Ravenscrag Slip is Born

Description

The story of how Ravenscrag Slip was discovered and developed might help you to recognize the potential in clays that you have access to.

Article

Luke Lindoe, founder of
Plainsman Clays in 1971

The village of Ravenscrag in southern Saskatchewan, Canada is on a lonely country road at the bottom of a large valley that’s drops away from the flat prairies. Not much happens there now but in the time of the dinosaur it was an exciting place. Their bones are easy to find and there is lots of archaeological activity.

To Luke Lindoe, a potter and geologist/prospector, this valley was a most interesting place. In the 1940s he worked in the local heavy stoneware and brick industries and had a dream to start a pottery clay manufacturing company using the amazing clays found here. That idea was the birth of Plainsman Clays in the 1960s. In 1972 I joined Luke and John Porter (a British trained master potter) at the new company and have been working there since. While Luke was trouncing around the countryside with pick and shovel and John was into the business of
clay, I was interested in working with the materials Luke brought in, learning their properties. Luke taught me to see each material as a living entity to be studied and understood in a physical way, not just as a bunch of numbers on a data sheet.

When I drive along the valley bottom looking up at the hills on both with
outcroppings of pure white clay I am still amazed there is a place like this.
There is no rock, just hundreds of different layers of clay. In ancient times
the area was at the bottom of an inland sea. The weathering of the mountains far
to the west created vast quantities of micro fine particulates that washed out
into the sea and settled over long periods. Each layer is unique depending on
the conditions of the geologic period. While they often have obvious boundaries
some layers blend into the next. To potters the most interesting of the
layer-groups is called the ‘Whitemud Formation’. These secondary materials
(transported and settled) are amazingly homogeneous and pure mechanically, many
can be used as-is for pottery by just slaking in water. Chemically the layers
are diverse and are stained by iron to some degree. Mineralogically the
whitemuds have a nice range of properties. There are refractory ball clays, buff
burning high and moderately plastic stonewares, a kaolinized sand and a
bentonite. The one of interest is a very fine sand-clay-feldspar blend known
internally as ‘3D’. Plainsman Clays has used it as a body ingredient since the
early 1970s to help vitrify medium fire clay bodies and improve drying properties (it
has low plasticity).

View from bottom of Frenchman River Valley with a quarry in center view

The whitemuds are perhaps 200 feet below the surface. However the Ravenscrag
is in a valley carved out by the Frenchman river so it is just a matter of
finding a hill at the bottom whose top is a little above the whitemud layers.
They can then be peeled off one-by-one and stock piled.

One day I plugged the percentage analysis of 3D clay into the Digitalfire
desktop INSIGHT (which I wrote). Notice the unity formula (I have shown the
ranges for a typical cone 10 glaze on the right).

BaO   Barium    0.05*  0-0.3

CaO   Calcium   0.07*  0.35-0.7

MgO   Magnesium 0.26*  0-0.35

K₂O   Pottasium 0.58*  0.2-0.45 KNaO

Na₂O  Sodium    0.03*

TiO₂  Titanium  0.16

Al₂O₃ Alumina   3.34   0.3-0.55

SiO₂  Silica   24.89   3.0-5.0

Fe3O₃ Iron      0.14

Whitemud layers being mined in nearby brick quarry

At first it does not look much like the chemistry of a typical high-fire
glaze because the alumina and silica are 10 times recommended and there is
little CaO (the basic flux of such glazes). Thus it struck me that adding
whiting to source only CaO could drastically reduce the alumina and silica (you
can learn more about unity formula at the Digitalfire Reference Database). Amazingly, as you can see below, it takes only 10% whiting to
turn the original chemistry (left) into a balanced glaze (right).

BaO   Barium    0.05*  0.01

CaO   Calcium   0.07*  0.88

MgO   Magnesium 0.26*  0.03

K₂O   Pottasium 0.58*  0.08

Na₂O  Sodium    0.03*  tr

TiO₂  Titanium  0.16   0.02

Al₂O₃ Alumina   3.34   0.45

SiO₂  Silica   24.89   3.32

Fe3O₃ Iron      0.14   0.02

The non-chemistry approach would have been to blend feldspar with this clay
to get it to melt more. But we can see from the chemistry that this is exactly
the wrong thing to do. However the chemistry was not a perfect predictor either.
10% whiting is not really enough to get the needed melting and the CaO is
actually too high. So I did some juggling and employed a couple of other flux
sourcing materials and ended up with a recipe that does melt well at cone 10,
namely Ravenscrag Slip. You might think it would be better just to sell the pure
natural material, but conditioning it with other minerals buffers mining
variations and gives Plainsman the power to adjust the chemistry if needed. It
also produces the right balance of clay, alumina and silica to be a complete
cone 10 glaze that melts well to a clear eggshell non-crazing semi-gloss.

Plainsman H435 with Ravenscrag Talc glaze matte inside, Ravenscrag Dolomite matte outside -

Fired at cone 10R. The GR10-C Raven-Talc matte is just 90% Ravenscrag Slip and 10% talc. This produces a stunning silky, variegated surface (which could be a base for many colorants). The GR10-J Raven-Dolomite matte was patterned after our G2571A glaze, but using as much Ravenscrag Slip in the recipe as possible while maintaining the same chemistry (its surface is less variegated and more matte).

