Glaze Sprinkles at Cone 6

This is a follow up to last month’s post about Glaze Sprinkles, with my favourite combination so far.

One thing I’ve been exploring is using a cone 10 glaze for the sprinkles. This has several advantages over cone 6 sprinkles.

Firstly, they can sinter correctly in a bisque firing (there does seem to be a bit of variation based on colourants though). This means you don’t have to do a separate firing just to sinter the sprinkles.

Secondly, they’re more static at cone 6. The base glaze around them should provide enough flux and boron for them to fully melt, but they won’t run as much as a cone 6 glaze in the same setting. This gives better defined speckles.

Thirdly, they’re cheaper to make. Without boron the recipes can be simpler and less expensive (for comparison, 4321 base is under half the material cost per kilo than 20x5). It won’t save much, the sprinkles are just a small part of the overall glaze after all, but it makes the experimentation stage a little less costly.

OldForge Blizzard

Sprinkles added at 0.3%, 0.6%, and 1%

This is my favourite result of all the tests. It uses a fairly static translucent white base (recipe) and small blue sprinkles (recipe).

The sprinkles are prepared as explained in the previous post, but sintered in my 04 bisque firing. I then use a kitchen sieve to remove the larger chunks, leaving me with sprinkles approximately 1mm or smaller. These are added to the base glaze mix after it has been made and sieved as normal. Don’t add them to a glaze when preparing the mix unless you don’t intend to pass it through a sieve at any point.

The smaller sprinkles can stay suspended in a glaze mix. You can dip and pour the glaze as usual, so long as you don’t have a particularly watered down mix (consider epsom salts if you have a mix with a good specific gravity that’s still too fluid to support the sprinkles).

That's all there is to it! Please try it and let me know how you get on, message me or use the hashtag oldforgecreations (I often miss @mentions on Instagram and there's no way to find them afterwards, but I'll see the tag). Good luck!

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