"Fun" With Those F*%&ing Stains

So several years ago while I was developing my "Slate" glaze, I was playing around with some other colours for my matte glaze as well. At the time, I tried a commercial stain called "Blackberry Wine" in my base glaze. I thought it was lovely but not quite what I was looking for at the time.
 

I added a bit of another stain called "Pansy Purple" to push the colour away from burgundy and more towards a dark wine colour. While the colour was exceptional, I lost all of my matte-ness, and shiny was definitely not the look I was after. (The photo doesn't really do the colour any justice, but here it is:)

 As usual, life got in the way and the colour tests got pushed to the back burner. The test tiles went into my huge box with 11 years worth of other test tiles and there it sat collecting dust until recently.

I am still interested in an eggplant coloured matte glaze for my Classic Collection and decided recently to revisit my Blackberry Wine stain. I mixed up a quick sample, based on that very first test as a starting point and was all excited.

Until I opened my kiln.

The colour had all but drained from my glaze and I was left with this rather anemic looking ugly gray. Certainly NOT what I was after.

Now let me explain a wee bit for those not so technically knowledgeable regarding the finer points of glaze chemistry: the stain that I am using to get the original colour uses chrome and tin. These are fickle fiends and require very specific glaze chemistry to pull off their colour magic - no zinc, fire under 1260'C, no magnesium in the glaze and lots of calcium. Check, check, check, and check for the matte glaze that I am currently using.

So what the fuck happened to my colour?!?

An excellent question and one which I have no answer to.

At first I thought maybe I could juggle the calcium in the glaze a bit - perhaps there was TOO MUCH so I bumped it down to the optimal range.

As you can see, the colour got even worse. At least the last time I was getting some speckles of wine colour. This time, nothing but an ugly, flat field of gray.

So I thought I could try adding some other stains to help boost the colour, like that Pansy Purple I tried before:

Or a Deep Crimson:

Better. But not the colour I'm after.

I even tried the Pansy again in a greater concentration:

While it's sorta lovely, there's still too much speckle there for my tastes and the amount of stain required to get this is horrendously high (16%).

So where does that leave me?
I have no flippin' idea.

I am currently at a loss as to why this particular glaze is behaving the way it is, and why it's changing SO FREAKING MUCH from test to test. I'm wondering if there's just too much kaolin in the glaze for the stains to truly come out? Except that I have a stone matte glaze with 5% Blackberry Wine in it and the colour shows up just fine. Or maybe there has been some sort of change to the ingredients that are in the base glaze that I am unaware of? Something coming from a new mine, with slightly different composition? After all, it makes no sense that a glaze that worked fine not three years ago is a complete disaster now. If anyone has any thoughts on this, feel free to post comments. I'm always open to insights.

In the mean time, I'll continue trying to get the colour I'm after. I'm presently trying a new base glaze so we'll see. These things never go as planned, and always seem to take waaaaaaay longer than I'd like. But so it is (sigh).

Seeing Red

My husband has been bitten with the glaze chemistry bug! Which is exciting because this means I have someone to get nerdy with in the glaze kitchen;)

We've been working together to create some electric fired, cone six, copper reds and are getting great results.

This is something we have both been toying with off and on (but mostly off) for the past 10 years. Iron reds always seemed too muddy and the copper reds in the electric kiln always seemed so elusive. We decided to try again on a whim, and it was one of those "what the hell" kind of moments in the glaze kitchen that led to the first results:

 

While this one came out mostly greenish (as one would expect from copper) we started getting some purples on the top, and where the three test glazes pooled in the center there was some shocking red.

 

The second test piece from that first firing, while turquoise on one side, the other side was definitely leaning towards red.  I honestly didn't think we'd get ANY interesting results out of our first coordinated attempt hunting copper red in an electric kiln so to say I was surprised is perhaps an understatement.

So next came how to smooth out that red colour from our second test piece. We needed to get rid of the blotches and push the red more to real red, and less pink. Here's what came out of the next firing:

The red COMPLETELY disappeared in the glaze test on the right, and the one on the top left went matte and was an interesting shade of dark wine. The bottom left was definitely getting closer. This gave us an idea of the direction we needed to focus in on. So...

