Electric Pottery Kiln Wash

Video Transcript

"Now we're going to talk about maintenance of your shelves. The first thing is kiln wash; This is a very important thing to use for your shelves. You can buy it pre-made from your clay supplier, which is what I do, or you can make it yourself. There are recipes on the internet. It's usually pretty simple. It's usually kaolin; maybe a little bit of silica, some alumina; it varies. But, they're all usually two or three ingredients. When kiln wash is fired to your cone temperatures it doesn't become glassy. There are no fluxes in it, it won't stick to things. When your pots are sitting on the shelf, and some glaze runs, it's going to stick to the kiln wash, instead of the shelf. You can grind that right off, and rewash the shelf, instead of replacing your shelf, or having to grind into your shelf itself. To make the kiln wash, you get a bucket with a little bit of water. Then you take either the pre-mixed kiln wash powder, which is what I have, or you measure out the ingredients that you found from a recipe. You add that to the water, and you mix it right up. This doesn't have to be incredibly precise. It's really just a slurry; you want it to be a little bit thick, kind of like pudding, so that when you paint it on it will dry in a decent amount of time. We're ready to grind the shelves in preparation for washing."