[Music] This episode is sponsored by Monkey Stuff. Monkey Stuff makes things for makers. We're inspired every day by the craft and creativity of makers and design and manufacture tools and accessories to try to make your making life a bit more delightful. Our products are designed in California, buy makers and for makers and manufactured in the USA. Check out our line of pottery accessories and tools at monkeystuff.com. Follow us on Instagram to see what we're up to in our studios and keep on making great things. Hey, this is Erin with Cornell Studio Supply located in Dayton, Ohio, exclusive distributor of Jen Allen templates and put a lid on it t-shirts. Find all your pottery and ceramic sculpture needs, including the largest stock of Jir pottery forms at CornellStudioSupply.com. At Cornell Studio Supply, we are owned and operated, four potters, five potters. [Music] Hello, my name is Kathy King and welcome to the for Flux Sake podcast. I'm coming to you from the Harvard Ceramics program in R Fair City, Austin, Massachusetts. I'm here with rows and mat cats of the world famous ceramic materials workshop and they are ready to answer your burning questions about clay and glaze. [Music] Well, howdy, rows and mat. Hey, Kathy. Hello, Kathy. Hello. Oh, well, I'm wearing all black today. That's because. Oh, my! Yes! Oh, you are too. So you must know where we're going this morning. I do. Ben's going to be here in a second with the bus to pick us up. So he's not going to run us over, right? No, I'm just wearing gray because you two are being too dramatic. Oh, well, we have to go to the fiery depths of materials corner. [Music] I can't even. I can't even. Lay it on us. Lay it on us. All right. So we talk all the time about the paranoia cycle and the, you know, the lack of clarity in ceramic materials supply. And this is one that we do need to discuss. So this is not a tragically bad one. And we even had a debate as to whether or not we should talk about this. Because it is definitely something that people aren't going to see normally, but that they may come across what has been a press release. And so we need to talk about it because it does apply to the ceramic community. RT Vanderbilt, who is a major material supplier, has filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy. Now, deep breath. Because. No, hold it your breath. Just let it go. Yeah. Is this scary? Yes. Oh, yeah. I mean, any type of bankruptcy is brought up. People like, oh my god, I'm going to lose everything. You know, it's not a nice word. Yeah. Yeah. And RT, should we do the list before we've been talk about the reality situation? Because it's a lot of materials that you may not recognize. All right. Here all the weird stuff. Yeah, this is the stuff that RT Vanderbilt supplies. And again, stay calm. Don't freak out when you hear this list. Dixie Clay, pureless Kaylon, McNamey Kaylon, McNamey, it's still for debate. People when you use a lot more with McNamey. So that people some people will go through different ways. But that Kaylon, which has become a big substitute for EPK. People would be like, I like it. I like that one. The V-Gum products. So people use a lot of V-Gum in their glazes and clay bodies. Vansil last night, Pyrax pyrotholite, and all of the Darvan products. These are all coming from RT Vanderbilt. That's a big list. Some of them you may never use and you don't care about. But these the last night in the Pyrax, those I think are the only sources we commonly have. Darvan, they're the only supplier of Darvan. There are other products or international friends. Use Dispacks and Dispacks is actually the same chemistry, but we don't have Dispacks here in the States. V-Gum is a brand. Maybe we will. V-Gum is a brand name. It's really a specific type of clay that's commonly called McAlloyd. But yeah, it's a big list. It's a big list. But so you brought up the chapter 11 bankruptcy. So chapter 11 bankruptcy is not I'm shutting my doors. I'm not doing anything. It's not that. It's basically and this is a simplification of definition of chapter 11 bankruptcy. It's basically they're taking their debt. They're reconciledating it and they're restructuring their management. It doesn't mean that they're closing. Doesn't mean that they're stop manufacturing. I can say I have talked to our people in supply chain. Actually, who are the ones that told us about it? Because we have ears in supply chain. They came to us and said just so you know. And they said they had contacted their contacts, advanced rebuilt, and they say nothing is changing. Could that change in the future? Yeah, it could. Chapter 11 is a difficult thing. Not everybody comes out of chapter 11 bankruptcy. But for most large corporations, which it says, this is about debt restructuring. Why this happened is actually a ceramic story that's worth discussing, because RT Vanderbilt used to be the biggest supplier of talc in America. And there is a large history of lawsuits associating talc in personal, personal dryness products to, to certain forms of cancer. I'm not going to get into that. I will say that that is about lawsuits and not about science. But that put them in an unfortunate position, because they were supplying the largest amount of talc in America, which if you've