Wednesday, November 3, 2010

Glaze Testing and Covering the Jar

We are busily working in the studio getting ready for the Celebration of Seagrove Potters and our kiln opening on December fourth. We are making a variety of forms for our flowing crystalline glazes. At the moment we are in the process of mixing glaze tests in the evenings and very excited to start developing some different surfaces and colors. The process of mixing and testing glazes is time consuming. It can take months and even years to go from a test tile to putting a successful glaze on a piece, and even after using a glaze for years we can and do go back and tweak the glaze a bit more.
What do we mean by tweaking? Bruce describes it like cooking in the kitchen, " We look at materials like a cook uses spices. A little bit of this material and a little bit of that material, always altering the formula to our taste."

Bruce has been focusing on creating new glaze formulas in the morning while drinking coffee, and Samantha will be trying to develop some new colors for the insides of her cups, bowls, and plates. We both have a strong drive for, imagination about, and passion to create glazes, and between us we have a lot of information and knowledge to draw from. Very cool and exciting.

Last night was like "Dueling Banjos" we had both of our scales out and were mixing glazes into the night, and in our new glaze lab to boot! Yeah !! Very Very happy here at Bulldog.






2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Very nice work. I love seeing the work in progress on the potter's wheel. Looking forward to more post of works in progress.

cookingwithgas said...

I once had a potter tell me when I was talking about your glazes that glazes were all luck- no skill.
I don't think I agree with that at all.
I think it does take a great deal of know how and good tweaking to develop good glazes.
you are a fine example of how one takes the knowledge and tweaks it to perfection.