Clay Pottery Glaze Tips

Video Transcript

"So, now we're going to talk a little bit about glazing your pots. Once your pieces have dried and been fired through the bisque, if they're brown clay, they're going to look a little bit like this. They're going to be hard enough to work with but they are still a little bit porous. They haven't undergone complete vitrification which is when the silica melts into a glass and causes the piece to become impermeable. Now this is important that your bisque be permeable because it's going to need to absorb the glaze. Now, what glaze is, is it's just a combination of minerals suspended in water. I make my own. You can buy commercial glazes as well. But to make your own glazes, you just have recipes, just like in your kitchen, that say what goes into your glaze. And this one, for example, it's go some calin, some feldspar, some calcium carbonate, some silica, etcetera. And then you're going to have your colorants as well. Now, once this glaze, it turns to a powder when it dries. When you send it through the glaze firing, it's actually going to melt into a glass on the surface of your pot. And it becomes impermeable, beautiful, glassy, glossy and very usable. But you don't want it on the bottom of anything. So, were going to talk about how to wax. We're going to talk about the things that you need in order to get ready to glaze."