The Shine of Your Japan, The Sparkle of Your China

(03 January, 2001)

I was tempted to make that "The Shino of Your Japan", but we'll get to that later.

As I said in the < href="biscuit022.html">Biscuit I'm currently writing (well, the one I was writing when I originally penned this paragraph), I have been reading Nigel Wood on Chinese Glazes, and getting lots of ideas. I am also continuing to work on the general issue of glazes for cone 9, because I now have an electric kiln, and will soon have two. (I just rebuilt the 23" L&L that Chris Daniel found a few months back, at the state surplus place. Once we have a circuit put in, I'll be able to run it.)

(Note, added on 28 February, 2001: It just barely fit within the capabilities of the existing circuit, so we didn't have to add anything. Works fine.)

I have tentatively decided to run this as a tree, with pages about various glaze families linked off this central trunk. Whether that works worth a damn I won't know until I try it for a while; please bear with me.

Glazes and Glaze-Families of Interest

(03 January, 2001 & 28 February, 2001)

Here's a list, containing most of the things I expect to discuss in this pageset.

• Celadon (your classic gray-green milky stuff; but also some that are less grayish, because I like them that way) [No page yet.]
  
  
• Yingqing (Like celadon, but blue; in fact, most people would look at these and just call them "blue celadon", though that seems to me to be a contradiction in terms and there is this perfectly good alternative name. For what it's worth I seem to have a "pink celadon" as well, yet another contradiction in terms...) [No page yet, may end up coexisting with Celadon.]
  
  
• Jün (which I have spelt that way because that is closer to the way it's actually pronounced in Mandarin) (These are very difficult unless you can control the heating and cooling cycles of your kiln rather tightly, but we'll see what we can do.) [No page yet, but various mentions of my Rutile Blues, which have similar colors, on other pages.]
  
  
• Speaking of which, Rutile Blue: I really love the colors I get from these glazes. Here's a page with two examples. I've got two more examples at the bottom of one of the pages of my journal. (The teamug and the bowl.)
  
  
• Mirror Black (several sorts, including a Ding Black imitation and some glazes that are decidedly not East Asian in their ancestry). Also some semi-matte and crystalline blacks, and aventurines if I can make them happen. [No mirror black page yet.]
  
  
• Tenmoku and relatives (including hare's-fur, oilspot, and so on, most particularly my pet Red Tenmoku)
  
  
• Ding Russet (this family is related to the Black Ding glazes, at least distantly, but these were quite possibly fired in reduction -- my one effort to date in oxidation was a rather miserable failure.) [No page yet.]
  
  
• "Dandelion" (glazes involving the local clays, particularly those from Doug & Lisa's back yard) [No page yet.]
  
  
• Satin Matte. Unfortunately, this glaze is impossible to represent in a photograph. It has to be touched. I have done one thing with it that can be seen in a photo, however, which is to put a blue slip on the upper part of a cup and then put the satin matte, which is translucent, over the whole thing:

  
  640x451
  
  

• Crystal Glazes (The excellent work of Fa Shimbo and some things I saw in Clay Times an issue or two back have got me rather excited, so I'm working up a base glaze.)
  
  
• Various Fluorescent Glazes:
  
  
• "Floating Blue" (I am beginning to work up a cone 9 equivalent of this glaze. For the moment, I'm still using Gerstley Borate, because I have some; but eventually we'll play with one of the substitutes, if there's any demand. This, of course, depends on whether I can get anywhere at all with it, which has not yet happened.) [No page yet.]
  
  
• Clear Glazes: Not much point in photographing these, but I am working on them. When I manage to get some striking colors that are based on them, I'll put up photos of those.

There. I'll add some detail as time permits.

To My Journal.

Back to the Top of This Page.

Pseudo-mailto: jon [at] bazilians [put it here] org

Last modified: Mon Jan 21 19:00:40 PST 2002