A Blog about Ceramic Art and Science
Ceramic Glazes
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…
Why I Use a Graduated Cylinder for Measuring Specific Gravity
I use a graduated cylinder for measuring specific gravity. A slender container is going to have smaller increments than a wide container, giving higher accuracy. You could compare this concept to using a scale with 1g increments vs 5g increments. The smaller measurement is…
How to Measure the Specific Gravity of Your Glazes
In this video I demonstrate how to measure the specific gravity of a glaze I just mixed using a graduated cylinder and a scale. Measuring specific gravity is a way to calculate the water content of a glaze to ensure that each time you glaze, you have the same amount of water…
Intro to Glazy.org – Video Tutorial
If you’ve never used Glazy.org before, this is a helpful tutorial to get started. In this tutorial, I go over the basics of using the site.
Adding Colourants in Glazy.org – Video Tutorial
In this tutorial, I go over how to add colourants to a recipe and keep the colourants separate from the base recipe so your base adds up to 100% and your colourants are shown as additions.
Material Substitutions with Glazy.org – Video Tutorial
In this tutorial, I show you how to use Glazy to make material substitutions using the UMF (Unity Molecular Formula).
How to Turn a Matte Glaze Glossy with One Ingredient
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…
Studio Tips
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.
Don’t Skimp on Safety in the Glaze Lab
Most of our glaze materials come to us in their very basic, unprocessed form. They are dug out of the ground, impurities may or may not be removed, they are ground into a fine powder, bagged and shipped to our suppliers. Working with these minerals in their raw state poses some health risks.
Specific Gravity
How to Measure the Specific Gravity of Your Glazes
In this video I demonstrate how to measure the specific gravity of a glaze I just mixed using a graduated cylinder and a scale. Measuring specific gravity is a way to calculate the water content of a glaze to ensure that each time you glaze, you have the same amount of water…