Making your own crucibles

I mixed a cone 6 porcelain body and a cone 6 clear glaze 50:50 and added 10% Mason 6666 black stain. The material was plastic enough to slurry, dewater and wedge like a clay, so I dried a slab and broke it up into small pieces. I then melted them at cone 6 in a zircopax crucible (I make these by mixing alumina or zircopax with veegum and throwing them on the wheel). Because this black material does not completely melt it is easy to break the crucible away from it. As you can see no zircon sticks to the black. I then break this up with a special flat metal crusher we made, size them on sieves and add them to glazes for artificial speckle. As it turned out, this mix produced specks that fused too much, so a lower percentage of glaze is needed. I can thus fine tune the recipe and particle size to theoretically duplicate the appearance of reduction speckle.

Related Pictures

A magnesia speckle matte at cone 6 oxidation is impossible, right? Wrong!

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I am getting closer to reduction speckle in oxidation. I make my own speckle by mixing the body and a glossy glaze 50:50 and adding 10% black stain. Then I slurry it, dry it, fire it in a crucible I make from alumina, crush it by hand and screen it. I am using G2934 cone 6 magnesia matte as the glaze on this mug on the left. To it I added 0.5% minus 20 mesh speck. Right is a cone 10R dolomite matte mug. Next I am going to screen out the smallest specks, switch to a matte glaze when making the specks (they are too shiny here), switch to dark brown stain. Later we will see if the specks need to bleed a little more. I am now pretty well certain I am going to be able to duplicate very well the reduction look in my oxidation kiln. I will publish the exactly recipe and technique as soon as I have it.

Making my own home-made fired speckle for cone 6

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I control the recipe and temperature I use to make it and now I need to control the particle size. I have already smashed it up (using a special flat hammer we have) and am now sizing it. That involves getting what I can through the screen and then going at the larger sized particles with a hammer again. I use three screen sizes in the procedure so that I can control the distribution of sizes in the fired product (to more closely match reduction fired ware). This can be a dusty procedure and those particles are angular and sharp and high in heavy metal, so it would be better to do this outside in a breeze or with a ventilator and mask inside.

Links

Glossary	Crucible In ceramics, potters make crucibles to melt frits, stains and other materials. Crucibles are made from refractory materials that are stable against the material being melted in them.
Glossary	Reduction Speckle A sought-after visual effect that occurs in reduction fired stoneware. Particles of iron pyrite that occur naturally in the clay melt and blossom up through the glaze
Materials	Calcined Alumina

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