Glazing
Glazing is a pretty interesting part of pottery. You can make glazes or you can purchase glazes. Making glazes for myself wouldn’t really work well. You should really have a good space to work with all of the chemicals/elements and I don’t have somewhere outdoors to do that. I am also not sure that I want to spend that much time on creating and testing them. It’s quite the process and I respect anyone who does it. It just means for me, right now, there’s more time for me to create. I do have to test the glazes a bit to get the desired results but it’s a drop in the bucket. I use commercial glazes from my local clay shop and I also tend to use Mayco glazes as well. So far, I have had some pretty good results. I have also had some terrible results, lol. You just have to learn from your mistakes and move on.
One thing to know about glazing is that what color you brush on will not look like the color it will fire to. When I fire a group of pottery together, I am firing them to the same Cone temperature. For example, I mostly glaze fire to cone 6. That gives me a range of how hot my kiln fired to. I put in witness cones on the shelves with my work during the firing to show me if my work fired to the desired cone. This really helps and while sometimes it seems to take up space it does give you a good understanding of how hot that area of the kiln gets compared to the rest. The hardest part about pottery for me is the wait to open the kiln. Once it has fired for hours, it typically takes hours for the kiln to cool. I will fire at 6:00am on a Monday and open the kiln Tuesday at 10:00ish.
When I’m making pieces, I do like to think about how I will glaze it. Sometimes I don’t and I’ll just plan on it being a dipped piece. Dipped just means you have a bucket of glaze and you can dip the piece in as opposed to brushing it on. I have 4 dipping glazes and one is a clear glaze. I hand brush the majority of my work. Glazing for some people is super-fast. For me it takes forever and sometimes just drives me bananas. If you dip a piece, most of mine take 2 to 3 layers of glaze. I usually give it about a day to dry in between dips. For brush glazing you have to wait until the layers dry as well. I typically have to glaze 3 layers on to the piece. It usually takes me a week or two to glaze. I will work at least an hour before work and hours after work. If I have full days off, it takes about 2-3 full days if it’s drying fast enough.
An example of glazing a poppy bowl: The clay is naturally white. It’s a simple design. There is a green stem, black under the poppy and the red flower. I will brush on the green stem, then the black part on the flower and let that dry. Then I put the red flower on top of the black. I will glaze the inside of the bowl red and let that sit until it is all dry. Then I do this to the bowl 2 more times. After that last layer is dry, then I dip, it in a clear glaze. After it dries, I will wipe off the bottom of any glaze. If any glaze touches the shelf during the firing, it will stick to the shelf and that piece is pretty much ruined. The kiln shelf is fixable in most circumstances. I also use “cookies” from time to time. You put it under your piece so if anything drips it won’t ruin your shelf. There’s pros and cons to using them.
Now everything is glazed and I’m ready to put it all in the kiln to fire.
