Glazed Pots

Remember these? They turned out so well! I can't get over how good they look. Usually, my clay objects would explode in the kiln in high school art class. This takes me in a whole new direction. Special thanks to D's mum for beautifying our beginner bowls with glaze - she even documented the whole process with a little write-up so that I could blog about it. Knitticrafty's first guest contributor, D's mum, is a talented multi-crafter/artist who specializes in watercolour painting, quilting, and now pottery. I can't wait to see what she has been up to next time we visit - I heard she has moved onto porcelain now.

On with the details:

From top right clockwise: D's mum's, mine, D's

The dried clay pots were given a bisque firing in the electric kiln at about 1000 degrees C. This drives out any chemically combined water, burns off any organic material in the clay and vitrifies the clay body to some extent. At this point the pots are fairly hard and porous and ready to soak up the liquid glaze.

The pots were then dipped into the chosen glaze and left to dry. This is an extremely messy process for the amateur! There seems to be little relation between the colour of the glaze at this point and the fired end result.

The glazed pots were then carefully loaded into the gas kiln (by an expert), and were fired up to around 1300 degrees C. in a reduction atmosphere (I think this means that the kiln was starved of oxygen to bring out certain colours in some of the glazes). The glaze melts and combines with the surface of the pot and the clay body matures.

The finished bowls – a magical transformation has taken place.