OH! YOU DIDN'T MELT!

The melted cone pack......nice.

Let me begin by sobbing happily....the test tiles survived, at least in one piece, and the glazes, well....mostly worked (Although whose to say they'd come out the same colour if fired correctly, huh?). The cone pack really says it all. The cone 5 is completely melted to a point where it was adhered to the shelf it was sitting on and its completely smooth, no crease like the other two cones. Beautiful....

Onto the test tiles! They didn't melt, which makes me super happy, but they did dry out to nasty feeling things...like sandpaper..but worse *sigh* . The glazes on the white tiles came out interesting enough but the red tiles all came out the same colour...a deep...black...brown (how disappointing). For this sake, I only took pictures of the white tiles to show ya, since the red ones were just...sad. But the white ones look good! The blend is so...so very blendy. More blendy than I thought it would end up, it's almost like paint mixing part by part which I assumed wouldn't occur.

Line Blend1- left to right- Cobalt to Iron

The most interesting colour happened around the half and half point in the middle. The mixture made this lovely metallic grey blue that has a nice warm tone to it. It's defiantly a colour I would be interested in using if I could recreate it and it isn't simply a result of the over-firing that happened. I would be interested in simply retesting the center glaze to check and see, good thing I kept all eleven glazes...

Onwards to the next test~! Huzzah~

Colour Testing and The First Line Blend

The Colour Test- left to right: Copper, Cobalt, and Iron.

 Ah. The first weekly update....good times.

Actually no. Not good times. Tragic times. But I will get to that in due time....

To start, I begin my testing with a simple colour percent test to see the results of the colour saturation when the percentage is varied. Using a simple base I tested Copper, Cobalt and Iron (more specifically Copper Carbonate, Cobalt Carbonate, and Crocus Martis) between 1-2% for Copper and Cobalt and 2-6% for the Iron.  The test went well and the results were interesting, or at least to me. The tests were easy enough to do and I have to say the Iron test did what I thought all the tests would do, but they did not, which only makes me want to do more colour testing~! However....I have more tests to try so that will just have to wait.

Line Blend 1-Before the kiln

Continuing, from this test I picked two of the glazes, Iron at 4% and Cobalt at 2% and made them duel it out in a line blend. For this test I used a set of white tiles and a set of red so I could get more results (22 results to be exact). But this is where the tragic times comes in. I set my tiles in the test kiln Thursday around 7:00pm, at 5:00pm this evening I went to collect the tiles to see my results and the kiln was red hot. The latch that drops and stops the kiln so it can cool, never dropped. So my tiles stayed red hot for gosh knows how much longer than needed! I'm anxious to know if they are ruined...and if so I might be redoing the test....AND if so I might be begging for forgiveness for ruining a kiln. I wont know until tomorrow evening after I get off work and I know I'll be tied in knots until then.

Kiln gods were not smiling down on me today...