Third Friday Cone 6 Commercial Glaze Tests - Georgies

Welcome to the October 2011 Beads of Clay post for commercial cone 6 glaze tests.

I've recently gotten my hands on a bunch of Georgies Cone 6 Glazes.

Click to visit the Georgies website

Some of the glaze I have are new, some old (to me anyway).

Before I get to my results, I want to point you over to the Georgies Website where you can gather a ton of great technical information through some of their online tutorials about glazing and firing glazed pieces.

Tutorials on commercial glazes - much like this one - are always going to have different results because of glaze application, clay you are using, glaze batch (although most commercial glazes are pretty consistent until one of the materials changes), firing speed, size of kiln, firing temperature, the surface texture, firing position (vertical or horizontal surface), and so on.

First Series of Georgies Glaze Tests.

When I ordered my recent glazes to start my series of tests with Georgies glazes I used their website "Combo Madness" to narrow down the choices I was going to make and as a starting point.

Glazes to be tested first - picked mainly by "Combo Madness" tutorial.

Thirteen Results of Combination Glaze Tests

Even more glazes to test!

Here is my first set of test results with the glaze on the left being the base coat (2 layers) and the glaze on the right being the top coat (1 layer). 

Clay and Temp details to follow below.

GLW10 (2 under) + GLW03 (1 over)

GLW10 (2 under) + PG614 (1 over) 

GLW10 (2 under) + PG616 (1 over)

GLW10 (2 under) + GLW42 (1 over)

GLW03 (2 under) + GLW10 (1 over)

GLW46 (2 under) + GLW41 (1 over)

PG624 (2 under) + GLW46 (1 over)

PG634 (2 under) + PG641 (1 over)

GLW10 (2 under) + GLW08 (1 over)

GLW10 (2 under) + PG624 (1 under)

GLW10 (2 under) + GLW25 (1 over).

PG624 (2 under) + PG616 (1 over)

PG624 (2 under) + GLW08 (1 over)

Here is some detailed information you will need about this first series of tests:

Fired on Highwater Clay - Loafer's Glory Cone 6-10 clay (bisqued to Cone 04).

Fired vertically in my Olympic Baby Doll Test Kiln to Cone 5 (bar style "cone").

Now you might ask - Marsha - If these glazes say Cone 6, why are you firing to Cone 5?

Answer - every kiln is different, and I typically find higher success rates for my glaze firings at Cone 5 in this kiln. So this is where I am comfortable starting.

And by starting, you know what that means - I'm going to be testing these glazes (making sure to mix some of them better first) in my small kiln to Cone 6 and in my large kiln to Cone 5 and to Cone 6.

I do this with newer glazes because I like to know what kind of results I'm going to be getting out of various firings. 

And because you never know what that one not so pleasing glaze (for your said purpose) might turn into with a different kind of firing…

To be continued…

PS - if you have any of these Georgies glazes, get some tests up and going because next month - November 18, 2011, I'm going to have the Inlinkz gadget for you to link up your test results from your firings (links up to your blog post about the tests).

Let's see what you're up to!

Thanks for stopping by...