Opaque Gloss White Raku Glaze

Here is a close up of the opaque gloss white glaze
pictured below. I like the glaze and will retest it with some brush strokes of red iron wash, under and over the glaze. Looks like it has lots of potential. I like the pinholing.
As is, the glaze doesn't appear to crawl so I am going to add some magnesium carbonate to the base and see what happens.

Raku Fired Tea Bowl

I finally was able to fire some tea bowls in the raku kiln this past weekend. Had several glazes to test and wasn't able to fire them all because I ran out of gas (not energy, propane). And, it was dangerously too windy to fire up the kiln yesterday.
Anyway, out of the pieces I did fire this is my favorite.
It is just a plain opaque gloss white glaze inside and out. The exterior was heavily textured and I used a metal rib to scrape off the glaze and even used a piece of sandpaper to clean it up a bit more.
The black, of course, was bare clay and recieved its color from post reduction in a can of sawdust.
I think this glaze has a lot of potential but it is a gloss white. I also have another similar bowl to fire that has been glazed in a matt white. Will post a photo of that when it is fired.
I also had a few failures, but all in all it was a pretty successful weekend.

Glaze Testing

Got a lot done in the studio yesterday. Started my bisque kiln bright and early with a load of torso sculptures that I made last year. While that was firing I decided to test some new raku glazes.

Thought I'd post them on my blog just in case I misplaced my notes.

Back left has a black underglaze and a gloss red on the exterior. The interior was glazed with Soldner's Clear Crackle Raku glaze.

Right Rear: Interior and exterior glazed with an opaque glosse white. This was a heavily textured tea bowl on the exterior so applied a heavy coat of the white and then used a metal rib to scrap away the top layer of glaze. In post reduction I am hoping the black will create a nice effect on the unglazed parts of the exterior.

Left front: Interior glazed with Soldner's Clear Crackle Raku. This was also textured on the exterior so I applied a gloss red and used the metal rib to scrape the high areas clean of glaze.

Center: This is a real "experimental" glaze. This is a borax and feldspar glaze with 15% magnesium carbonate added to create a crawling effect. The glaze brushed on terribly because of the Borax I think but I got a heavy coat on it. The interior is an opaque gloss white.

Right Front: opaque gloss white on the interior. Three brush coats on the exterior and then I brushed 3 coats of Amaco Arroyo Black glaze on top of that.

It was way to damn windy to fire up the raku kiln yesterday so I'll have to wait to fire these up. Maybe today. Stay tuned.