Recent work

It took me a while to figure it out, but the blue responds much more to temperature than my other glazes. It kept going much more blue-green and only occasionally exactly what I wanted. Finally, Christy and I figured out that it got that way if any area of the kiln was fired just past cone 6. The middle of the kiln is the hottest, and even a small difference in temp made a big difference in color. We almost always have witness cones in each load and we finally saw a pattern: The best blues came out on the top shelf and it's the coolest. Now I have lowered the peak temp and that made it clear what the issue was. It's still easy to get the middle too hot unless I back it more loosely, which is hard to do when you have a really small kiln. So I can just put different colors on the middle shelf when possible.