Glazing Experiments

Small bowl, formed on the potter´s wheel, fired and glazed

 

I´m sure most of you remember my post concerning the Art of Mastering the Potter´s Wheel about two months ago (if not, just have a quick look here).

Due to the summer holidays and my new job, I had to wait until now to begin with my glazing experiments on the little pieces I made back then.

I call them experiments because I´m mixing two or three different glazes on one piece and don´t know what will happen to them once they are forced to fuse under the enormous temperatures. As you can imagine, it´s always wonderfully exciting to open the hatch of the kiln! 😉

Sometimes these experiments work out just fine, other times one glaze seems to absorp the other completely and you can´t see any difference at all.

 

 

For the little bowl you see above and below (it´s always the same one 😉 ) I used two different glazes called “turquoise snowflake” and “strawberry red”.

 

 

As you can hopefully see (it´s quite challenging to photograph glazed pottery because of the reflection), both glazes tried to stay dominant but fused at one point or another.

 

detail of glazed bowl

 

I did the same thing with different glazes on another piece of mine, this time a small vase.

 

Vase, fired and glazed

 

The effects are always unpredictable.

 

detail glazed vase

 

I also tried this technique with this cute little elephant one of my students made for me as a present a couple of years ago.

 

Startled Elephant, fired and glazed