Night Skies Crystalline Vase

My ‘Night Sky Crystalline Vase’ was wheel thrown from high-fire stoneware. The luminous glaze was achieved using a crystalline glaze I make from scratch in the studio. I painted 22k gold on the rim of this piece as it was just begging to be contrasted with the gorgeous cobalt blue and to emphasize the pretty fluted rim.

There are many steps to making crystalline glazed ceramics so it is incredibly time consuming, but I hope you’ll agree that the results are worth the effort! Every piece has a single-use, hand built ‘riser’ and ‘glaze catcher’ dish made to fit it perfectly for the glaze firing. This is necessary as the high gloss crystals need a glaze that flows a lot to develop, and all that flowing glaze has to go somewhere. After the glaze firing, the pieces are removed from the risers and catchers by a number of methods and then the razor edged base needs to be sanded, using 5 different grit sanders until it’s baby-bottom smooth. My crystalline pieces are glaze fired to 1300 degrees celcius over 16.5 hours. This piece also went through a third firing, to fire on the gold on the rim.