Slip Plate Results

The garden bench plate is speckled stoneware with a clear shiny glaze over the top. Both this and the butterfly plate came out fine. I read on another blog where they used cannned goods to hold up plates to photograph them. It works really well.


Unfortunately I tried a Duncan clear glaze over these and that glaze is discontinued, so I'll have to do more experiments with a shiny glaze. I do like the slip work on the speckled surface, so I'll be working with this clay some more. This is the same clay I used for the scallop shell bowl and it does nice things to glaze.


The textured fun platter above is made with terra cotta clay and has a matt glaze and it is cloudy. Yet the three slipped plates pictured further along aren't cloudy. Some of the slip colors burn out with the matt glaze, they seem to react with the clay and glaze. With the dragonfly platter I used the shiny clear glaze and the slip colors stayed true.



This plate had an air bubble come to the surface, I've never had one of those, interesting to see, glad it didn't explode, just an half inch long top surface crack which doesn't go through to the bottom.



Luckily I saved one terra cotta plate out of the firing so I can try a different glaze on that one. I am having some of the same issues with warping on plates that I did with my cone 10 plates. The thinner plates without rims seem to warp more. Although the fun textured platter rim warped. The fern trays are flat and thicker and there was no warping. Also my cheese trays (not shown) did not warp. Those were also thicker.



My fern trays were not cloudy; they were fired in two different loads. Position in the kiln didn't seem to matter to results. I used porcelain sand under all the plates, platters, and trays. For this firing cone packs for all three shelves were almost exactly the same. The middle of the kiln fired slightly hotter than the top and bottom, but just barely. I alternated shelves side to side with space in the middle. Comments and suggestion are welcome.