Want to trade terra cotta?

Before I knew what I was doing I purchased 25 lbs of terracotta clay. Anyone want to trade me the terracotta for white buff stoneware or basically anything else?

Michael

What is the Cone firing temp for your clay? I have some tan speckled “spectacular” clay which works with the DMS kilns I’d be willing to trade, but it’ll be few weeks before I’m back at DMS.

Hey,

Mine is from trinity, it should be good for the makerspace kilns as well.

Speckled clay would be great!

I’d recommend calling for a check. Some terracottas do nicely at 06-04 (fireable in the bisque loads) but blister/warp/get sketchy when you start going above that. And then there are others you can take up to six and they develop a rich color.

https://digitalfire.com/glossary/terra+cotta

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That’s why I was asking: cone 6 compatible or something else?

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Smart man! I’m a big fan of those higher cone terracottas and the deeper ruddiness they can develop.

The Trinity Ceramics page says:

Tags: cone 04, cone 05, cone 06, cone 4, cone 5, low fire, midfire

I think this means it can be fired at DMS during a bisque firing, but not a Cone 6 glaze firing, right? Thus, I could throw and fire a plain terra cotta plate/pot/etc. but not glaze /fire it at DMS using the Amaco glazes there.

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right it would have to wait for a cone 5 firing which we are doing those more often

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You could certainly run a test tile of the C5 terra cotta in a C6 safe dish and look at your results. It might perform okay, it might blister. Also, be sure to safely test glazes before going wild, you’ll have a different porosity than stoneware at lower firing temps and if you fire higher, decomp that might cause pinholing, blistering, etc.

Please don’t take any of this in a negative way! It’s a great clay type that can do very cool things, it just performs differently than stoneware. I mean, heck, that’strue for all new clay bodies one tries out. Testing leads to successes! Yay!

Edit: also, if you have inclination and time when you start firing this clay, I’d love to see photos of the results! I’ve not used the Trinity terra cotta and it would be awesome to snitch the resulting information of your hard work. :slight_smile:

We do have some Mayco Stroke and Coat glazes, which are designed for Cone 04 (i.e., bisque temp) firing. Properly marked, you can put a low-fire glazed piece in the bisque fire. The team needs to know that it’s low-fire so that they don’t accidentally put it on the Cone 6 glaze shelf, and so that they give it enough room. Pieces can touch in a bisque fire, but not if they’re glazed.

I haven’t really studied the low-fire glazes, but it looks like they are likely to all be fritted rather than a heat-chemistry reaction. My guess is that the metals don’t start combining until you get over 2000F. What that means to me is that they act more like paint so far as color goes – what you see is what you get, and there’s not likely to be any flowing. It’s still a glaze, though, so it’ll get molten and stick to things it touches while at temp.

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