23rd
I’ve ecountered a lot of intermediate and advanced pottery students in Nashville who are beginning to think about setting up their own studios. They’re finding there’s a limit to resources here in town for potters who get serious enough to pursue working on their own, yet need to learn about glaze composition, kiln construction and firing, studio layout, good production practices, etc. For these folks and others in the same boat, I’m starting the DIY Potter series of posts here at Diving Into the Clay.
Fortunately there are a lot of resources online, which, short of hands-on opportunities to learn, can offer a lot of foundational information for the budding potter.
For today’s post, I’m jumping right into some material that will be fairly challenging to the non-mathematically/scientifically inclined. Teaching in a university environment, I suddenly find myself regularly running into people in the clay studio who work in mathematics and the sciences. For those folks, and for other adventurous types, the link above is to a basic description and how-to for taking a batch formula glaze recipe (what potters use to make their own glazes) to a molecular unity formula which let you analyze how each material affects the glaze, enable you to make substitutions in glaze materials, tweak the firing range of a glaze, etc.
It’s a tool. Once you’ve got the hang of it, the next step is to figure out what you can make with it.
PLEASE feel free to leave comments here and ask questions about anything that doesn’t make sense. There is some lingo - for instance, I don’t see the term L.O.I. explained. It’s Loss On Ignition, or the amount of material by weight lost during the firing process (mostly carbon).
