Mid-Range Glazes for Beginners

You bought the clay, mixed a glaze recipe off the internet, fired it at cone 6 exactly as written - and got crawling, crazing, or a color that looked nothing like the photo.Mid-range is where most working potters actually glaze, but most beginner books either wave at the chemistry or bury it in a materials-science textbook. Mid-Range Glazes for Beginners is a complete, ground-up foundation in cone 5-6 glaze chemistry, built for potters who want to understand what a recipe is actually doing instead of just trusting it. Inside, you'll learn how to: - Read a glaze recipe like a potter, not a chemist - what silica, alumina, and flux are each doing, and why their balance decides whether a glaze runs, crazes, or holds- Use colorants and oxides with real confidence, from iron and cobalt through the full palette, with an accurate feel for how small a "small amount" actually is- Build a genuine test-tile practice, including line blends, so every glazing decision rests on a fired result instead of a guess- Apply glaze the way working studios do - dipping, pouring, spraying, and layering - and know when each one is the right call- Diagnose and fix the defects that stop beginners cold: crazing, pinholing, crawling, and blistering- Glaze functional ware safely, with a clear understanding of what "food-safe" actually requires- Work within real constraints, with guidance on community studios and shared kiln access for potters without a kiln of their ownWritten specifically for the home and studio potter with no chemistry background, the book builds every concept from the ground up before you need it - nothing assumed, nothing taken on faith. By the final chapter, a glaze recipe stops being an opaque list of powders and becomes a set of materials doing a job you can recognize and predict.If you're ready to stop guessing at cone 5-6 and start understanding it, open Mid-Range Glazes for Beginners and run your first test tile today.