Glazing Basics / full length video / free to watch

hi I'm Miri of good elephant pottery welcome to blazing basics this is a free video in which I'll teach you all the basics you need to know in order to glaze a pot specifically I'll be glazing pots that are bisque fired already and destined for an electric kiln these are the parameters that I work within and I know that these parameters fit many of you out there as well so all of my glazing and glaze making videos will be set within these parameters now good glazing is mostly about common sense but there are some specifics that might not be intuitive that you need to understand but by the time you finish this video you will be able to successfully glaze a pot and get it through an electric glaze firing without ruining your pot and without damaging the kiln first I'm going to introduce you to this bucket if you're new to glazing what you might not know is that glazes are not liquids glazes are actually solid particles that are suspended in water which means that whether you work by yourself in a home studio like I do or whether you work in a big commercial facility everybody needs to think about not letting those solid particles go down the drain of your sink because they will cause problems with your plumbing a simple and effective solution to that is to keep a bucket of water on your glazing station so whenever my tools brushes sponges or my hands are dirty with glaze these things all get washed in this bucket first until they are what I call bucket clean and then I can head over to the sink and finish washing them until they are sink clean and this way all of the solid materials that come with glazing end up in this bucket rather than going down the sink now when I first put this pottery studio in my house way back in 2002 it did manage to clog the drains of my house twice and on the second time when I realized how expensive it was to call a plumber to fix that problem I started using these buckets in my studio instead and I haven't had any problems with my drains ever since I started using the bucket clean system now I run a pretty busy pottery studio I make about 2,000 pots per year and I only need to empty the solids out of this bucket about once a year at that point the level of solids will be maybe this deep and there might be a little water on top of it this much and what I'll do is take a turkey baster and sip out all of the water that's on top of the bucket and then I'll take the solids and I'll scrape them into a trash can and that's how I dispose of the solids that are the result of glazing when I'm glazing I always wear a towel around my waist and clamped on around the waist and that's because your hands are always getting wet while your glazing either with glaze or with water or sometimes you get wax on your hands but your hands need to be clean and dry anytime you touch a pot so wearing a towel like this means you always have a place to go like this whenever you need your hands to be dry one of the most important things that a new glazier needs to learn is that it's really important to keep the bottoms of your pots completely free of glaze and that's because if there's any glaze down here at all and you put this pot in the kiln on a kiln shelf your pots gonna end up being fused to that kiln shelf and if that happens you've ruined your pot for sure and you may have ruined a kiln shelf which is more important because kiln shelves are expensive so to me the best way to keep glaze off the bottoms of your pots is to wax the bottoms of your pots now there's two forms of wax that you can use there's hot wax and there's cold wax and I actually use both of those in my studio and I'm going to explain both of them to you I'm going to start with hot wax this is an electric skillet that is set to 225 degrees Fahrenheit and please don't go out and buy a new electric skillet because thrift stores have these and I'm pretty sure I got this for about five dollars and I'm gonna melt some soy wax in the bottom of the skillet this is the type of wax I like to use it's soy wax in flake form that I buy in ten pound bags now this bag will last me a good three years and again I'm making about 2,000 pots per year give or take and that should help you gauge what size bag of soy wax you need to buy and the reason I like to buy wax in flake form because it can be measured with a measuring cup and I know from experience that this amount of soy wax flakes is the right amount to make just the right depth of wax in the bottom of your pan all right so while these flakes are melting I'll explain that between hot waxing and cold waxing I prefer hot waxing as many pots as I can because it's faster to apply hot wax to a pot and the surface of hot wax resists glaze better than cold wax does but there are some situations where you have to use cold wax because you have no choice and I'll explain what those situations are all right so now these flakes are melted and I'll show you just how fast it is to wax a pot with hot wax just take this pot and gently put it down in the wax and give it a spin around 360 degrees okay I'm going to hold the pot slightly tilted so the excess drops of wax fall back into the pan okay so now you can see the bottom of this pot is coated with wax and there's a nice level line at the top edge of the wax alright so I'm going to do one more just to show you how fast this is again push the pot down gently you don't want to splash the wax give it a spin okay and then just tilt the pot and let the excess wax drip off now on the