Earthenware glazes are made mostly of frit, which is a kind of man-made feldspar. Borax, soda and other water soluble materials can be made insoluble by heating together with silica. The resulting glass is ground up and used together with clay and silica to make low temperature earthenware glazes. Frits are also used to lower the melting temperature of mid-range glazes. The raw mineral borates are found in dried up lake basins in Turkey and California.
Quartz weighed on a triple beam balanceChina clayBorax frit
Opacifiers can be added to make the glaze opaque. Tin oxide is the most effective opacifier but zirconium silicate is less expensive.
Tin oxide
A respirator mask should be worn when weighing dry materials. The dry powders are added to water and left to slake before sieving.
Stoneware and porcelain glazes are made up of at least four ingredients: silica, feldspar, whiting and clay. This is what they look like in their raw mineral forms. Silica is ground flint or quartz, usually from sand or sandstone. These are large pieces of milky quartz from a vein in igneous rock.
Quartz
Silica has a high melting temperature. In order to melt in a kiln, it needs a flux. The main flux in stoneware and porcelain glazes is feldspar, found in granite, an igneous rock composed of the minerals feldspar, quartz and mica. This piece of granite from Devon has both muscovite (silver, sparkly) and biotite (black, crystalline) mica. The dark vein is mafic rock, high iron and magnesium. Granite forms when molten magma cools and solidifies. The darker minerals solidify first, then the feldspar and finally the quartz, often in large veins running through the rock. Slow cooling, deep in the earth’s crust results in large crystal size.
Granite: feldspar (white), quartz (grey) and mica (black)
Clay contains both alumina and silica and is added to increase viscosity to prevent the glaze from running off the pot when molten in the kiln. Clay also helps to keep the heavier quartz and feldspar suspended in water in the glaze bucket.
Clay, dried and powdered
Calcium carbonate added in the form of whiting is an extra flux which helps to stabilise the glaze and can also produce a matt glaze surface. Whiting is ground up chalk or limestone.
