Video: Testing Clay Pottery Glaze

Glazing is the final artistic step in clay pottery. Learn some tips from a pottery expert on how to test pottery glaze in this free video clip.

Video Transcript

So once all of your dry ingredients are wet, they're no longer going to be floating around in the air, you can off your dust mask, you're safe now. And what I've done is added just a little bit more water to this glaze, and mix it up. And then I was telling you about that knuckle test. Now here, if I dip my finger in, you can just barely see the glaze starting to break around the edge of my knuckles. And that's what you want to see for your initial test of a glaze. That tells you that it's not too thick. And you can hydrometer it at this stage but I don't because you never know when you're testing a glaze for the first time whether it's going to be anywhere close to working. So as long as you've got it at a decent thickness you can get a test and get an idea of whether or not you have any desire for moving on further with tests of this glaze. Any little piece will work. You can make little pots, you can make little straight tiles, anything you want in order to do a test. And then I usually dip for two seconds. That's just a good standard time start with. You want to leave some space because you never know if a glaze is going to be runny or not, and you don't want it to stick to your kiln shelf. And what I like to do is, on my test piece, on one side, once the glaze is dried, put another dip on there. So that gives me a thicker version of the same glaze and I can see if it changes its properties in any way. Now I'm going to talk a little bit more about testing in just a moment.

Testing Clay Pottery Glaze

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