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The Basics of Glazing Ceramics

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it's always exciting when you get to blaze your pots and you get to take them from being pink and looking like everyone else is something that's really really beautiful and unique So today we're going to talk about blazing just a very basics of how we're going to the first thing you want to think about is it actually bisqueware and that's a new term for us bisqueware means it's been fired in the elect calum's once which means it is no longer green we're so first let's discuss the difference between greenware and bisqueware one of the first please don't notice is the color difference  greenware even when it's really really dry bone dry it's actually more gray than pink another thing you'll notice is the sound that it makes when you hit your fingernail or a metal tool on it so when you hit this fun there's a punk punk punk almost a hollow sound like when you're hitting a pumpkin or a melon and when you hit the bisque where there's a very bright sound more like a wind chime or Bell so that's one thing if you want to get really weird you can actually lick your pot and if you lick the bisqueware pot your tongue will stick to it and it stick to the green Mart pot but I don't recommend licking your friends pot because you don't know where their dreams have been so we look at the color we look at the sound and then worse Terio if you're really confused you can always ask me and I will tell you if it's ready to blaze or not so now that we've decided it's actually bisqueware I want to tell you about the importance not putting glaze on the bottom of your pot  if you notice this already glazed bull it has a ring on the bottom like the foot ring on stone that has no blades on it and the reason that is that's called a dry foot and that's also Nuvo Capcom the reason you want to have a dry foot on the bottom of your stop is because glaze doesn't know the difference between the pot that your glazing and the Kiln shelf so if you put glaze on the bottom of your pot and then stick it on a kiln shelf what what happening is after it melts you get a bull attached to a kiln shelf and that's not really useful unless you're super strong and went to look to come help every time you're sleeping your Siri she need to make sure there's no place on the bottom Potter's used to just glaze their pots and then wipe the bottom off with a sponge we have a trick that we use that makes it a lot easier and what we use is wax and so what we're going to do is we're going to think about all the spots that are touching turn shelf plus a little bit up the wall on each side as I'm waxing this all tell you why that's an suffer some cover in the bottom of each pot with wax then you'll notice that split ring is about a quarter of an inch up on either side and what we're going to do is we're going to put wax all the way up till it reaches the bottom of the bowl and the reason we want to do because each glaze is a little bit different but we've talked about the fact that Blaze has silica in it and silica as a glass former and when there's a lot of silly my glaze or lot of flux which is what makes the glaze melt  the blaze actually relaxes in the kelm and I like to think of it it's kind of shrugging down and it could potentially touch the Kiln shelf so we need a little bit of wiggle room in case the glaze decides to run down the foot of our pot a little bit alright so now we've done the outside and that's usually the side people remember to do a lot of times when people forget is that the inside of their foot ring needs to be waxed also  otherwise it's going to stick on the inside and one of the next glazing videos I'll show you how to use a banding wheel which makes process a lot faster and a little bit less cumbersome  so when we glaze this will be glazing this part of our pot the very bottom and the inside so next we need to talk about places when you're deciding what color Blaze you want to use you're going to notice a lot of tests tiles that are either cups like this with ridges in the middle  or flat tiles that are L-shaped they also have ridges in the middle either way can I tell you what the glaze going to look like after it's been fired so the reason this is important is if you look in the glaze buckets you're going to see colors like this and this place is Tim McGraw or Hamada rust is another name of it and it actually turns out this color you'll notice this light of the tile where the ridges are where it goes over the sharp edges it turns brown so this would be a really good glaze to use if you had a lot of details on your pot because you be able to see the details better when it goes over the surface you can also see on the flip side that when you put it on thicker it turns black will be cautious if you really like this kind of rusty black and gold color that you put it on just with one coat versus to the backs of these tiles have to what's on them  now that you've picked what color you're going to do you're almost to the part where you actually get to glaze your pot but there's one more thing you have to check before you can you play set and that's to make sure that the glaze is the right consistency so if you look at the top of this glaze bucket what you might notice is that there's kind of a Wateree section on top that isn't the same as the rest of the glazed and as I Stir It Up  the clear section of water goes away as I mix I'm also kind of feeling around on the bottom to make sure that there are no big chunks or that one particular chemical has