been listening to materials corner, we'll know we've been having talc issues for 15 years, because of the actual downfall of the RT Vanderbilt talc source, and then the downfall of another talc source. And then it just cascades and cascades. But so yes, this is real. But I think we are saying this because on a recent episode, we are having a conversation about the bad flow of information. And again, supply stores spreading bad information that was only partially true, or not true. We were talking about materials in Sweden that they were told were banned, when they weren't really banned, and ceramic supply stores continuing to tell the wrong narrative. So we wanted this came across our desks, and we wanted to put it out there just so that everyone has clarity on it. We don't think that this is bad. We don't think that this is the end of these materials. It could happen. Things could go topsy-turvy on this one, but stay calm for now. I would not say everyone who just started using Miami should go and switch to something else. I actually still say, here's our insight from the testing we've been doing with EPK replacements. McKinnami is the most viable. It's not exactly replacement because materials aren't replacements for themselves, but I think actually McKinnami is a pretty good raw material. You know what I mean? I live in Dive by Darvan. I'm a slipcaster. Like that huge problem. VGUM is a great product, but this is the reality. So don't believe the hype. Right here is what we know, and we'll tell you if anything changes and what we know as it changes. So Kathy, stop, stop weeping. Kathy, stop. I know my heart can't take it. I can't take it. Too much. Today's episode is brought to you by the Rosenfield collection of Functional Ceramic Art. The collection exists as an online source for research and inspiration, featuring photos of thousands of objects made by over 800 artists. The images are high quality and can be used with no permission required. To find out more, visit www.RosenfieldCollection.com. Glazes don't make sense, but that's why Rosenyer here at SerantMaterialsWorkshop.com, helping translate glazes for real ceramicists like you. So join us for our brand new class starting October 1st. For everyone from beginners to masters, we clear up all the mysteries of glazes to make them work for you. Join us at SerantMaterialsWorkshop.com for making glazes. Makes sense. Should we get some questions? Come on. Come on. Okay, so let's get to it. Here we go. Our first question comes from Mark from Indianapolis, or the area thereof. And has a question about makes and glazes with students. Hey, Matt and Rose, Kathy, producer Ben. This is Mark from Indianapolis. I'm a high school ceramics teacher.
And up to this point, my classes have only used commercial glazes, and honestly, so I, but I'd like to start my advanced students mixing their own glazes, you know, finding recipes on glazy blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I'm kind of stuck for a starter list of raw materials to order. And I was hoping you could help with that. We're looking at cone six glazes. And I just, yeah, I would just like a little bit of help putting together a list of solid ingredients that we'll use, that we'll actually use. I know that some people order way more stuff than they actually will ever use. So I kind of want to focus what I'm doing, especially because I'm on the budget. Thanks a bunch. Love what you do. Bye. Thanks, Mark. Oh, Mark, I want to say I am so proud of you for taking this step. I think it is so important for the mentors in our community to be exposing children to experimenting with white powders. I think that that's awesome. Lord, there's some color in there too. I mean, come on. No, it is. It is a great step. And boy, I wish I had, I started ceramics in high school. And I didn't use a commercial glaze till I got to college, or sorry, a handmade glaze till I got to college. And so that is awesome. And the students can totally handle it. It is well within their means. And yeah, it's intimidating. The number of times we get contacted per year. I bet Kathy, you probably get the same thing producer Ben, you might even get this in your studio where somebody says, I'm cleaning out my grandmother studio. And I have got 800 bags of material. Listen, I used to hate that. I love it now. I'm like, okay, do you have any custard? It's awesome. Just like, all right. So are you gay? Both the left we go on. Well, my real frustration is how often we get offered uranium oxide. Yeah, yeah, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, uranium. I want the uranium. I don't want the, the upkeep of it. I don't want the lead box. I don't want all the insulation. I don't like those big, radioactive suits. I don't want to have to put a sticker on anything. She doesn't want the cats to grow an extra toe. No. Polydactory for the wind. Yeah, but Mark, okay, great. Okay, so simplest, the harder part is going to be tagging down some recipes. And that's where I can get really intimidating. Glazy is great and wonderful and amazing, but it can be really overwhelming. And there can be some sketchy stuff out there. So let's start with the basic list. If I had to give you our basic list, Nepheline Sinite, okay, you need