I love the look of raku fired pieces. The glazes can have a metallic opal, oil slick look. Or you can get these gorgeous cracks in the glazes. I was wondering if it would be possible to do a raku firing at DMS.
The raku process is very stressful on pottery, so we need special clay. We will need special glazes that create the opal or cracked effect. If we have a group who is interested we can buy the materials together.
You also need a group of people to do the actual firing, because you need many hands to open the kiln, remove the hot pieces, and place them in a container with paper and wood shavings.
Unfortunately as far as I know we can’t do Raku at DMS itself. But we have done group events at offsite locations.
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Members are responsible for buying their own clay. Although, if you look Way Back in this category, you will see posts from various raku firings that we’ve held off-site. Conor Muldoon of Trinity Ceramic Supply has offered this. I’m sure we’re paying him for his facilities, but I haven’t participated, so I don’t know. We’ve actually fired some standard clays without much issue. Some of the slip-cast pieces came out quite fabulously.
@meanbaby , @Anette_Henningson , @cmcooper0 , and @Julie-Harris are just a few of the folks who’ve participated in the raku events.
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Thanks for all this information! Ok I’ll keep an ear out for the next event. Thanks!
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You might attend the next Ceramics Committee meeting in early March. We usually discuss which weird thing we’re doing this month.
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I’ll throw in some information on clay bodies and glazes!
It really isn’t necessary to use raku clay, though that can help if you have a variety of thicknesses, as with certain sculptural pieces. If you have fairly even thickness, basic stoneware does just fine and I’ve even had porcelain pieces make it through perfectly okay as long as they go into a reduction chamber.
There might (maybe, big maybe), still be some raku glazes in the teacher’s cabinet but it would be the wee dregs of long past firings. I highly recommend Spectrum raku glazes, Oxblood if my fave, and if you want to do a bunch of strong metallic pieces, there is a nice Shiny Copper that reduces in wildly different colors depending on how quickly and thoroughly you reduce the pieces after pulling them from the kiln. I can shoot you the recipe for that one and Trinity can make up however many gallons you want. You might also want to check out Obvara, which is a Baltic raku style that is a lot of fun, low cost, and has done well for us in the past.
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A few pictures from a past Raku event.
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