bottom of this pot there's a bare spot in the middle where the wax didn't reach and that's what I keep this brush in here for this is just an inexpensive synthetic brush where I can touch up those spots okay so you can see how fast it is to wax a whole run of pots but just by dipping them in the melted hot wax okay now let's talk about cold wax this is the brand of cold wax that I use this is standard ceramic cold wax and the reason I buy this one is because it's the one my supplier carries and I like it but there are several other brands out there that are just as good now like I said the issue with all brands of cold wax is that they don't resist as well as hot wax so there's two tricks to applying cold wax so that it is as effective as possible the first one is to apply the wax as thinly as possible and the second one is to allow the wax to fully dry before you try to dip your pot into glaze what I mean fully dry I mean at least fifteen minutes or longer if you can so one of the tricks I do to make sure the wax goes on as thinly as possible is that I thin the wax out with a little bit of water and so on this container you can see I've marked on the side here that I'm going to fill this container with wax up to this point right here and then I'm going to add a little bit of water up to this point right here you know and then give it a little shake and that makes the wax a little bit thinner which means it goes on more thinly which means it dries faster and therefore it resists the glaze better now these are the situations where you need to use cold wax instead of hot wax for example when you have a pot such as a dinner plate that is wide and flat and is too wide to fit inside of the electric skillet this one needs to be cold wax and then another example is this jar this jar has a lid and as you can see I've already hot waxed the bottom of this jar body and also the rim of this jar body which is where it's going to touch the lid but on this lid the spot where it's going to touch the rim of the jar is concave so this is not something that you can wax by dipping it into a pool of wax this can only be waxed by using a brush and some cold wax instead alright so now I'm going to show you the process of applying cold wax so when I'm waxing something with a big broad surface like this plate I like to use these foam brushes because these can cover a lot of ground quick but even still you're going to get a sense of how much slower it is to apply cold wax compared to hot wax you have to draw a clean line with the edge of your brush you know that takes a little bit of time and care and it's never going to be as level or as perfect as though as the line at the top of a hot wax dip okay so now that I've got that outline drawn I can fill in the middle which goes a little faster and always while I'm doing this I'm thinking about applying the wax as thinly as possible like I don't want to do any big puddles or drips here just keep it nice and thin okay so like I said this needs to be set aside to dry at least 15 minutes or longer all right so now let me turn my attention to the lid of this jar now if you visualize where this lid is going to touch this jar we're going to wax the underside of this lid here and we're also going to wax the outside of the flange just to make sure there aren't any glaze surfaces that are going to touch the rim of that jar now this surface is too small for this foam brush so I'm going to switch to this paint brush which is smaller again this is an inexpensive synthetic brush ire you use cheap brushes for all of this I like this brush because it has a flat nature and it's got square right angled edges that's good for waxing but again you're going to notice that this is kind of slow work you know carefully create a clean edge on the edge of your wax so when I'm glazing I I typically glaze an entire bisque load in one session and that takes you know four to five hours to finish and that first hour of a glazing session is all about waxing both cold waxing and hot waxing so that should give you a sense that you know I don't rush through the waxing process I try to do a careful job of waxing both hot wax and cold wax and I will usually do all the cold waxing first and then I'll set those pots aside to dry while I do the hot waxing and then hopefully by the time I'm done with the hot waxing the cold wax has had a chance to dry okay so now I'm done with this underside area I'm going to turn my attention to the outside of that flange and apply wax there to I mean the edge of your cold wax lines are never going to be as clean or as level like I said but you just do the best you can okay so this is done again the sneeze dis dry at least 15 minutes are longer and one last thing that's important about cold wax as soon as you're done with your brushes you have to wash these out right away if you let the cold wax dry on your brushes your brushes are ruined you basically have to throw them out and even though I'm going to wash these brushes out right away these brushes to me are dedicated cold waxing brushes I mean even though I clean them every time I use them I feel like these brushes are too contaminated to use for anything other than cold wax now I've mentioned this earlier glazes are not liquids they are solid particles that are suspended in water so anytime you open a bucket of glaze that you haven't touched in at least a few days this is what you're going to see the water is all on the top and all the solids have settled to the bottom and these need to be stirred in order to