Test Results are In

I’m super excited to see some of the results from the soda fire! All of these recipes can be found on my newly made glazy page (https://glazy.org/u/oghwood/recipes).

I started my clay body exploration last semester when I found some clay body recipes that I like, but were still a little off from what I truly wanted. I originally started by manipulating the pre-existing recipes that I liked, and I now feel comfortable starting from scratch. I hope to continue this research and possibly start to incorporate local clays. I recently was gifted the new wild clay book—it was a great read and it’s motivated me to really look at the material that I am using.

This round of tests were built around a classic stoneware and porcelain body that are flavored with iron rich clays. I was really surprised by how much carbon trapping that occurred in the flavored porcelain bodies. I feel that the downfiring process lent to a lot of soot/smoke buildup on the test pots. I plan to keep expanding on these tests as the raw clay captures the flame path and emphasizes it more with the carbon trapping. I’m interested to see how it presents with some cobalt blue and a clear glaze. The stonewares are a little dark but not dark enough for downfiring processes. I plan to iterate on the first two bodies as the later two seem to be overfired and are starting to show dunting cracks.

No new work this week, just a lot of analyzing results before pushing for the next round.