"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).

Yay! Maybe.... Or not?

After last week's post, I tried a bowl without the line decoration.
Let me know what you think!

I trailed a line of my matte glaze all around the rim, and love the way it ran on the inside, and how it blends with the stripes on the outside. I need to work on consistency in terms of applying my darker stripe, and clean up those black pin stripes - I need to get them thinner! I also want to do some fine tuning on the form, beef up the rim a touch, and improve the curve of the bowl. But otherwise, as for the overall shape, I'm pleased.

I'm also anxious to try this with a pale, apple green and a complimentary shade of blue? yellow? orange?. I was trying these early on in this testing series, and I'm almost ready to go back and try again. First, I need to head to the paint department of my local hardware store to stare at paint chips to help me narrow down which oxides to start playing with. But it may be a while before I get the chance to get there.

I'm excited and anxious about these stripes all at the same time. I have to admit, I feel like I'm being pulled in all sorts of opposing directions when it comes to trying all this new stuff with my glazes and my work. It's a little unsettling and even stressful to some extent. It's kinda like heading out somewhere without really knowing where you are going or how to get there, but hoping you make it there regardless.

And I still can't shake this urge to decorate. I wasn't happy with my trailed linework on the previous version of this bowl but I feel like this one is missing something. I'm not sure what exactly that means, and where that needs to go. Part of me just wants to go explore fabric stores, but with my schedule filling up, I can't see finding time for that any time soon. Maybe it's best to push it into my subconscious and let that part of my brain work on it for a while.

And as for all of my testing: you may recall, when I first began writing this little series of posts, I mentioned that I was currently exploring two different directions with my new line of work. These stripes have been one direction. Stay tuned to see where else my creative mind had been going!