Vintage Glaze

When I moved to the area, I joined the local potters guild and met Cynthia O'Brien, a scuplture artist. A couple of years later she was cleaning out her studio and gave me some pre-mixed glazes that she knew she would never use. Cynthia got them from a fella whose mother was a potter but since had passed away.

These pre-mixed glazes were dry,bagged, mixed by Tucker's Pottery Supply and dated 1982. Wow! Vintage glaze! I had no idea what I was in for, but as soon as I found a few empty buckets I mixed up Shiney White, Old Blue and Oatmeal.

I loved the way Shiney White looked on my buff stoneware clay body. It showed throwing lines in the clay through its almost transparent sheen. In places where the glaze overlapped it was opaque and in other places like on the rim, I could see small crystalline patches. Here's a picture of a jug and some wine cups glazed in Shiney White and Creek Mud - a local clay that I happily discovered fires as a glaze at cone 9/10.

The Oatmeal was exactly as I expected it to be - like 1978. Iron yellow, brown specks, warm and homey.

Here is a teapot done in oatmeal flanked by my DaisyWare glazed in VCAA Blue.

Old Blue was a gorgeous dusty grey blue that also showed throwing lines well, although it was opaque. I loved that you could really see the flow of the glaze as it melted in the kiln. But that Old Blue was like a ghost. I went to great lengths to find the recipe for it. I got on Clayart and asked everyone there if they had a recipe for Old Blue. I scoured every issue of Ceramics Monthly from 1977 - 1982 (yes, I actually do have every issue from that period, but that's another story), and found some recipes that could maybe be Old Blue. I mixed small batches of these possibles and it led nowhere except to the discovery of an ugly glaze that indeed was blue, but it also had pink speckles in it. Really not my cup of tea. I even wrote to Tucker's and asked if they had the recipe for this Old Blue. No. No one had even heard of a glaze called Old Blue.

Plate detail. Handbuilt slab plate with stamped design. Stamp made by artist.

After a year or two, and gathering a few empty buckets, which are few and far between in my studio since I'm kind of a glaze junkie, I opened up that box of pre-mixed glazes from Cynthia to see what else I could mix up. I pulled out several more slightly torn paper bags of glaze and among them I discovered two bags of blue glaze. One was marked blue and the other blue semi-gloss. Hmmmm. My interest was piqued. I mixed up both bags in seperate buckets and they looked really similar to Old Blue. I tested the glazes and eureka! It was Old Blue. Okay... suddenly it became clear. It was in the interest of using up that one last bag of glaze before the others that the potter had written on the bag the word old (in red) in front of the word blue. Of course!

I wrote back to Tucker's and this time I asked for the following group of recipes:

Shiney White, Blue semi-gloss, Oatmeal, Cain yellow, Cain brown, Temmoku and Black semi-matte. They came through! They had all those old recipes on file. Now I could reproduce what I already had. They might look slightly different since the raw materials I have to make glaze came from a supplier in Manitoba, but that is the way of this art form.