an alkali metal flux, that is by far the most diverse one. So Nepheline Sinite, you're going to want that. You're going to want a whiting calcium carbonate for an alkaline earth flux. You're going to want Kaelin, as we said, historically in glazes, we would have just said E.P.K., now the D.P.K. is a dead material. We're leading towards saying the McNamey, McNamey. We haven't fully decided. I can get them wrong all the time. It's like Routille. I could say that different in the save conversation. A hundred percent. Routile. Routile. Routile. But yeah, I think McNamey's fine. Some people are going with tile six. That's also fine too. Whatever your supply store has, whatever's cheap, they basically work the same. You're going to want flint. And this is one that is worth noting. A lot of ceramic supply stores will sell 325 mesh flint and they'll sell 200 mesh flint. You can use either, but you should go for the 325 mesh for your glazes. 200 mesh, they're selling for making clay bodies because it's cheaper and you use a lot more silica in your clay bodies. So price matters on that one. But for glazes, they will melt more effectively if you use 325 mesh silica. And then the last one is Frit3134. That you'll need that for your cone six glazes. And do note that's 3134, 3134, not 3124. They are very similar, but they are not the same thing. And 3134 is going to be more diverse for what you want it to do. You're also going to want some colorants for experimenting with color. Cobalt carbonate. That'll get you blues. And that's a pretty good one to go with. No moxide will get you greens. Copper will get you a different shade of greens. Red iron oxides will get you browns. And then the other two that you can choose between are nickel and manganese. Nickel and manganese are both fine. If you're just stocking up, you should definitely have them. If you're just looking for that first thing and you're really concerned with budget, you can kind of skip them because they both basically make shades of brown. So like do you need three ways of making brown and ceramics? Not really. Yeah, a nickel is not always an easy one to find. Yes. I get comments a lot to say, I can't find this. Can I substitute for something else? And so then the other thing with the colorants is you have to watch out for the sourcing. Cobalt carbonate is your best form of cobalt. Copper carbonate is your best form of copper. Chrome only comes in chrome oxide. The iron, you want red iron oxide. They might offer it as Spanish red iron oxide. That's fine. And then what was the other ones? Manganees only comes in manganese dioxide. Nickel if you do get it, try to get black nickel oxide and really avoid nickel carbonate if you can. Nickel carbonate, it's not toxic or anything. It just reacts with water very badly and can turn your glazes into pudding. If you want it easier colors for students, that's where stains come in. But stains are expensive. And so that is definitely the thing to know for that. For recipes, that's, as I said, where it gets trickier. I mean, I would say the basic recipe that every cone six potters should know is 20 by five, by Tony Hanson. It's literally those five ingredients at 20% each. It works fine. You can put whatever colorants in there and you can do some colorant testing. If you want something like a phase separated glaze, which is sort of the streaky fingers, Joe Thompson, old forge creations on social media. He's been a longtime student of ours and he came up with a glaze he calls first five. And that's, I think it's all the same ingredients and it'll get to some of those streaky fingers in that one. Again, you can look around on glaze, but actually having those material restrictions is the best thing that you can have because you have to look for glazes with just those ingredients. And that'll actually keep you a little bit safe from things that are a little bit wild or a little bit hard to do. And that'll definitely give you a good starting spot. I mean, I think that that's mostly what we need. And then you can have a student do testing. Yes. Yes. Test test. Yes. And that's it. Like stuff like the color and test and trying the colorants and different percentages. They're going to have so much. So much. Yeah. And you can do those wet. You can do those dry. There's lots of different theories out there about doing track seals or line blends or all those. I mean, I could go off on that forever. But you know, just have them experiment with one base glaze with different percentages of colorants and then combining colorants. And yeah, anyway, you want to do it as fine. They'll have a ton of fun. You'll get a lot of colors. You'll see some glaze flaws in there. Not everything will act nicely. You know, I'm looking at you, Copper and Iron. Oh, that's the one color and I forgot. You might want to get a zirconium silicate, which commonly now goes by the brand name of alt-trocks. That's going to make your glaze white. That's what you call an opacifier. So I would consider that one. If you need to cut budget, you still need those five base ingredients and I would just pick and choose the colorants. You sort of, I think you implied in your question like amounts, I can't tell you that. That's whatever you need. You're going to need