New Glaze Tests

I did a cone 6 firing last week and experimented with some new glazes. I've always just fired to cone 4 because I found a couple great base glazes over a decade ago and just configured my own colorant and oxide amounts to add to them. But, over time I am discovering that cone 4 is very limiting. There are hundreds of cone 6 glazes out there that I've been itching to try. It takes hours to do though, something I don't have a lot of. I bought "Mastering Cone 6 Glazes" by John Hesselberth and Ron Roy, glazing gurus. A very good read with loads of great info. I realized that I've been loading my kiln so that it's not firing evenly. With just a little more work and watching the kiln more closely, my firings are coming out better.

Down below are the three test tiles that I'm most pumped about. Raspberry, Bone and Spearmint. The Bone looks more whiteish in the book, but I like the warm variation I got here. I can always experiment with the amount of rutile in that one. I'm sooooo excited about the Raspberry and cannot believe I actually weighed out the components correctly on my tiny little kitchen scale that I've owned forever. One measurement called for .2 grams of green chrome oxide! If you put even .1 gram more, you can get a disgusting green color instead of red. And the Spearmint just looks so yummy.