Wish you had control over your glaze results?
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 can fine tune your glazes with a few easy steps. All you need is a scale and a container and it's super simple to adjust your glazes and keep them consistent.
Understanding Glazes and Studio Tips
Articles written by Sue McLeod, a studio technician and glaze explorer
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...
How to Fix a Hard-Panned Glaze with Epsom Salts
Why Do Glazes Hard-Pan? 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....
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...
A Week in the Life of a Ceramics Studio Technician
What Does a Ceramics Studio Technician Do? For the last 5 years, I've been a ceramics studio technician at a community pottery studio. After working full time for 4 years, I cut my hours back to 3...
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...
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...
What to Keep Track of in Your Glaze Journal
Download your free Glaze Journal Checklist Print out this 5-page checklist and keep it in your studio for easy reference. Click here to get it!How Magic Becomes Science Have you ever unloaded a...
Different Styles of Test Tiles You Can Make for Glaze Testing
What Are Test Tiles? 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...
15 Tips to Get Started with Glaze Testing
My Introduction To 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. My first year...
How to Calibrate Your Kiln Sitter for Accurate Firings
How the Kiln Sitter Works 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...
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. (I use the words “reclaim” and “recycle” interchangeably.) When we make...
How to Make a Good Kiln Wash to Protect Your Kiln Shelves
Different Kinds of Kiln Shelves Before I talk about kiln wash, I want to talk about kiln shelves. The kiln shelves that I’ll be referring to in this article are high alumina kiln shelves. Alumina is...
"Understanding Cone 6"
NCECA presentation - 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?
"Understanding Cone 6" presentation slides and script are available as a free download!