This post is based on an email I sent out this past Fall about my journey from a struggling studio potter to starting my dream job as a studio technician to reluctantly growing out of that position and quitting my job in order to teach online classes full time.
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.
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.
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…”
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…
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…
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.
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…
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…
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…
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.
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.
