You may have noticed that the sample pieces for our workshops and courses always have a line of raw clay exposed on the bottom. It's always our goal for our students to take home work they are happy and proud of BUT they can't do that if we have to break their piece! Wait, wait wait... what do we mean?
Why would we ever have to break student work!?
Did you know that glazes in the kiln, when heated up, can act similarly to glue? At high temperatures glazes turn into a "liquid glass" substance that oozes over your piece to coat the clay. Once it has cooled back down from "liquid glass" consistency temperature, the sticking power of that stuff is honestly WORSE than glue since it has to be ground off BOTH the shelf and the piece. You can see that our protective layer of kiln shelf wash (the white stuff) has made it about 100x easier to remove the stuck mug in the left photo. Sometimes stuff happens and the shelf wash can only do so much! If the piece is really stuck on, the only option we have left is to try and break the piece off to recover the shelf. In the photo (left) above, a student did not listen to our policies about glaze mixing and their piece ended up with sharp glaze pieces near the bottom. We're lucky that it did not drip more, as the bottom of the mug would most definitely have been lost in the process of removing it from the shelf and rendered the piece completely unusable. In the photo (right) above, you can see our OWN glaze tile that had to be scrapped due to breakage from glaze running onto the shelf too far, even our kiln shelf wash could not save it. We believe that our students would prefer a small line of raw clay at the bottom of their pieces rather than no piece to take home at all due to it having to be broken off our kiln shelf!
EVERYONE, no matter if they are a student, open studio participant, or kiln rental patron, must follow all of our glazing policies. Trust us, we do not have these rules in place to make your life any more difficult; creating ceramics and going through the motions is probably more than enough! See some examples below of a wide range of work from students, open studio AND our kiln rental service that clearly show that line of raw clay!
We truly believe that all of these pieces are absolutely beautiful, raw clay lines and all! Guess what? They all survived their glaze firings and were able to be taken home and used as intended! Having these policies in place has made it so we very rarely ever have to break student work off our shelves or grind down sharp bits. We are very proud of this!
Ceramics is a fickle beast that requires certain rules to be upheld to keep the process moving along smoothly. As glaze firing is the last step in our studio's process, anything that helps get pieces home is always our priority. If you're curious about any of our glazing policies, please contact us OR if you'd like to learn how we paint on glazes in our studio, sign up for a Glazing 101 session using the link below!
Signed,
Your Local Eccentric Studio
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