I collected some twigs and pods from around my house to do one of my CopprClay experiments. If you've been following along with me, you know that I actually had some success at reconstituting some old clay and forming new pieces, firing them, and finishing them with a lovely LOS patina. Now for the ones that didn't work out so well!
I gave each of the twigs and pods coating after coating of copper slurry "paint", allowing each coat to dry. I propped up and hung them between coats. Before firing, I baked them at 200 F in my oven just to make extra extra sure that everything was dry.
I carefully buried them in the activated charcoal and fired them in my kiln, and this is what happened:
Every one of them crumbled, broke, flaked, and crunched away. The problem is that I can't tell you which of two possible problems was the ultimate cause of the failure. The clay was old and reconstituted, so as you may have noted on my other pieces (the ones that actually succeeded), there were lots of rough spots and air bubbles. The second possibility is that I simply didn't add enough layers of the clay. I've done this before with PMC silver clay and Art Silver clay with no problems, so my instinct is that it was probably the unevenness of the reconstituted clay. But we'll never know for sure, huh?
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