Tools I Use the Most

My tools never look this clean on a daily basis. They are normally covered in clay and scattered about this tray.

Some of the tools I purchased, some I made, some are altered to fit my needs, others are repurposed from ordinary items and some like my signature stamps were designed by me but manufactured by someone else. 

The reason for this post is that I will be teaching a beginning throwing class at the Sedona Arts Center and I want to share with students the tools I use the most.

Students can purchase a Kemper Basic Tool Kit from the Sedona Arts Center for $15. The tools in the basic tool kit will get you started but when you want to move up to more professional grade tools you can visit the sites listed below.

The places I frequently order my tools from include Mudtools, Bailey Pottery, Axner Pottery and Dick Blick for square throwing bats.  You can get some of these tools at Marjon Ceramics if you happen to be down in Phoenix, AZ.

If you would like to order your own pewter signature stamp you can get one made at 4clay.com.

Making, buying and fabricating your own pottery tools is part of the process. Many of the tools I buy do not work out the way I think they will so I have a few boxes full of tools I rarely use - but when I bought them I thought they were going to be put to good purpose! Part of having a hobby or an avocation is the joy of getting to buy stuff for it. Pottery has no shortage of things to spend your money on so have fun filling up your tool box.😉

Making Hard Clay into Soft Clay the Easy Way

 

Watch this video to learn the easiest way to soften a bag of clay that is too hard to use. This method has a 100% money back guarantee.

There is a different method that people use to soften clay where they add some water to the pug of clay and then submerge it into a 5 gallon bucket of water and let it sit overnight. This method is way more difficult than it needs to be. Who has room in their studio or classroom for 5 gallon buckets of clay and who wants to lift all of those buckets or deal with wet bags of clay afterwards?  The method I present in this video is for those who want the easiest method that requires the least amount of effort. You could say it is for people who want to work efficiently or you could say it is the laziest way to do this.

Stull's Map explained by Matt Katz of Ceramic Materials Workshop

 As the title says, this video is the Stull Map explained. This video gives you an idea of what glazes will appear in certain areas of the map. Think of it as an overview of the territory of the Stull Map. To me this map is the starting point for creating glazes. I view it as indispensable in analyzing glazes and figuring out how to adapt them to fit my needs,

Plotting glazes on the Stull Map

This is the Stull Map. The vertical axis on this grid measures alumina. The horizontal axis on this grid measures silica. That white section in the middle labeled bright is where all of the durable glossy glazes are located. If you enter a glaze recipe into the website glazy.org it will automatically plot your recipe on a Stull Map.

There was a discussion on the Clayart Listserv group about the Rhodes 32 glaze. This is where Rhodes 32 lands on the Stull Map - it lands in the semi-matte region. Rhodes 32 has a problem with cutlery marking and the discussion revolved around how to correct that.

I used the glaze calculation feature on Glazy.org to map out four corners for a biaxial grid. The bottom left glaze is the original Rhodes 32 recipe. The top left glaze has added alumina. The top right has added alumina and silica when compared to the original. The bottom right glaze has added silica.

I used the biaxial blend option in Glazy to generate a 5x5 grid. If I were looking to explore this glaze I could mix up the four corner glaze recipes and then use Ian Currie's volumetric blending method to create the 25 glazes in this grid.

This is an example of how I use the biaxial grid method on the website glazy. Each glaze in this set of 25 glazes has the same fluxes in a .3 to .7 R2O to RO ratio. What varies is the amount of alumina and silica in each of them.

This type of grid can help you spot trends. The glazes on the left are matte. As silica is added they move into the glossy range. You can see that some of the matte glazes on the left are runny. That is what happens when a matte glaze is over-fired - it runs. But if you add silica to that same matte glaze, it turns glossy and you can see that happening in this grid.

This is the Stull Map for the biaxial grid set of mine. If you study this image, you will see that many of the glazes are in the matte and semi-matte region on the Stull Map. This corresponds well with my fired results. Notice that the glossy glazes that I generated with that grid set are plotted in the glossy area of this Stull Map.

