Quick Tip: Saving Shelves: Two Ways Gabriel Kline
Appears in the January 2022 issue of Ceramics Monthly.
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The Magic Carpet
A wet piece of thick, napped carpet works well for quickly cleaning glaze off an unwaxed foot. Dip your work in glaze, and once it has dried to the touch, you can draw the piece back and forth over the wet carpet to clean any excess glaze off the bottom of the pot (1). This technique quickly removes excess glaze and creates a clean line, all without the use of wax.
Wadding and Cookies
Wadding is a type of clay made from extremely refractory materials (usually 50% EPK and 50% alumina hydrate). I use wadding to lift pots off the shelf. This is absolutely necessary for salt and wood firing so that the atmospheric glaze doesn’t fuse the pots to the kiln shelves. Wadding can also be used underneath pots in any kiln when glazes have a tendency to run. Keep your wadding in a tightly sealed container, as it does have a tendency to dry out quickly.
Cookies are flat pieces of stoneware clay that have been kiln washed on one side or simply left bare. If you are using runny glaze combinations, we highly recommend placing your piece on top of several balls of wadding that have been glued to a cookie (2). While this process takes some extra time during loading, it saves many headaches (and remaking many pots!).
Excerpted from Odyssey ClayWorks Director Gabriel Kline’s new book Amazing Glaze Recipes and Combinations, published by Quarto Press and available at https://www.quarto.com/books/9781589239807/amazing-glaze-recipes-and-combinations.
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