Commercial Glazes Cone 6 Tests Georgies Pt. 5

Welcome to the Third Friday Commercial Cone 6 glaze test post.

This is part 5 of testing some Georgies Glazes.

Part 1 is here. Part 2 is here. Part 3 is here. Part 4 is here.

This 5th part is testing some combinations of the base glazes on beads instead of pendants.

This time in both a chocolate clay body and porcelain - fired Slow Glaze, Cone 5 in my L&L computerized and vented kiln.

I was pleasantly surprised at the way a lot of these glazes looked on the textured beads versus the textured pendant. This was also true for a few of the base glazes from Part 4 of this Georgies glaze series.

Maybe due to them being fired horizontally vs. vertically or the way the glazes puddled...

For "practical" applications with layering of glazes, it is easier to mix the glazes together ahead of time into one new glaze instead of painting on layers of the glazes in the mixture (which can give you uneven layers - but that might also be something you are looking for - so set a goal, and be ready for surprises).

"Practical" being that if you want a certain glaze color and you want to keep your production costs down you've got to speed up certain parts of your process so you can increase your profit margin, not your retail pricing.

Here are two photos of my test glaze notebook with the color combinations.

The test # is circled.

If you are mixing dry glazes or glaze materials from scratch, you can get a pretty consistent and precise measurement of how much of each glaze goes into the mixture.

However with mixing liquid glazes - it is a whole different ball game.

This is where knowing your glazes is important.

How thick or thin are they & what is the stage where they look best.

Is it a 1:1 ratio? or more like a 2:1 ratio?

Sometimes is matters a lot, other times, not so much - it all depends on the glaze and how much of a control freak you want to be with being able to reproduce consistent results.

Or if you have a customer that wants to order a lot of a particular color, and you are willing to take on the task.

How are you going to be able to provide consistent results?

I have lots of experience with this sort of thing from having online stores carry my pendants.

And let me tell you - it becomes "work" at that point. You take on "production" & those big wholesale customers usually want very consistent pieces because that is what their customers want - that piece that they see on their website. Every piece has got to be good enough, or they will return it.

That is a whole other topic though isn't it?

This photo shows the original #13 layered glaze test tile and the other two are results of two test mixing of the #13 test (PG624 + GLW08).

Left = Layered Test.
Middle = 2:1 ratio (2 of PG624 to 1 of GLW08).
Right = added more GLW08

What I did was mix a rough 2 to 1 ratio because I had been putting the PG624 on the piece first in 2 layers. Then the GLW08 on top of it in 1 layer. This result was too purple for what I was trying to achieve (but I ended up with a nice muted purple).

I wanted that green look closer to the test tile, so I added more of the GLW08 to that mixture and got too much green.

At this point, working with small mixtures, this glaze would become a OOAK color, and I would try again from scratch to see if I could get better results. I would also be happy with not offering this as a color to anyone that wanted it reproduced - it is what it is, get it on the pieces you see for sale or you might not see it again.

Do you like to mix glazes?

What kind of glaze projects are you working on?

Next month - I'm jumping over to some Coyote Cone 4-6 Shino Glaze Tests.