‘Undoing’ glaze recipes for ceramics

What do I mean by saying ‘undoing’ glaze recipes for ceramics? Let me explain…

When we cook a meal we take individual ingredients all with their own flavours, put them together and create….hopefully….a new and delicious flavour, a combination of them all.

Following a glaze recipe for ceramics is no different, we take different ingredients all with their own character, they fall into three main categories:

Silica, the glass former; Alumina, the refractory (makes it stick to the pot, so quite important really!); Flux, the glass melter. In these three main categories fall many ingredients, I have been busy sampling several of these with really interesting results, for example potash feldspar when used very thickly, and I mean thickly, gives a lovely icing sugar, slightly crazed white finish, very tactile. Lithium carbonate doesn’t stick to the pot particularly well, however where it does it gives a toasty mottled effect going into an opaque creamy white as it gets thicker.

These are just two examples of how I am ‘undoing’ glaze recipes for ceramics and I am in the process of sampling many more, building a unique library of samples ready for the next step of blending and slowly developing my own glazes. This is so exciting I feel as though I am starting over, un-learning and re-learning about glazes, their components and how they work with or against each other.

So please feel free to join me, Jane Samuel, an Anglesey potter, on this journey and share the successes and failures with me and if you wish to share your journey here on JS Ceramics weblog that too would be great because in the sharing of information so we grow and move forward.