Willow goes stoneware!!!

Well I have been a bit busy lately and have not had the time to post regular updates as I wanted to. No matter, we have had so much to do, which means lots of juicy news and pics for all our fans.

So lets start from the beginning of 2019....

The main objective we had for the start of this year was to finally change over from our earthenware clay to the higher quality stoneware clay.

Stonware is a higher quality clay that is the standard all over the world because of its frost and cold resistance. The other main reason is the amazing glazes we were looking forward to testing. Stoneware offers so many more options and effects than earthenware.

Now to say that we had it easy during the changeover would be a bit of a stretch. We had to do continued tests with the temperature settings of our kilns to get it perfect. Plus having 1 or 2 problems with our clay.

However the main hurdle was to test all the new glazes we had samples of. Our first batch of tests we had over 20 glazes to work with. Some made the cut and looked like we expected but others were a complete disaster to say the least.....

We then worked hard to have unique colour tests done. Now this was an interesting process in which some of the tests turned out great results even though they did not look anything like the colour we were after.

A lot of effort has gone into our glazes and we can say with confidence that they are unique to our high quality range of pots...

In the next blog I will continue the story of our start to the year with more on the pottery side of things and the trees I have been styling.

Untill next time...