Glaze Day or Bust!

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Saturday was Glaze Day. I only had 4 pieces for the traditional high-fire glazing, but I also had pieces to raku. The only new piece was the top of my egg, which I completely forgot about the previous week (oops). I also had two older pieces I wanted to re-fire because I didn't like how they'd come out. Here they are before I did anything to them:


That's one of the nice things about raku; do-overs aren't too hard to do. There was enough room for my two older pieces, so I reglazed them and they were fired on Saturday in two separate firings (that makes *three* for this session! we apparently love our raku around here!). I put curdle blue on the top part of the butterfly's wings and glass red on the lower part. I also added just a bit more alligator rust to the body. I put white crackle on the head and body of the angel, plus glass red on the wings and in splotches here and there on the rest of the piece. Here they are after applying new glaze, and then after they'd been fired:


I'm not 100% happy with the butterfly; the colors on the bottom of the wings are still too dark for my taste, but at least the top improved a lot. The glaze had been on the thin side the first time they were fired, so just added more glaze helped with that. And it seems like it reduced much better this time, too. Perhaps last time my can had let in too much air... The freaky angelish thing I'm pretty happy with though. I had wanted more runny-ness with the glaze the first time, so adding more glaze let things meld a bit more. I'm calling it good, at this point!

As for the high-fire glazing, here are my pieces when they'd just been bisqued:

I used plain white (toilet bowl white, as we sometimes call it) on the little dish and wrote on it with iron oxide (and something that was black... black iron oxide?). I now call it my "brag dish" and it will live on my desk at work. The square bowl was dipped in Bobby's green and I put splotches of gold slip on the inside. The larger round bowl was dipped in black and then boo-boo blue on two edges, plus I put drips of boo-boo blue on the inside. (I am not making that up; that's what we call that glaze... I think it was originally supposed to be something else and the instructor made a mistake when making the glaze, but liked the end result so much she kept making it that way ;) ) For the petal bowl, I dipped it in Virginia celadon and painted white designs on it. It's not pictured as it'd give away the surprise. Here are all the other pieces post-glazing, pre-firing:


We were able to pick up our finished pieces yesterday, so here they are post-firing:





I just LOVE the colors on the bowls. I will definitely use those combinations again; there weren't any samples with those particular combos, which was largely why I decided to try it out. The gold slip in particular was a bit of an experiment; it doesn't work with all glazes. But it turned out just beautifully.

So anyhow, the spring session of pottery is complete! I'll post pics later of the finished petal dish, after the recipient has received it. It was a ton of fun, as usual, and I've got all sorts of ideas for the summer session. See you then!

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