Experiments in Mid-Range Crystalline Glazes | Recipes & Techniques

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by John Britt This is a 54 page PDF containing many proven recipes and images of fired test tiles in multiple cycles. It will save you countless hours of mixing and testing and get you started immediately making your own beautiful macrocrystalline, microcrystalline and iron crystalline pieces at a cost of less than one test firing. It was generated during a workshop I gave in Dallas, Texas in April 2017. Jen Rose, a professor at Richland College in Dallas, our workshop participants and myself were attempting to test and learn as much as possible about mid-range crystalline glazes from books, articles and word-of-mouth information and then combine that with our actual experience. This meant that we had to consider our materials, kilns, cones and actual firing and cooling rates vs. the rates prescribed in the books. We had to be adaptable to what we found and determine what occurred, both good and bad, and then design the next step. Plus, we had the group testing before and during the workshop so we had to consider the scale variations, personal variations in knowledge and techniques, variations in clay bodies, mixing, sieving, etc. It was a pretty complex equation which we only solved on the last day of class. I consider it a kind of analogy for all potters who want to explore a glaze type rather than just trying recipes. We did research up front from books, on-line assets like Glazy.org, Google, Crystalline forums, Facebook Groups, friends, etc., and then used a systematic group of firing cycles to explore the crystal growing ranges on 5 different clay bodies to see which worked best. This paper is a write up of our experiment and conclusions which are a stepping stone for further tests or larger pieces we will make.The cover of this PDF shows a test tile created by Conor Muldoon Show more