Saturday, May 7, 2016

First Batch of Fired Tiles

The first batch of fired tile is back. These definitely look handmade. LOL
It is apparently easy to get a small bit of something embedded in the glaze that isn't visible during the glazing process but shows up during firing and ruins the tile. My "failure" pile is pretty large, though we may use a few of them in the row of accent tiles near the ceiling. (My standards may possibly be too high; Jeff considers most of these acceptable.)
 Here's a close up of the worst one.

Today, Jeff is getting in on the action. He is playing with the slip we bought.
Our next tile project is to try our hands at drawing on designs with slip then filling it with glaze, like was commonly done with art nouveau tiles. Ultimately, I'd like to be able to make tiles like these.

2 comments:

  1. You need a kiln. I want one just to melt glass bottles and fuse glass but I have to say that this looks like a lot of fun.

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    1. Yeah, it would be nice to have access to a kiln because I could speed up this process, but they're way too expensive for our casual interest in making tile. It really has been fun. This has been a worthwhile project. I certainly appreciate better the effort that goes into fancy tile now.

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