Current Learning Opportunities with Sue
Glaze Mixing Essentials
Learn how to mix your own glazes from scratch and do a Colour Run by testing a base glaze with multiple colourants in this online workshop.
Glaze mixing is a foundational skill that will enhance your creative potential, save you money and increase your understanding of the materials you’re working with.
Instant access plus a live Q&A session on Zoom every month for 6 months.
Do you wish your glaze results were more consistent?
Do you have these glaze challenges?
- You don't know how much water to add to your glazes
- You get different results every firing
- Your glazes aren't turning out as expected
- You can't seem to keep your glaze thickness consistent
Grab my FREE GUIDE
You'll start understanding your glaze results better when you measure specific gravity. It just takes a few simple steps to calculate the water content of your glazes and then it's easy to keep them consistent. No more guessing!
Consistent water content = consistent application thickness = consistent results.
Sue’s Ceramics Blog
Articles and videos about clay, glazes and studio tips, written by Sue McLeod
A Clay Reclaim Process Using a Pugmill/Clay Mixer
If you run a community studio or your personal studio is high production, you probably have a lot of clay scraps to deal with. This article will describe the clay reclaim process we use at the very busy pottery studio where I worked as technician for 6 years.
How to Make a Cone Pack
In this post, you’ll learn how to make a cone pack using pyrometric witness cones set into a coil of clay. Cones are important for measuring the heatwork of your firings.
Commercial Glazes vs Mixing Your Own – A Cost Comparison
This post will give you an idea about the differences between commercial glazes and mixing your own from cratch.
Troubleshooting Commercial Underglazes
Have you experienced issues with commercial underglazes? Participate in my underglaze research project and help me find solutions for underglaze firing defects.
99 Cone 6 Glazes You Can Try
Have you been looking for new glazes to add to your glaze palette? If so, I have 99 different cone 6 glazes you can try. That probably sounds like a lot to look through, but it’s really just 9 base glaze recipes plus 10 colour variations each.
The Air Bubble Myth
There’s a common belief in ceramics that leaving pockets of air in your clay, either due to insufficient wedging or by creating an enclosed form, leads to explosions in the kiln. The belief is often communicated in these ways: “Poorly wedged clay containing air bubbles will explode…”
What Glazes Can You Make with Limited Materials?
When you start looking for glaze recipes and have a limited number of materials on hand, you may find that you have almost (but not quite) all the materials for a million glaze recipes, but you can’t find a recipe that only uses the materials you currently have.
How to Measure Specific Gravity – Clay Week 2020
Here's a live demo of how to measure the specific gravity of your glazes so you can have more consistent results. Measuring specific gravity is a way to calculate and control the water content of...
12 Tips for Managing Glazes at a Busy Pottery Studio
Glaze Management 101. It’s a lot of work to run a school or community pottery studio. There are a lot of moving parts to look after. I’ve been a studio technician for 5 years now and it’s a very busy and rewarding job. As the technician, I’m taking care of all the behind the scenes…
How to Fix a Hard-Panned Glaze with Epsom Salts
Have you ever had a glaze settle into a rock hard layer on the bottom of your glaze bucket? It’s impossible to mix and even if you do get it mixed, it just settles out again. This annoying phenomenon is called “hard-panning” and it often happens to glazes that don’t have enough…
How the Water in Your Glaze is Affecting Your Results
Does any of this sound familiar? You unload a piece from the kiln and the glaze turned out perfectly! So you glaze more pieces with the same glaze combination, fire them, and they turn out completely different… OR… You mix a small test batch of a glaze and LOVE how it looks…
A Week in the Life of a Ceramics Studio Technician
What Does a Ceramics Studio Technician Do? Since 2015, I’ve been a ceramics studio technician at a community pottery studio. We run 14 classes per week for both adults and children. We also have an open studio drop-in program where 60 registered members can…
How to Make a Saturated Epsom Salt Solution to Flocculate your Glazes
Flocculate… What Does That Even Mean? You may have heard this term “flocculate” in reference to glazes and thought it was a funny word but you’ve never really known what it means. Or you may have been told what it means several times and still…
Getting Clarity with Clear Glazes
There’s nothing worse than a cloudy clear glaze muddying up your beautiful slip design, screen printed images or coloured clay. How can we make sure our clear glaze is always clear and prevent it from going cloudy? In this article, I’ll explain some of the factors that affect the…
What to Keep Track of in Your Glaze Journal
How Magic Becomes Science. Have you ever unloaded a BEAUTIFUL piece from the kiln and thought, “Gee, I wish I could remember how I did that”? A big part of glaze testing and advancing your understanding of glazes is record keeping. Whether you’re dipping test tiles or…
Different Styles of Test Tiles You Can Make for Glaze Testing
The word “test tile” can refer to any shape of clay that’s used to test glazes, slips, underglazes, engobes etc. Test tiles can be any shape you wish and can be made in a variety of ways. In this post, I’ll share lots of different examples of ways you can…
15 Tips to Get Started with Glaze Testing
I find ceramic glazes to be absolutely fascinating. I had no idea when I started working with clay that glazes would become the main focus of my life. Glazing was always an afterthought and I basically ruined most of my pieces by glazing them…
How to Calibrate Your Kiln Sitter for Accurate Firings
If you’re anything like me, then your first kiln wasn’t or isn’t going to be the digital programmable kind. Many of us start out with a manual kiln that we got second hand. I have 4 different sized kilns in my home studio and none of them are digital or programmable.