settled on the bottom some most people think that if the top of the glaze is stirred up but that's good enough but really it's not because some of the important chemicals might be at the bottom and if you don't get the right combination to glaze won't turn out the way you wanted to so now they make sure that there's no chunks and it's all the same consistency I want to think about what consistency that is ideally you want it to be a little bit thicker than whole milk you want it to be not super chunky like oatmeal you wanted to be running enough that it goes on to your pot evenly but you don't want it to be so thin that you don't get enough lays on there so if it's like you know thick well stirred haut-chocolat that's what I like to think about it as being alright  singer glazing with any of the glazes that are red learn while they're in liquid form you want to be careful about getting them on your clothes because it means that they have iron oxide in them which I said before is the same as rust so you want to make sure that if you need to wear an apron you wear one or bring an extra change of clothes from homes that your parents are mad at you for getting lays on your clothes for just be super careful when you're using these places that have a lot of iron in them so what I'm going to do to glaze this bowl all one color is I'm going to use this pair of tongs I'm going to clamp the side and I'm going to make sure that it's firmly clamp Before I Let Go Now when I put it in the glaze I'm going to make sure it gets go in and I'm going to hold it under only for about a full second before I pull it out and make sure all the glazes dumped out so you can see what that looks like I'm going to go in 1001  and then I'd make sure all the blazes dumped out make sure you also dumped out the glaze that's caught in the foot ring some forget about that in the end up splashing that on their clothes you see that the blaze is drying fairly quickly and that wax is not a really good job of keeping the glaze off the bottom Flex I'm going to flip it over and unclamp  the pot and you'll see that there are these little marks from where the whose work so what you can do is you can put a tiny bit of little glaze on the inside if you have any cuts on your where's any wounds from other classes you take mr. Duvall's class and what I'm talking about  you want to make sure that you can use gloves or a paint brush because you don't want to get the metals inside of your cut cuz it's not very good for you  since I do not have any cuts on my finger  concept I can smooth it all out if you see any of these smaller bumps on the surface of those will clean melt out once it's really hot so you don't have to worry about getting it perfectly smooth you just want to make sure that it's smooth in general you can see that there's some bumps on the inside then what you can do is just take your finger and lightly Sam them to make it smooth  and now we can go over to the and get it ready for the  to get your pot ready for the Kiln you have to make sure that you have a truly dry foot which means there's no place on the bottom so even though the wax did an excellent job of keeping most of the plays off you can see that there still a few spots on there so what I'm going to do is I'm going to take a sponge and make the rain most of the water out of it  then I'm going to  just give it a quick little white to make sure that there's no place pots  double check that I've gotten glaze all over everywhere on my piece of pottery now I can take it up to the count and it'll be fired and it'll make an excellent little ice cream rules so some people might wonder why I only put one coat plays on this particular piece and that was because the glaze was just the right thickness that when I dipped it once it gave a nice even codeine all over the whole life I really like when the Tim McHugh plays turns out with that Rusty brown black combination if I wanted it to be solid black with this particular delays I could cast time and that would make it darker I'm however you want to make sure that you never put more than three layers of Blaze on that's not you know charred set in stone number that's just a rule that I generally use with the glasses in our studio because sometimes if you put too much glaze on a pot it will actually run really heavily and this person got very lucky you can see this trip and particular went all the way down and almost touch the Kiln shelf but didn't however some students haven't gotten so lucky and their Pottery becomes a permanent installation of art on the shelves out in the Kiln then they don't get to take it home and it's very frustrating and then they also get to spend a lot of time grinding the shelves for me which isn't super fun so just make sure you're not putting glaze on too thick the other thing you need shrap in terms of caring for your glaze before it gets to the kelm is once it turns into this dry powdery chalk on the outside be very careful not to bang it Destiny hard edges or hit it with your fingernail because you can actually flake pieces of glaze off and then you won't have any glaze there and it won't look as nice also let's pretend you have two pots one with the glaze that's very red and another glaze that is very white make sure you wash your hands before you touch a piece of pottery that isn't the darker color glaze because it will transfer just like chalk and powder to your clothes it'll transfer to the other pieces of pottery

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The Basics of Glazing Ceramics

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