Ceramic Glazes

Why Specific Gravity Isn’t Listed on Glaze Recipes

If you’ve been glazing for any length of time, you may have heard about the importance of measuring the specific gravity of your glazes and you may have found yourself wondering: “If it’s so important to measure specific gravity, why aren’t specific gravity values published on glaze recipes?”

How the Water in Your Glaze is Affecting Your Results

Ceramic Glazes, Specific Gravity

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…

What to Keep Track of in Your Glaze Journal

Ceramic Glazes, Glaze Testing

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…

How to Turn a Matte Glaze Glossy with One Ingredient

Ceramic Glazes, Glaze Testing

Do you have a matte glaze that you wish was a bit glossier, or would you like a glossy version of one of your matte glazes? It’s really easy to convert a matte glaze to a glossy glaze, just by adding one ingredient…

How to Convert Kaolin to Calcined Kaolin

Ceramic Glazes, Studio Tips

If you have too much clay in a glaze recipe, you might have issues with your glaze crawling during the firing. Crawling is where the glaze pulls away from the clay body due to a combination of shrinkage, poor adhesion and high surface tension.

How to Make a Saturated Epsom Salt Solution to Flocculate your Glazes

Ceramic Glazes, Specific Gravity

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…

How to Fix a Hard-Panned Glaze with Epsom Salts

Ceramic Glazes

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…

5 Reasons Why Your Large Batch of Glaze Doesn’t Match Your Test Batch

Ceramic Glazes, Specific Gravity

Has this ever happened to you? You mix up a test batch of a new glaze, dip a test tile and you like the result, so you mix up a large bucket, dip a test tile and your results look nothing like your test batch?

Start Mixing Your Own Ceramic Glazes – A Shopping List

Ceramic Glazes

Are you ready to start mixing your own glazes? Perhaps you’ve reached the point in your ceramics journey that you want to start understanding the materials you’re working with and what is actually happening when you put your pottery into the kiln.

Are You Mixing Your Glazes Well Enough?

Ceramic Glazes, Studio Tips

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…