The CodyO Show "Raku-ing Jars"

The quest for the perfect white crackle:

This picture is an example of one of the best white crackles that I was ever able to achieve. There are many different variants that can cause you to get a good or bad white crackle. Sometimes you get a few big dark cracks, sometimes you get a lot of smaller spiderweb like cracks, and sometimes you get not cracks at all.*

I wish I was taking meticulous notes when I made the jar in this picture, but at the time I figured it would be easy to reproduce the same results. How wrong I was. Oh well. Now I think I will start a series of CodyO Shows trying different techniques to achieve "the perfect white crackle". Ya'll can learn with me.

In this episode of "The CodyO Show" I will be spraying my jar to encourage cracks then I will be reintroducing oxygen into the post fire reduction chamber in one minute intervals (a process known as "burping"):




What did we learn?

The Bad: This method of spraying and burping did not get the cracks that I was looking for. This may have been because I let the pot cool down too much before I put it in the combustibles. It may also have been because when I burped it, I let it flame up too much rather than just letting it smoke real well.

The Good: I was able to solve a problem that I was previously having were I was cracking the clay body instead of just the glaze. This was a durability problem that was keeping me from being able to sell these jars which are in such high demand right now. I was having this problem because I had to bring my kiln up to 1800 degrees to melt the glaze. Pulling the pottery out at this point was too much thermal shock for the clay body. I remedied this by first bringing the kiln up to 1800 then dropping it back down, and not pulling the jars til about 1700, thus having less thermal shock.

Next Time: Next time on "The CodyO Show" we will try our luck with the tried and tested method of blowing on the pot to encourage cracks in the glaze (instead of spraying it with water). I think I will also burp it but I'm not gonna let it flame up as much. I'm just gonna to go for tons of smoke. See ya next time :)

* Remember, you can always click on any pictures in my blog to view them closer. You will find this helpful for examining the various types of crack formations on the three different jars I have shown in this post.