Glaze Tests

I Haven’t posted in over two months, and I thought the summer was too busy. This post will be on the technical side, and you can skip the first part if you like. Three of the tiles, with small white dots in the background glaze, had an undercoating of a strontium carbonate glaze. The undercoat glaze adds variation to the surface quality of the main glaze, kind of makes it look like the tile had been in a reduction, maybe salt firing. The three new glaze mixes are shell pink, mango, and robins egg blue. I add the mason stain colors to a base majolica glaze that doesn’t have its usual opacifier. The puffin tile on the top right shows what the shell pink looks like without the strontium carbonate undercoat, it has a slight purple tint with the pinkness.

It’s been a busy Fall, sold tiles at four shows since the summer market ended, The Bad Girls of the North, and I’m not even a bad girl, in Fairbanks, the Alaska Federation of Natives conference in Anchorage, the Artisan Tile of the NorthWest event in Seattle, followed by another Bad Girls of the North in Anchorage. Did really well in the Anchorage shows and pretty good in the shows away from Anchorage. Getting ready for the Anchorage Museum Thanksgiving show and the last show of the year at the Alaska Native Heritage Center.

One of the more interesting things I did was to become certified as an instructor for the First Peoples Fund. I will talk to native americans about starting an arts business and all the things involved with that, like how to value your time. Many native craftspeople way under pay themselves for the time they put into their art.