A steep climb: stairs up to the Ceramics Department at the GSA.

As the days are getting shorter (less than 12 hours daylight now) and things at school are speeding up, the blog entries are getting further between. Seriously, the Scottish winter closing in is something else. The very long days you enjoy during the summer, suddenly start growing shorter at an alarming rate. It becomes harder to get out of bed as it’s still dark in the morning, and early evenings seem incredibly late - it gets dark at 7pm now. We will sink to an all time low of 3pm by the middle of winter. Sunshine becomes a rare and precious commodity and rain coats an everyday necessity.

Click here to see the results from my first glaze test firing in early October. Clear cone 9/10 oxidation glazes on porcelain. I’d like to extend a special thank you to everyone who contributed the glaze recipes I tested in this batch, including Wendy Kershaw and Janet DeBoos. For the benefit of anyone interested in carrying out their own tests, I’ve included the recipes used with the photos.

The main issues with my test results involve some clear bubbles trapped in the glazes, which my supervisor, Janet DeBoos, tells me are called ‘beading’ and could be remedied by either a thinner application, higher firing temp, longer soak or change of fluxes.

I’ve decided that I really like Glacier Porcelain and dislike P2  Porcelain - just because of its colour. The journey continues…

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 25th, 2007 at 3:51 pm and is filed under Ceramics, GSA, MPhil, Scotland. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.