In June I wrote about my experiment with the transparent glaze. I
noticed that sometime the transparent glaze gets opalescent when I apply it too
thick. Well, sometimes. The first time the experiment didn’t work. I have
glazed the pieces very thick but nothing happened. The glazed cups came out of
the kiln clear and shiny. There were no traces of any kind of opalescence.
Then, I gave it another try. This time I let the glaze mixture settle
down a bit. I wanted to separate all the solid parts from the liquid. With a
brush I took only the sediment of the glaze and applied it on the pot. I was so
sure that this must work. It did!
As expected, the glaze got bluish and milky. If you hold the bowl in your
hands and turn it around, you may notice that the colour changes depending on
the angle under which you view it.
What happened
next is a very typical for human behaviour. When you want something really
badly and then finally you get it, you may realize that you didn’t want it as
much as you thought you did. Well, the glaze is beautiful, but it is too much
to look at. I couldn’t possibly imagine to have the whole set of bowls glazed
this way. It would make me feel dizzy, I guess. I have realized that I had much
more joy when this opalescent effect happens unintentionally. It seems that I
had to be reminded again that sometimes it is the small things in life that
make you happy. Also, sometimes those small things come to you on their own.
You don’t have to search them all the time – you just have to recognise them.
