Glaze Recipe: Raquel Acosta

I create my pottery from my garden studio in South West London. I find joy in making simple everyday objects beautiful – beauty that is made to be part of your daily life. I chose the name Glaze Me Pretty for my ceramics line when I was first learning how to make pots. Back then I didn’t know anything about glazes but found them fascinating. When I discovered that glazes form crystals while molten, in the same way as rocks and minerals form beneath the Earth’s surface, I knew it was  what I wanted to make. I develop each glaze over months in search of a quality that makes it unique. For example, it could be glazes with crystals formed by molecules bonding in a beautiful pattern that will be different on each piece. The glaze I have chosen to share here is part of a set of tests aimed to explore the behaviour of four different pairs of fluxes. I developed chemically similar glaze bases with four flux combinations: sodium-strontium, sodium-barium, lithium-strontium and lithium-barium. I kept the alumina level the same across all tests and tested nine different amounts of silica on each base to achieve a range of finishes from matte to gloss. I then tested the 36 separate bases with no colourant, with copper and with cobalt. All four flux combinations produced similar results on the gloss side of the tests, with a very clear surface and vibrant colours. On the matte tests, there were subtle differences in texture, ranging from very smooth and almost glittery mattes to waxy mattes with streaks.