more of those base ingredients, less of the colorants. But you know, do you need five pounds? Do you need 10 pounds? It depends on your students, your budget, you know, sort of all that. But I don't think we'll amount to the big five. Yeah. So basically equal amounts of those five and then smaller amounts of the colorants. But yeah, you'll see real quick, like that cobalt that's going to hurt. So, but you don't need a lot of it, which is the good news. Well, that's great. I mean, I'm just glad there are teachers like you out there, Mark. So good on you. I didn't get to have any of that fun in high school. There was just one pottery wheel in the corner that had a bunch of crap on it. And when we asked our teacher about it, he said it was too messy. And then we had to go back to doing pencil drawings of crumpled up grocery bags, which is, I can't even use a grocery bag anymore. This is what the teeth is. I know she is today. Well, no, there's a lot of other reasons for that. But let's go on to our next question. Okay. So our next question comes from Jessica from Durham, North Carolina. And she has an interesting question about cleaning out. Hello for FlexSake. My name is Jessica and I am in Durham, North Carolina. A few minutes ago, I was in the hospital.
weeks ago I was washing up my tools and my bats and my hands and everything after a throwing session. And I heard Matt's voice in my head nagging me, "You've got to know your chemistry." And for some reason I flashed back to AP Chemistry and remembered a lesson with some sort of information about the difference between soaps and detergent and the way that cleaning agents work and dirt and particles. And for context a few years ago I stopped using the dish soap that was provided in my community studio because I found that it got really so soaked into the sponge that it I felt like it never rinsed out and just made everything soapy and more obnoxious. And so and I didn't feel like it was cleaning up the clay that much more effectively than if I was just using water. So my question is will soap help me to clean clay off of things? And if so does the type of soap matter? So like the blue dish soap versus another kind of soap? And would the temperature of the water that I'm using impact the efficacy and efficiency of my cleaning? Thanks for all you do to help us learn or in my case re-learn our chemistry. Excellent question that I don't want to talk about the chemistry at this point. I want to ask Kathy, I mean you make pots and you run a public studio, what is your cleaning technique? What do you do? Do you soap? We don't know. I mean it's just it's a lot of sponging. We're very much about water conservation. So like we have a whole video about like how you clean your wheel with just like a couple of inches of water. And you know and also because our settling system for each of our sinks it's you know precarious. So we've got to really protect the sinks. Anywho. So it's like sponging and then it's microfibering. Micro fibers will just change the whole game because it gets rid of that feeling of like oh you thought you cleaned that wheel and then come back in 20 minutes when it's dry and it's just like white swiping marks all over it. That microfiber really takes care of it. So no we only have soap in the ladies' and men's room restrooms. Well and since we do have producer Ben here who is also making pots and also works with the public studio. Anything different from you? Any thoughts? No same thing in the microfibers man. What a revelation. I have just learned about them like somewhat recently. But I tried to convince our owners of the studio I ran to take the soap out of the studio because it just made so much mess. But they didn't want to do that. So we have the option of soap but I encourage people not to use the soap just to use a sponge like Kathy said to do the initial cleaning than microfiber. I mean I guess the only time I use soap and what would make sense is in the glazer room like to clean out wax brushes you know because if you do catch those early and use some nice hot water with a little blue soap as it was referred to that does really do the job but yeah I don't know what do you all do? We don't use soap really for cleanup at all. I mean we use microfibers and like limited water we have settling systems. But yeah I wouldn't think to put soap on my sponge to clean my tools. Well even the sponge I mean to really go on the microfiber thing this was something that we didn't even think about and we have a brother-in-law who used to work for a company that made microfiber cloths and one day he shows up and gives us like five stacks of these you know just packaged microfiber cloths and we you know we put them in our kitchen we put them in the bathrooms but we put some in the workshop too and let me tell you that is what we have changed to we used to have the big you know the giant thick sponges that are the size of your hand that everybody used they basically just sit on the shelf now we do everything with microfiber cloths we have a bucket full of them we wipe down everything with them and we wash with them and then you rinse them out and put them out on the table and they'll be dry the next day and you can just keep going with a basically clean