get all of those particles suspended back up into the water now these are my favorite tools for storing glazes toilet brushes do the best job of breaking up all that solid stuff at the bottom of a bucket now I do have one glaze that the consistency of it is too thick to be stirred with the toilet brush because the bristles get little clog up with that glaze so for that place I use a slotted spoon instead this is the second best tool for stirring up a glaze this first glazing technique I'm going to show you is called pour in pour out and that means I'm only going to be glazing the very inside of this vessel in powder speak we call that a liner glaze and we also use the verb lining as in I'm going to be lining this cup with this glaze now there are two slightly different approaches to pour in pour out that I'm going to show you this first one is where I'm going to glaze this cup all the way to the edge of this rim and no further now to help me do that I'm going to use this measuring cup which I have altered I have bent this handle downward like this so that I can hang it on the inside of a bucket while I'm doing pour in pour out okay so I'm gonna take a cup of displays and pour it in and again I only want to glaze just to the rim and no for this I'm going to tilt this cup so that the glaze you know hopefully touches the very edge of the rim and I'm going to carefully spend this cup around to line the entire inside of this cup with this glaze now the edge of that glaze is going to be a little bit messy we're going to clean that up a little bit later but once I get all the way around to the beginning then I can pour out the rest of the glaze so as you can see the edge of this glaze is not as tidy as I'd like when you're doing this method of pour and pour out you always need to do a little bit of cleanup of that edge so I do that with a a green scotch-brite pad just some light buffing along that edge letting the powdered glaze fall back into the bucket okay so with just a little bit of buffing you can make that edge nice and clean now this second slightly different approach to pour and pour out I'm not going to stop the glaze here I'm going to glaze this pot all the way over the edge of this rim and down the outside of the pot by a little bit to about there this is a slightly faster way of doing pour in pour out okay so since I'm not trying to be careful about where this edge of the glaze is as I'm spinning the pot around I'm going to be pouring the glaze as I spin it pouring it out as I spin it and therefore this goes a lot faster okay so this always results in a slightly messy edge along the rim so to make up for that I'm going to dip the very rim of this pot into the glaze okay so now I've created a nice clean edge for the edge of that glaze so again these two methods are not that different from each other I prefer this one because I think it's a little bit cleaner and tidier but like I said this one is faster to do so whichever one you like better is just fine this next method of glazing is probably the most widespread method for glazing which is dipping dipping is the reason why I make this glaze this is the glaze I use the most I make it in big batches and store it in this giant bucket so that I can dip as many different sizes and shapes of pots as I can in this bucket so I'm going to glaze this dinner plate by dipping dipping is in most cases done in two steps you can only Clay's half of a pot at a time by dipping because one half of the pot needs to stay dry enough for you to hold it okay so I've dipped one half of this plate okay and now that the first half is dry enough for me to hold on to this half I can dip the other half now this is one of the tumblers where I have already lined the inside of this tumbler using the pour and pour out method and now I'm going to glaze the outside of this tumbler are using dipping and again I'm going to do this in two stages I'm going to do the top half first so I can hold on to the bottom half while the top half goes in all right and now that the top half is dry enough for me to hold now I can dip the bottom half so anytime you glaze a pot by dipping it in two halves you're always going to have this area of overlap where the two halves overlap now the glaze is thicker in that overlap area so with most glazes that means in the final fired piece the glaze is going to be a slightly different color in the overlap than it is here and here now I personally like the effects that these overlaps can have and I purposely build them into the designs of my pots but there are times when I don't want an overlap to be part of my design aesthetically speaking so in those cases that's when you use these these are glazing tongs and with these tongs you can grab an entire pot without having to touch it with your hands and with these tongs you can glaze an entire pot by dipping with just one dip so when you use tongs for glazing the tongs always leave behind these tiny little no teeth marks in your pot so once your glaze has dried those teeth marks need to be rubbed out but after that they will just disappear this next technique is called the pour over pouring over is when you want to glaze just the outside of a pot and nothing else it's kind of the opposite of lining a pot and let's say for some reason you want to avoid doing the dip in two halves like let's say you want to not have the overlap area for this particular pot pouring over allows you to glaze the hole outside of this pot in one move without any overlap pouring over is also really handy when you