Mini test pots: A serious attempt towards confidence with glazes

Monday 7th July In the past, I’ve stuck to underglazes and illustration or linework on my pottery – this has been creative and fun! However I’m finding myself more and more in awe of the variation, fluctuation of standard or flux glazes.

In part, my hesitation is from appalling and confusing glaze results from my previous community gas kiln. But now as I’ve seen my mums pieces come from her clubs electric kiln with sustainable success I feel almost ready to try this. Part of me doesn’t want to give up the underglaze style I’ve used for so long but I’m also excited to have something new to mess around with!!

So I ordered two new glazes, Deep Sienna Speckle (Amaco) and Ivy (Mayco Stoneware) to explore. Part of this means trying out combos with my other two reactive glazes Arctic Blue and Emerald Falls (Amaco). Emerald falls is pretty new too and I’d retired AB during the unpredictable gas kiln days)…

Exploring these starts with test tiles!

Many of them. Because combining the glazes can create some totally different colours. Even if you use the same combo, if you swap the order of which goes on first or how many layers of each, you can end up with something completely different.

Part of doing test tiles also means you’re not potentially ruining a piece with an untested glaze combination that might be prone to melting or just looking ugly.

Test tiles can be pretty boring to wait to do when we just want to use these new glazes ASAP but when I was thinking about the serious testing that I needed to do I recalled the darling little pots at my first community studio that were used as test tiles, about half the size of a Japanese tea cup.

Fuelled by the idea of having ten tiny cute pots to my name I set about throwing them on the wheel. The first attempt was successful in that I threw them all.. but they were normal sized cups!! Whoops. So the next day I re-wedged the clay and took on another 3hr throwing session to make 17 baby-pots. This time I was throwing off the hump (centre one big lump of clay and use the top section to form and cut off your piece) which I’d not done in years! 😀

They’re not identical but for glaze-test-pots do they need to be?

18 freshly thrown baby-pots with rounded tummies and flared rims. The largest would fit your thumb inside

Another two days of waiting and then three hours of trimming later they were sent off to be bisqued. The day these came out I then spent about four hours glazing them to cover all combinations and orders of colours (I heavily relied on my notebook matrix and black glaze pencil to keep me from making mistakes).

Saturday 12th July Thursday night we went to the studio and picked up all our goodies from the kiln (before the next storm hit us and flooded the road to the studio). These test tiles were a success – know melting or sticking to kiln shelves. Alot of the greens (Ivy, Emerald Falls and Seaweed) look pretty similar combined however change their features slightly. Their combinations with Deep Seinna Speckle and Arctic Blue are intersting!

Feel free to flick through below for all the detail if you really want to (I tested both orders of each combo of glazes, one where glaze A is three coats of the base colour, covered by three coats of glaze B – and the reverse on the second half (BTM/TOP)).

I’ll highlight some of my faves and the plain glaze colours here. Their combos include: Deep Sienna Speckle (DSS), Arctic Blue (AB), Seaweed (SEA), Ivy (IVY) & Emerald Falls (EF)

Sea/AB | AB/Sea

DSS/AB | AB/DSS

Full Set

DSS | IVY

and the full set below!