Managed to fire some of the cone 6 soda test tiles in one of my tiny electric kilns yesterday, hoping that taking some of them up to a full cone 6 -7 might mature those flashing slips a bit more and it just didn't work. I had cone 6 touching and cone 7 at 2 o'clock and those flashing slips are all, still dry.
So it's back to square one. I decided to not fire the gas kiln as is, unloaded it, and picked out the new, unfired tiles and threw some new test tiles - more to do tomorrow. Right now I need to head back out and cut those tiles off the bats and tomorrow, finish them as well as throw some more.
From what I've seen of photos of cone 6 soda pots, the flashing slips look drier than what I'm used to at cone 10 and higher. When the flashing slip is more of a background base for a lot of glaze and colored slip over, I guess it seems to work well; but my hope is to find a way to get these slips a bit more mature at that temperature. It may be a futile attempt, but I'll keep at it a bit longer
From the various flashing slips I tried, Bauer, Blair Red and Randy's show the most promised Of maturing at these lower temperatures with a bit of tweaking.
In the meantime, I have more glazes to batch and new tiles to dip. Fortunately, most of the flashing slip revisions are batched; but it will still take me a week or two to get it all done. Stay tuned.
June, Odyssey has been doing some cone 6 soda firing and they have a lot of test tiles they've done there. They did a class on cone 6 soda last fall and Tacy Apostolik taught it. Jan Cothran did most of the firing, I think. It might be worth it to drop by and take a look.
ReplyDeleteMarian
This is so interesting! I am looking forward to seeing your results.
ReplyDelete