Ravenscrag slip glazes - Cone 6
Top:Addition of frit and cobalt

Bottom: Addition of frit and chrome and tin

Adding about 10-20% Ferro 3134 to Ravenscrag Slip frit will produce a good to reactive melt at
cone 6. Ravenscrag is thus an ideal starting point for material-blending style
glaze development and experimentation with colorants (although it has a little
iron that can impede bright colors), opacifiers (eg. 10% Zircopax), variegators
(eg. 5% rutile), and glossing/matting/reacting agents. You can make tenmoku,
celadon, brown crystal, or kaki at cone 10R with the appropriate amount of iron
(2-12%).

However this is only part of the story. This material has a unique physical
presence also. I was originally attracted most by its amazing slurry properties
(it is surprising how many potters tolerate difficult-to-use glazes). Yet even
at high temperatures where it is easy to formulate glazes with good slurry
properties it has often not been done. Why? Many formulators start with the raw
material that melts the best (feldspar) and then add things until the melt is
stabilized. The problem is that clay is not a good addition. Why? The best
answer is a chemistry one: feldspar has plenty of alumina and thus little is
needed from other sources. Unfortunately the major other source is clay, it is
needed to create a good suspension. The result has been a bunch of high-feldspar
low-clay glazes having rotten slurry properties that craze because of the high
sodium content!

Ravenscrag is an excellent solution to this. It imparts beautiful working
properties to the glaze slurry: suspending and improving evenness of
application, drying speed, reducing shrinkage enabling multi-layering without
cracking (many of the most beautiful art glaze effects can be achieved by
layering). Ravenscrag glides onto your ware like silk and hangs on without
dripping.

To learn more visit www.ravenscrag.com. The site illustrates interesting cone
6 and 10R Ravenscrag-based glazes that Kat Valenzuela developed. They have more
reactive and interesting surfaces and produce good multi-layer effects.
Ravencrag is excellent for underglaze use to achieve variegation and pooling
effects. For double layering try applying a fluid dark colored version (more
frit) and overlay it with lighter colored less fluid version. Or try three
layers (i.e. light fluid, dark stable, light fluid). During firing the layers
separate to expose others and rivulets and variegation occur (be sure to control
the overall thickness to prevent running).

Another potentially valuable use for Ravenscrag Slip is as a stable glaze underlayer. Glazes that normally must be thick to achieve the desired effect (i.e. rutile blues) may run. If you apply a layer of Ravenscrag Slip on the bisque first with a thinner layer of your glaze over it will fire as if it were
thick. A very interesting variation of this is to employ Ravenscrag as an
underlayer for metal sulfate decoration. Cobalt sulfate, for example, can be
painted over a Ravenscrag Slip layer to produce watercolor-like visual
effects.

However, remember that layering glazes can be a tricky business. Test to make sure
that overlayers do not ‘pull’ on underlying ones and compromise their bond with
the body. Remember also that Ravenscrag is a raw material and thus produces
gases during firing, so bubbles and blisters can occur in thick layers.

Related Information

Clay in "dinosaur country" of southern Saskatchewan

This is a "badlands" slope in the Frenchman river valley. The valley exposes the "Whitemud Formation" in many places (clearly visible here half way down on the left). Two surface mines of Plainsman Clays are nearby (over the top and down the other side), in a place where lower-lying rolling hills leave much less over-burden to remove. To the left of this is a former mine of I-XL brick. This is also the site of a mine for the former Medalta Potteries. These materials were laid down as marine sediments during the Cretaceous period. Below the Whitemuds are formations from the Jurassic period. The skeleton of the world's largest T-Rex, dubbed "Scotty", was found 50km east of here (in the layers just above the Whitemuds).

Luke Lindoe, my private tutor

1971, the year I met him. He was the founder of Plainsman Clays. My dad had just built the factory for him and I began working there in 1972. He was a well known potter and sculptor at the time. He got me started along the fascinating road of understanding the physics of clays. He was a true "plains man", interested in the geology (notice the skulls, these inspired the Plainsman logo). He got me started doing physical testing of raw clays (that he was finding everywhere). I was blown away by the fact that I could assess a completely new material and judge its suitability for many types of ceramic products and processes by doing the simple physical tests he showed me. It got started writing software to log the data for that back in the 1980s, that eventually led to digitalfire.com and Insight-live.com.

IXL Industries clay quarry near Ravenscrag, Saskatchewan in 1984.

Layers of the Whitemud Formation are being mined. The layer being extracted is a silty stoneware they referred to as the "D member" (equivalent to Plainsman 3D which is mined several miles to the east). Below the D they continued to mine a much whiter kaolinized sand of equal or more thickness. Above the D is a ball clay (equivalent to Plainsman A2). Above that is a light burning stoneware (the combined layers that Plainsman extracts separately as A3 and 3B). A foot-thick layer of much harder volcanic ash is visible in the green over burden at the top. From these stoneware clays they made brick of exceptional quality, firing it as high as cone 10. Twenty years later the company reclaimed this land and today you would be unable to find where the quarry was located.

Materials	Ravenscrag Slip
URLs	http://ravenscrag.com Ravenscrag web site
URLs	https://plainsmanclays.com/data/index.php?product=12911 Ravenscrag Data Sheet at Plainsman Clays
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