This weekend was a big thing for me - I was attending an advanced glazing course downtown Copenhagen at Keramikskolen with instructor Tine Seier.

I have worked with glazing before and find it very confusing and somewhat technically challenging and I wanted to improve my skills so that I can start making my own glazes or enhance store-bought glazes.

To sum up the course - day 1 was yesterday and the curriculum was to get the theories behind glazes right and then test the different flux components and additives to get different results. Day 2 is in a couple of weeks and will be a detailed deep dive into the different components and additives - pro's and cons and how to see and correct flaws or imperfections in the finished products.

SO overall most glazes and this is just the general assumption to make it easier to get started, consists of 4 different components.

Feltspar, Clay/Kaolin, Quartz Flux, stain/oxide

The above components are powders that are mixed with water in different measurements and then a glaze is formed. There are plenty of recipes online and there are so many factors that influence the final result.

If you like me are fairly new to this, my instructor advised me to stick to the basics before moving to the more experimental fluxes and additives.

Once we had the basics set, we started working on mixing our own glaze samples.

As we were 9 people, we were able to make one standard glaze each and then add different additives like Mg, stains or TiO to see how the different glazes react when exposed to different additives. So in total we each made 10 samples of a standard glaze + 10 different additives, that will be fired at 1245 degrees and I can't wait to get my hands on them next time we meet.

Safety is a big thing when working with glazes and we go quite a lot of information on toxidity and what to avoid and how to stay safe - I can very much recommend taking a class to ensure that you don't do something that might effect your health longterm.

So masks on - gloves on and no food/drinks in the room.

Thats all from me for now

See you tootles later

/Sys