This is not necessarily the best set of tests because the results were more oxidised than I would have liked. I also held the kiln for 8 hours between 1830°F and 1750°F. This was a rather specific firing.

I wish I had a smaller soda kiln that I could have reduced hard and not done a cooling cycle to see the results with only the variable of adding soda. But I did not have the luxury of this and they were in a firing which was mostly about yellow glazes wares for my thesis show.

Anyway, aside from that long preamble, lets get to the results.

These results can be compared to the ones from gas reduction which are in the last 4 or 5 blog posts.

Here are my initial jun tests…

Similar to those in gas reduction but perhaps a littl emore drippy and a little jazzier. i think my long hold contributed to some of this crystal growth. I’d love to get these surfaces analysed and see what the composition of these crystals is.

Now on to my grid tests…

Here they are individually…

The second set has the most promising looking results but this may be deceptive. It got the least amount of soda (being on the bottom of the stack). Maybe this suggests that the chun blues do not like soda.

Here are the vertical tiles from grid 2 organised:

And now the ones from grid 3:

It is pretty difficult to make sweepinf statements about these results. So much depends on the atmosphere and how much soda each tile got. Considering this firing was pretty oxidised these results are actually pretty encouraging. I think I could get a working jun glaze in a soda atmosphere.

There were some nice surfaces out of the individual test tiles. Here are some that stood out…

And then here is a small test bowl glazed with DP1266…

As you might be able to tell, these glazes felt really nice. This may have been due to the intentional slow cooling though. It would be worth redoing this test in a regular reduction soda firing with no intentional cool.

I am encouraged to keep putting jun formulations in the soda kiln!