Low cost glaze materials?

certainly experiment, but once i dug a hole to plant a tree and thought the dirt at the bottom had a very nice look to it. i added a shovel full to a bucket & added water. at cone 10 i got a classic tan to dark tan brown. remember that old glaze Albany Slip is dirt from albany, new york before they built too many houses there...

for a ground breaking cerimony at an old company i worked for, i tried to collect some dirt from there, and wanted to make a basic vase with the dirt for fun. THAT dirt looked horrible as a glaze!

i have used plain old ash with nothing else added and got some beautiful affects though it runs like crazy! i added porcelain (50%) to slow down the runs and added maybe 5% of green mason stains and had a great deap-dark green with rock litchen affects that i haven't been able to do again since i didn't keep notes...

if you're after earth tone floor tiles you might actually already be standing on your glaze!

see ya

steve

steve graber

I think you'll need to get a book on glazes (or maybe a book like The Potter's Alternative by Harry Davis or Pioneer Pottery by Michael Cardew about setting up a pottery in Nigeria both available at Amazon), and you'll have to know what cone (temp) you're firing to. For something like floor tile, if you didn't mind the crazing, recycled glass could be useful glaze ingredient, even though it's only used for special effects in typical glaze work. The glass could be heated in a fire and dumped in water to shatter, and applied as a rough powder to the tiles, or if ball milled, possibly mixed with local clay, or wood ash or other types of ash. Few 1st world potters do enough with local glazes to be useful for you, and even if they do, the local results don't necessarily transfer to other geography. Steve's suggestion is a good one, though, everyone should try using their local clays as a glaze sometimes.

Brad Sondahl

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Thanks Steve. Further searching led me to ash/clay glaze, your earth glaze sounds a good idea, and I noticed some mention of washing soda somewhere too. Light glazes would be preferable to browns. At least I have enough info now to know what can be done in principle, thanks.

NT