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Welcome to my blog. I will attempt to make it much more than just a pitiful list of the relentlessly mundane minutiae of my daily existence but if you feel that I have failed try to imagine all the stuff that I haven't posted.

Tuesday 10 March 2015

Who would have thought.......

....that dinosaur dung could look so good?
The testing stage that I've been carrying out on this unusual material is over and I have a range of glazes for different parts of the wood kiln.
This test tile shows a series of lineblends fired in my gas kiln to cone 10, where I managed to get the refractory coprolite to melt into a glaze. It's coloured the glaze green due to its iron content, but seems to have added little to the character of the glazes in these tests. I was happy with these tests as I finally managed to get the coprolite to melt, rather than just sit suspended in the glaze.
Last week I fired my wood kiln and dotted test pots around the kiln with four test glazes selected from this tile.
I'll upload a few images of these little pots, which gave quite varied but rather beautiful results. There were good ash deposits throughout the kiln, but there are also quite distinct areas within the pack - each with its own characteristics. All of the glazes selected gave good results in at least one of these areas, but not all.
This is how I usually test my glazes, so that I can plan the pack carefully and use specific glazes for particular places within the kiln.
Now I'm ready to glaze the final pieces and fire them in the smaller wood kiln.

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