A Low Tech System for Recycling Clay Scraps
As clay artists, we’re so lucky that we can reduce the amount of waste we produce by reclaiming or recycling our unfired clay. When we make something that cracks, warps or doesn’t look how we wanted it to, we can reclaim our clay, bringing it back to its original state so…
How to Make a Good Kiln Wash to Protect Your Kiln Shelves
Kiln wash is a material that you can paint onto your kiln shelves. It looks very similar to a glaze when being applied. It acts as a barrier to prevent unexpected glaze runs or drips from ruining your shelves. Kiln shelves are made of a hard material that is similar to…
Temperature vs Heatwork – Why We Use Witness Cones
I receive a lot of glaze questions and the first question I generally ask in return is “What did the cones look like?” Knowing whether the kiln was over- or under-fired is important for diagnosing many glaze issues. Sometimes I’m told a kiln temperature in response. But…
How to Add Bentonite to a Wet Glaze
When I was in school and learning to mix my own glazes, I was warned: “Make sure you add bentonite to the DRY materials and mix them together BEFORE you add any water.” It was good advice. The reason for the warning is when bentonite gets wet it swells and gels and…
Are You Mixing Your Glazes Well Enough?
Glaze results on the thin side? As a studio technician at a busy pottery studio, it’s my job to mix and maintain 20 different studio glazes. I’m also the one studio users often go to for help when their glazes don’t work out as they had hoped. Every now and then…
Why I Don’t Use a Hydrometer to Measure Specific Gravity
I didn’t always know about measuring specific gravity. Of the 10 years that I’ve been mixing glazes, I’ve only been measuring specific gravity for 3 of them. It wasn’t a technique I learned in school. But… I had heard about it enough times that eventually I used it to try…
Publications
Technofile: Air Bubble Myth
Published in Ceramics Monthly – Apr 2021
Click here to download this article and join my newsletter.
Originally published in April 2021 issue of Ceramics Monthly, pages 54-55. http://www.ceramicsmonthly.org
Tips and Tools: The Kiln Sitter
Published in Ceramics Monthly – Nov 2020
Click here to download this article and join my newsletter.
Originally published in Nov 2020 issue of Ceramics Monthly, pages 60-61. http://www.ceramicsmonthly.org
Technofile: Hard Panned Glazes
Published in Ceramics Monthly – Oct 2020
Click here to download this article and join my newsletter.
Originally published in March 2020 issue of Ceramics Monthly, pages 90-91. http://www.ceramicsmonthly.org
Technofile: Bentonite
Published in Ceramics Monthly – March 2020
Click here to download this article and join my newsletter.
Originally published in March 2020 issue of Ceramics Monthly, pages 62-63. http://www.ceramicsmonthly.org
“O La Fuente”
by Sue McLeod
Published in 500 Teapots – Volume 2
Page 257
"Understanding Cone 6" - Pittsburgh 2018
My NCECA presentation Understanding Cone 6 is all about using glaze chemistry, the Unity Molecular Formula and the Stull chart to understand how different surfaces are created at cone 6.
Which glaze formulas are likely to be matte or glossy? Which ones are likely to be crazed or be under-fired? How does flux ratio impact fired results?
Click here to read or watch/listen to this presentation on my website.
Understanding Cone 6 presentation slides and script are also available as a free download!