleteIs it that glossy or is it just the lighting?
Boy, I'm starting to miss high fire.
Also noticed your shino recipe.
ReplyDeleteThat's a lot of spod!
Interesting that you use G200, most of the recipes I got use neph sy.
Hi Limom, sorry for the delayed response... I didn't see these comments earlier.
ReplyDeleteYes, the shino is very glossy. I sort of wish it were a bit more satin, but I'm fairly happy with it overall. I also wish it didn't craze (crackle) so much.
I'm still a beginner at glaze mixing, so take the following with a grain of salt...
I don't remember where I got that recipe, but I'm altering it a bit for the next firing, adding a little bit of silica in hopes that it will shrink a little less.
From what I can gather, G200 has more potassium and less soda-ash than Nepheline Syenite, presumably it's in there to get the glaze melting early since it has so much clay. That's also probably the reason there's so much spodumene—the lithium's fluxing power (along with the added soda ash) will balance all the alumina in the ball clay and kaolin.