Glazing Daze…

One of the things I love about working in clay is when you’re in the studio and you’ve got the tunes jammin’ and you zone out into that world that has no time. Later you look up and hours have past and it only seemed like a fraction of that.

Zone is an accurate word and has very positive connotations whereas sometimes the zone can turn into a daze and you’re not even aware except that the blissful feeling seems to have disappeared. That being said, I offer a bit of rare and obvious advice… zero out your scale! I had some base glaze mixed and was ready to add some tin oxide the other day and had to wait (see 2 posts previous). I use a digital scale thats capacity is 400 grams accurate to the 1/10 of a gram. This means that after accounting for the weight of the measuring cup (tare weight), I can only put 300 grams/cup of any ingredient and if I need 1300 grams of EPK, I put four 300 gram cupfuls plus weigh out another 100 to get to 1300. But when I’m done with the base glaze, for various reasons I shift to another cup for colorants. This cup has a different tare weight and this is where I need to re-zero out the scale, otherwise the weight of each cupful will be off by the difference in weight of the two different cups. So when I finally got the tin, I weighed out the remaining ingredients with the small cup and after sieving that went back to start another base glaze. Did I zero it out or no? Well I measured out the entire 8000 gram base glaze and when I set the small cup on the scale and hit the re-zero button, in that split second, I thought I saw the wrong number but it was gone because I just hit the zero out button. I mixed and sieved and the amount of mixed-up glaze just seemed wrong but no way to prove it without starting completely over and comparing the two. After fretting for a while, I decided to trust my gut and I calculated the difference in tare weights and multiplied that by the number of cupfuls of each ingredient and added the percentage of each partial cupful and added all that into the glaze. I feel more than 50% sure that this is correct because when I added up all the numbers (even though there were numbers on my mix sheet like 1448, etc.), the total unmixed ingredients came out to an unbelievable 900 grams even. I bet you’re wishing you had back that part of your life. So this is where you’ve left the zone and entered the daze. The daze is a dangerous place. I have 3 different strength reading glasses lying around the studio depending how close I have to get to something and I had a pot in my tongs ready to go with a recently agitated slurry of glaze and I realized I had my “too far away” glasses on instead of my “medium I’m gonna dip this piece” glasses so I hurriedly reached over, grabbed the correct specs and proceeded to jab myself right in the center of my left eye with the part of the glasses that rests on my left ear. Aside from hurting like hell, I had a side to side phantom image of everything I looked at up until I went to bed. It seems fine now, much to my relief… the fluid in your eyes while you sleep is a miraculous liquid. Anyway, getting there slowly and maybe I’ll get to run a kiln this weekend… I guess only then I’ll know if I zeroed out that scale or not. More pots…

This big bowl is drying because I had to rinse it off yesterday. The shellac leaves detritus on the surface of the pot after the bisque and I checked the outside but forgot the inside (the daze) and there was just a touch around the rim which became obvious after dipping the big boy…

It sounds worse than it was and I did have some help from the bug who came in to glaze some of her tiles. They’re on the shelves in the shot above. Today is a new day though, the sun is out, my eye is healed, the glazes are all mixed and global warming has been solved… oh wait, 3 out of 4 ain’t bad.

Tags: ceramics, clay, porcelain, pottery