have a bucket of glaze and there's only this much left at the bottom of the bucket which means you can't do any dipping because there isn't enough glaze to do dipping if you only have this much glaze left you can still get several pots glazed by doing pour overs rather than dipping all right so I've got my pot perched upside down on two dowels over top of a glaze bucket pouring over is pretty simple you just take a couple of glaze and try to pour it over at the you can write I'm gonna let that dry completely before I try to pick it up this last method that I'm going to show you is the one that I recommend the least it's brushing yes you can apply glazes by brushing them onto your pots and brushing is another way to use glazes when you only have a small amount of glaze available and not enough to do any dipping but the reason I don't recommend it is because most glazes have a consistency that doesn't flow well off of a brush the glazes are drying rapidly as it's coming off the brush and therefore it doesn't spread well and it doesn't level itself so it's difficult to be consistent and predictable with your glazing if brushing is your method compared to other methods such as dipping or pouring but I'm gonna give you some tips on how to do it anyways in case you find yourself needing to do it of the glazes I have in my studio this is the only one that I'm willing to brush because it has a slightly different consistency from my other glazes this one will stay wetter on a brush longer than the rest of my glazes so after I give this glaze a good stir I'm gonna load up my brush with a lot of glaze okay I'm gonna work kind of quickly and brush the glaze on in one direction okay and then I'm going to give the pot a 90 degree turn reload my brush and repeat from this direction all right and give it another 90-degree turn reload the brush and repeat and yes I'm going to do it one more time for that last you know directional all right so I've basically addressed this pot from all 360 degrees with my brushing from four different directions and in that way that ensures the most even coverage of glaze possible even though I applied it with a brush while your glazes are drying it's pretty common for pinholes to form in the surfaces of your glaze now some glazes can heal their own pinholes while they're being fired and some glazes don't I know for a fact that this glaze does not heal its pinholes so unless you know your glaze is really well it's a good habit to always get rid of your pinholes anytime you see them before you put your pots into the kiln now this pot formed to kind of large pin holes here and here so I'm just gonna do a little bit of rubbing to erase them and that's all it takes and on this dinner plate here in the overlap area there's a whole bunch of tiny pinholes that formed here and that's actually pretty common when your glazes are thicker they're more likely to pinhole and again it's just a little bit of rubbing to get rid of those this is the last scene of glazing basics and it's called clean your bottoms even though we waxed the bottoms of all of our pots there are always going to be drops of glaze clinging to the wax and these need to be scrupulously cleaned off the bottoms of your pots even if you have a trace of glaze left down here that can potentially cause you problems so with an ordinary sponge I'm going to get it wet and wring it out and I'm going to thoroughly clean away all of these glaze drops and out from all of the nooks and crannies of the wax again the word is scrupulous you want to be scrupulous about this okay so this one is ready to go all right there's quite a few drops of glaze here as well lots of nooks and crannies in the wax that need to be scrubbed out alright and on the bottom of this dinner plate they're sort of like a more widespread pattern of glaze droplets and again this is typical for cold wax cold wax is not as good as hot wax so when I'm loading a kiln at the end of a glazing day that takes me over half an hour to load a kiln and most of that time is spent cleaning bottoms again it's one of the last things you do or I should say it is the last thing you do and it's got to be done thoroughly all right and then finally for this little jar I mean there's drops of glaze down here all right but also on the rim of this jar and also on the underside of this lid these waxed areas also need to be scrupulously clean you don't want to have any traces of glaze in the parts where these two pots are going to touch each other okay and now for the underside of this lid let me clean my sponge out again this was done with cold wax rather than hot wax so the edges of the cold wax are not as you know clean as the edges of hot wax so not only am I going to clean up these drops of glaze that are left behind but I'm in this case I'm also going to use my sponge to try to soften the edges of the glaze so they're not quite as crooked looking like particularly in this area here where the line is not very clean I'm going to clean those up now with a sponge all right so now I have two pots that are completely clean of glaze and the points where they're going to be touching each other all right and now those two parts can safely be fired together so that's it for glazing basics these pots have been properly waxed glazed and cleaned and they are now ready for the kiln

Channel: good elephant pottery

Views: 235,273

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Id: vs8B2-ZRI2U

Length: 28min 37sec (1717 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 25 2020