Sunday, November 2, 2008

Crystalline Matte Test Tiles


Here are a couple of crystalline matte test tiles which just came out of the kiln this week. I plan to refire them in a post fire reduction in my large gas kiln but wanted to get a nice photo of them as they are before post fire reduction. 

Just recently, I've been labeling my glazes with a number and a letter so that glazes are called 0-A, 0-B and so forth. It would be more efficient to use letters for both -- A-A, A-B, ... but I started this way and was too far along to change. Instead of running out at 256 combinations, you would have, by using all letters, 676 combinations before you have to add a digit.

The mixing notes are carefully kept in order so that all I need to write on the bottom of a tile is the number-letter and the thickness of the glaze. So a tile might say 1-R   15, which means it is glaze 1-R located in order in the notebook, and the thickness is .0015, as measured by the glaze micrometer. After the tile is fired, I write the firing it was in on the bottom in permanent marker. The kilns are hooked up to my computer by a program called KISS, and so the firing cycles are named and duplicable. And I keep the cones in a ziplock bag for reference. 

Probably waaaay more than you want to know.


3 comments:

Crafter of Khnum said...

I love your organizing plan! You've given me some ideas on how to better organize myself.

Avi said...

Hi John,
This is going to be fun and enlightening.
Thanks,
Avi

bill boyd said...

Hey John,
Perhaps there are going to be a lot of pots out there that have the same number/letter system on the bottoms!
I've been up to 999 and then decided to start again with 1 to avoid more than 3 numbers on small bottoms. Your system is better. As always, you are the king of organization. Thanks for the tip.