Glaze Development for Dummies

[Dani Montoya]

If anyone wants to write this book I would be the first to buy it. 

I am just now attempting to do some glaze development and I am learning on my own, no classes or a teacher or mentor etc because there are none around me.

I bought the MC6 and have been working with that but I still end up starring blankly at my triple beam scale, surrounded by bags of white powder, all decked out in my respirator!!  (Think Breaking Bad, oh I wonder what my neighbors are thinking)

It is so overwhelming to me! I am not a chemist so that throws me for a loop.

Does anyone have any words of glaze wisdom for me? A book I can read, online class I can attend. 

[Norm Stuart]

Kabe - That sounds familiar.  As a tile ink I previously mixed betonite and black mason stain, but when I ran out I was too lazy to make it again, as I needed hot water to dissolve the Veegum brand bentonite.

Now we use our remaining Laguna red iron oxide, which fires brown, mixed with a little water in a capped pint container.

Fine tipped brushes are in short supply at our studio as they quickly lose their points when abused, so I tied it to the ink with a string.

The nice advantage of using an iron oxide as ink, is everyone can tell at a glance whether the tile was fired to Cone 6 or low-fired.  After a cone 6 the red iron oxide gains a metallic sheen to it, which you don't see after a lower temperature firing.

We typically make up 500 grams of glaze and keep the sieved glaze in a disposable quart deli container, which costs a couple of cents with the lids at a restaurant supply store.  We can mark the name of the glaze on the side with a permanent marker.  I have photos of the glazes in an Excel spreadsheet and in Insight-Live, but we keep a test tile on the top of each quart container.

When empty we use it for refills if it's still in decent shape.  We have about ten bucket glazes, but 150 other glazes in these quart containers. The containers on the right in this photo below are far more durable than the ones we use.