I think of the Stull Map as a compass. It can help you spot the trends that happen in a glaze when you vary the amounts of alumina and silica in that glaze. The line between semi-matte and glossy is not a hard and fast rule where moving one small bit over that line from the semi-matte to the glossy region generates a glossy glaze. Rather what happens is that if you create a biaxial grid of your glaze, you can use it to spot the trends and then zero in on the results you wish to explore. Looking at the fired results of this grid has led me to make up a batch of glaze A2 because it is a lovely blue-green matte with crystals.

Making Smalls

I live in a town that gets 3 million tourist visitors a year. Because of this the small things I make are my biggest sellers because they are easy to pack in a suitcase for the trip home. Mugs are a big seller because coffee is such a big part of our daily beverage ritual. Other things that sell quickly are spoon rests, cactus refrigerator magnets, cactus Christmas tree ornaments and cactus ring holders. You can see the theme here. If it’s got an artsy cactus on it and it fits in a suitcase, there’s a good chance someone is going to buy it. The nice thing about smalls is that they are easy to tuck in between larger pieces in my kiln. The last load that I fired was almost entirely filled with small things because the shops in town that I sell at were running low on them. Another nice thing about smalls is that they are easy to use as glaze experiments because if it doesn’t work out, there’s not a big loss in materials or time. I have to admit, that I have the best sales months when my booth has lots of smalls besides my larger work. 

Shelf cleanup

 

As a potter and former art teacher, I accumulated a lot of different size kiln shelves. Sometimes I would find broken kiln shelves in the kiln room at schools where I worked. Some shelves had huge glaze messes on one side of the shelf, but the the other side was in good shape. Sometimes people would ask if I had use for a kiln that was in their basement and free for the taking if I came and carried it away. Sometimes these kilns came with free shelves and other ceramic supplies. Not all of these free shelves fit the electric kilns I had. When I had a little pile of these over-sized shelves, I would rent a wet tile saw from Home Depot and cut them down. 

I ended up with these little weird trapezoid and triangle shapes from the cutoffs. I saved them and use them under test tiles and pots where I think the glazes might run a bit. 

So in my gas kiln shed I have a pile of these small kiln shelves. In every kiln load I put experimental glazes. These little shelves save me from having to clean up my larger shelves if any of the experimental glazes run off the test tiles or small pots.

Today I applied Lee's Kiln Wash which I get from Axner pottery. This kiln wash does not flake off - EVER! A gallon goes a long way.  I used Lee's Kiln Wash in every kiln when I was teaching in public schools and I fired those kilns 3 days a week for the entire school year. It's the only kiln wash I ever use and I know from using it at the bottom of my gas kiln that runs very hot (Cone 14) that this kiln wash is super durable.

The take aways from this post are that Home Depot has wet tile saws that cut through corderite kiln shelves like a hot knife through butter. Small cut off pieces of kiln shelves can be used under experimental or runny glazes - and Lee's Kiln Wash is super amazing and never flakes off!

Animal Jars

As an elementary art teacher I often had my students make clay animals. It feels like I made hundreds or maybe thousands of them as samples over the course of my career. I did not really occur to me until recently to start adding these little animal sculptures to my thrown pots. They are fun to make and give the pots a quirky, whimsical personality. Below are some animal jars I made for some friends of mine. These are all fired to cone 10 in my gas kiln with Winokur matte glaze on them.

Monkey Jar for Joe

Puppy Jar for Allie

Lion Jar for Jack

A Scorpion Jar for Me :)

Javelina Jar

New from the kiln is this small javelina jar. I have been working on developing new glazes for my gas kiln and this turquoise is a winner. I added a little cobalt carbonate to a glaze containing green chrome oxide and this is the result. The great thing about this glaze is that it likes to be fired HOT!  The bottom of my kiln fires a little hotter than the rest of the kiln and I did not have any glazes that really took advantage of that extra heat. But this glaze loves to go to cone 11 or 12 so now I know what color pots are going on that bottom shelf.