sponge so they're really good for sort of the physical like when you get clay really like caked on there then they're really good as both of you were saying for wiping down a surface that has that clay residue it'll tend to pick up most of that without having to go with more water and again you just rinse it and it's good to go and that's it that the mechanical cleaning is better than the chemical cleaning when it comes to clay you know soaps surfactants detergents whatever can they alter surface chemistry yeah but they don't alter the surface chemistry of our materials to really do enough to change them you can't use them like a dispersant to break up clay particles and because the clay you know as we've talked about their tiny little magnets so they stick together and so trying to get them to force apart is really a physical process not a chemical process so water and elbow grease the only other thing that I would add that that I do like especially when things are really caked on is scotch bright pads green scrubby pads they will really sort of get the clay that's sort of cooped into places and in nooks and crannies that the wash cost might not but yeah I think that it is an elbow grease situation as far as I am but using the right tools is a big deal because getting soap everywhere is not going to really work so I want to know about the temperature of water does the temperature of water matter? Kathy? No. Ben? Well let me ask wait hold on before we go to that let me ask the throwers not even from a cleaning perspective does throwing with warm water make it better than throwing with cold cold water or room temperature water aside from your hands being more comfortable. I didn't think it would affect anything but my personal comfort. Yeah that's a big one. Personal comfort I don't want to put my hands in cold water and then in the summer I want cool water so yeah exactly. What's the great thing? I would agree with that like I there is no scientific evidence because when we say hot water these temperatures are super minimal. Oh compared to like your dishwasher and yeah washing machine. And dishwasher is really about the motion more than anything again using more physical and the surfactants do help break up the oils in our food but that's really the thing because yeah that that's really what you need to watch out for but I wouldn't think the temperature would make much of a difference. No I just remember when I was a production potter and in Colorado I worked in the goat barn the old goat barn and it was always freezing so I tried to get as much hot water as I could so my water my throwing water was at least tepid by the time I was done. But going back to the oils and the soap that actually makes sense why you shouldn't use soap because it will also take the oils out of your skin which makes your skin drier. This made me think about when you're talking about your production job Rose because as a production potter like your hands would get gnarly from just too much washing too much clay like you got to do all this stuff to keep them from crashing. Yeah and just a single day to my hands for like a mess after a single day. Yeah it was definitely wore gloves afterwards putting like um oh I forget what it was called now it's not it's not Vaseline but it was like Vaseline like and I put it on the mom stuff. Yeah yeah the cowette or stuff. Yeah and put gloves on for a little while to help soak it in. That was fancy with like your turban head wrap on and your robe that's how I picture you Rose. After a long day in the studio. Oh so so long yes. The lady is a bad glimmer. What is that? No more wild haggas. Oh my goodness we could go on and on and on but alas we have run out of time people so until we have the pleasure again. Farewell. Later y'all. Well folks that's it for this week's episode of For Flux Sake. I'd like to thank the listeners who submitted questions this week and if you want your question answered on the show shoot us an email at
[email protected]. So join us next time and when in your studio remember what Rose always says. Always remember to test test test. This is a test of the emergency glazed system. Hi everyone if you've been leaning into our glazed deep dives to troubleshoot your studio struggles or just geek out over oxide ratios. We'd love to invite you to join us over on our patreon. Think of it as the flux that helps our creative process flow a little more smoothly.
Producing for Flux-Akete takes a lot of behind-the-scenes chemistry from research time to tech costs. By becoming a Patreon member, you're directly helping us keep the show independent and technical. By supporting us at the $5 a month tier, you get access to our Patreon Flux-U bonus episodes, archived for Flux-Akete Season 1 and Season 2. And you get priority submission for your questions from the team to answer in future episodes. Oh, and along with exclusive for Flux-Akete merch. We know how quickly the cost of Cobalt adds up, so we've kept our tiers accessible. Every bit of support means we can spend more time answering your questions and less time worrying about the business side of things. So check out our link on our show notes or visit patreon.com and keep the conversation and the kilns firing.
PodcastTranscript AI