Onwards and upwards! Here's the next batch of tests: 

 There's three different base glazes on this test piece. While they all came out red-ish, we decided to narrow our search down to one glaze recipe. We picked the red-est glaze and continued to play. At this point, we had narrowed down our testing to four different things within our glaze formula that seemed to be affecting our red. Here's what came out next:

Now I realize the images may be very difficult to discern on a computer screen, but I can assure you we were pleased with where things are headed. Here's some close ups of where we will focus our fine tuning even more:

The nerd in me loves this aspect of pottery! My background in science certainly comes in handy. And I'm not gonna lie, it's nice to have a partner in crime!

Adventures in Damask

So my experiment with the underglaze and my damask stamp was a complete failure. You couldn't see it at all when it was under may slate matte glaze, and when it was on top of the slate matte, it completely disappeared as well.

Incidentally, I had some other glazes kicking around that I thought I'd try with the stamp at the same time. I used some Licorice from the Mastering Cone Six Glazes book, but this was a disaster. Really runny, and left more of a greenish/translucent-ish blur. No detail what-so-ever. 

I also had a test batch Strontium Crystal Magic kicking around and thought what the hell? Strontium Crystal Magic, from what I can gather, is a glaze attributed to Steven Hill, who does the most amazing electric fired work that convincingly looks reduction fired. This is a glaze he uses to get other glazes flowin' and movin'. And if you've been following my posts on my adventures with glaze, you'll probably notice I have a lot of "what the hell, why not?" kinda moments. Ironically, it's in these moments where I find the most interesting results.  Here's some Strontium Crystal Magic stamped onto my slate matte glaze:

So it's a little drippy. But this happened when I was stamping the image onto the pot. I saturated my stamp a little too much and it ran. So other than that what do I think?

Interesting....

But not what I'm after. I was hoping for a black image on my gray glaze. I'm not keen on the lighter Damask on the dark glaze. And the Strontium Crystal Magic seems to fir the image too much. Now don't get me wrong, there's a lot of potential in there. The effect is really quite attractive, if that's what you're going for. But in my case, it's not. I may come back to this at some point, with another idea/design but I don't think I'll pursue it any more with this particular tangent I'm on.

So where to next? I have been doing some reading and came across transmutation glazes. These are glazes that draw colour up from the clay body underneath and incorporate it into the glaze. I'm intrigued by this and have some ideas that may create more of the look that I'm after. So back to the glaze room to mix up some more tests...

And in case you're interested, here's some recipes: (please use common sense when mixing and testing glazes in your own studio).

Licorice:
Ferro Frit 3134: 26
Custer Feldspar: 22
Talc: 5
Whiting: 4
EPK Kaolin: 17
Silica: 26
Red Iron Oxide: 9
Cobalt Carbonate: 2

Strontium Crystal Magic:

Custer feldspar: 46
Whiting :17.2
EPK: 4.9
Strontium Carb: 12.6
Ferro Frit 3134: 14.6
Titanium Dioxide: 13.8

Another Path

 So one of the things I have been studying a lot lately are those amazing damask wallpapers. I have completely fallen in love with them!

 

 
I have been curious about pattern and itching to decorate my new line of work and thought I'd try my hand at damask. I did a bunch of research over the internet, studied patterns, and stumbled across a tutorial on how to design your own damask. The tutorial was for using Photoshop, which I don't have, but gave the gist of things. It broke down the damask patterns into triangles, and once you have your basic shape, its just a matter of filling in the sections. Using this as a starting point, I came up with a simple damask pattern to use with my own work.

Now for the hard part: how to use that pattern. One of the things I like about many of these damask wallpapers is the tone-on-tone colors. So I began thinking about how I could use that approach with my slate matte glaze, and how I could pair that with some decoration in a darker black. This would keep the pattern subtle, and understated.

I thought a good place to start would be with my black underglaze, either under or over my slate matte. Okay. So now how to put it there.

I picked up a little trick from Scott Barnim who uses a hot pin tool to carve his own sponges for decorating his work and thought that not only would this be fun to try, but it would help create some soft lines, so I set out to transfer my damask pattern to a piece of foam that I could use as a stamp.

I  can tell you that burning foam is absolutely, utterly nauseating. A mask is most definitely required. And a WELL ventilated space. LOTS of open windows. And LOTS of air flowing through the room. Anything that smells that disgusting has GOT to be pretty toxic.

So anyways, here's how things went down. First I scanned my damask image into the computer then blew it up to the size I was after. I cut this pattern out with an exacto to make a stencil so I could copy this image to my foam and then I ever-so-patiently heated and re-heated my pin tool and slowly burned away the foam to create my stamp.

  

 

So the stamp works! Now to give it a try over and under some glaze! Stay tuned!