GLAZE LAB WITH AMELIA BLACK

$170

Session 1 (optional): Sunday 6th September 1pm - 3 pm (extra $75)

Session 2: Sunday 13th September 1pm - 3:30 pm

Session 3: Sunday 20th September 1pm - 3:30 pm

Ever wanted to see your favourite Lygon Street glaze in a different colour? Taught by ceramicist and glaze chemist Amelia Black, this 2 or 3 part workshop deconstructs a selection of Lygon Street's base glazes to help you understand their appearance, surface finish, and colour from a glaze chemistry perspective. Introducing volumetric triaxial testing as a method that allows you to develop custom glaze colours.

You'll choose your base glaze, your colourants, and the colour range you're aiming for, and Amelia will guide you through setting up a triaxial blend to test it. No glaze chemistry experience needed. You'll mix in the colourant to create your test batches and apply them to test tiles, which we'll load into both gas and electric kilns and then you'll come back the next week to see exactly how atmosphere changes your results.

Session 1 (optional) : Make Your Own Test Tiles

Make tiles specific to your own practice. Learn different techniques for making professional test tiles, then use your preferred clay body to create tiles completely custom to your practice. Recommended if you want results that reflect what you actually make. Skip this and your glazes will be tested on supplied white test tiles instead.

Session 2: Mixing & Application

An introduction to glaze chemistry and a deep dive into volumetric triaxial testing. Choose your colourants and target colour range, then mix your blend from Lygon Street's glaze bases with guidance on proportions. Apply to your tiles, creating two sets: one for oxidation firing in the electric kiln and one for reduction firing in the gas kiln.

Session 3: Chemistry & Results

Using your fired results as the starting point, we go straight into each test tile, it’s base chemistry and firing atmosphere, to understand the base glaze recipe in a whole new way, using tools like UMF, Stull charts, and glazy.org. We'll talk through next steps for pushing your results toward a new glaze of your own.

Suited to makers who want to understand how to adapt base glazes (using Lygon Street’s glazes), no prior chemistry knowledge required.