A Blog about Ceramic Art and Science

Ceramic Glazes

How to Convert Kaolin to Calcined Kaolin

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.

Understanding Cone 6 – NCECA presentation 2018

Ceramic Glazes, NCECA

On Mar 15, 2018 I gave my first ever NCECA talk. I was part of a panel discussion called Glazes Without Borders, moderated by my teacher, Matt Katz. This video is a 20 minute clip of my presentation titled "Understanding Cone 6". My co-presenters Kiara Matos and Peter...

What You Need to Start Mixing Your Own Ceramic Glazes

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.

How to Normalize a Glaze Recipe

Ceramic Glazes

When a recipe adds up to 100%, we can easily compare it to other recipes. This is particularly useful when we have additions like colourants and opacifiers. The base recipe remains constant while the additions are always relative to 100%. It also allows us to look at 2 recipes side by side and compare the amounts of individual materials. But what do we do if our recipe doesn’t add up to 100%?