>>970866
I forgot to mention! I will definitely try any recommendations, and would be more than happy to bring back any results, with pictures of test tiles, notes etc

>not throwing a feldspar-less kaolin/silica mix and firing at Δ20
P L E B

I've seen paperclay which is pretty cool.

What would happen if you included iron filings or something like that?

>>970874
In an oxidation firing it would be oxidized (derp) to iron oxide, staining the clay red/brown, in a heavy reductive firing it would stay as metal, but if it were embedded in the clay it would cause extensive cracking (iron expands much more than clay on heating)

>>970866
Bone ash, wood ash, and soda ash are going to flux your body, lower the maturity temperature of the base and increase shrinkage/warpage, which will affect the glaze fit. Although experimenting is very useful and informative. With fluxing bodies, I strongly recommend you liberally kiln wash a junky kiln shelf before firing. The bentonite is going to increase plasticity at 1-2%, and turn the body into a ridiculously gooey mass above that.

What's the firing temp of this body?

Inclusions can be fun. You can add sand, grog, or small feldspar pebbles (under marble size. Larger feldspathic rock may explode, small pieces tend to soften and weep at higher temps).

Organics are fun. They'll burn out, leaving interesting shaped voids. Try anything. Acorns, seeds, grain, sticks, coffee beans. Just be sure to clean all the ash out after bisque firing. It'll turn to glass on you in the glaze firing. You can fire iron and steel embedded in the clay. Expect some cracking around it from the clay shrinking. Most people counter this by heavily grogging their body.

It's kinda hard for me to make suggestions without a more specific desired result or working characteristic. Glad you're making records.

>>970866
Ive always been curious. Can you add fiber glass fibers to fired ceramics? And if so what exactly does it improve? Tensile? Compression? Shear?

>>970887
Yes. Sculptors add fiberglass to their clay bodies. It improves green (unfired) strength (the clay can flex a little bit without breaking) and reduces cracking during drying by opening long air channels through it which makes water content wick out evenly. Uneven drying in thicker work causes uneven shrinking, which causes cracks. Unfortunately, the trade-off is that the fired ceramic is less dense, and weaker. The tiny air pockets where the fibers once were may make the sculpture unsuitable to live outdoors in areas where it freezes. Frozen water gets all up in there and cracks it. Fiberglass stinks up the studio pretty badly as the plastic burns out. Good ventilation if you don't want cancer or something.

OP here, thanks for the replies everyone! Some really good info.

Iron oxide would turn any variation of brown or red depending on the level of oxidation etc. The base clay I'm using has enough as impurities from the mine that it is off-tan/pinkish after oxidation, but almost a blue-grey in reduction.
The paper clay idea I'll be certain to try, though I've heard that as well as some of the other common fiber inclusions stink like high hell. We had someone do a beer clay for the bacterial souring and it made workability go up but the stench was unbelievable.

Thanks for the info on the ashes and bentonite. I kind of figured it would turn to goo after seeing what it does to our glazes; one of the professors (I'm a work study student) actually told me to disregard it though it was previously a component of all of our class glazes. I might try it just to see it anyway, 100-300g batch isn't too much lost clay and maybe it could make an interesting addition material. The firing temp of the body I'm using is Cone 04 bisque/Cone 6 glaze. It's a very similar derivative of a class clay that is used, and all of the classes fire on the above schedule.

As to what I'm looking for personally, the idea with the clay tests was to come up with bodies that did very strange, unusual things, for example one of our grads last year had a black clay that turned almost to a volcanic foam, puffed up really strangely. Anything along those lines, just to see something beyond the normal ebb and flow of making bodies with slight differences to account for personal taste, since the other students are currently pursuing those and we're getting lots of info from that.

Hard to know exactly what sort of working characteristics to go for, I mostly make handbuilt works (non-thrown) and am just starting to look into different things to change to make that pursuit easier.

>>970950
Huh. Wonder why your professor told you not to use bentonite. You should ask. It's pretty useful. Say you wanted to whiten up your body by replacing the fireclay with kaolin (you'd probably increase the spar a bit), but you'd lose plasticity. A small addition of bentonite would help. On the glaze end, if you've got something with a very low clay content for color development reasons (like copper reds, or high alkaline copper turquoise blues in oxidation) that dry very powdery, bentonite is also helpful.

I don't know what kind of goodies you've got in your glaze kitchen, but taking a white stoneware or porcelain body, and doing line blends with metal oxides and body stains is an invaluable project. A working palette of colored clays that fire together opens up all kinds of cool techniques like agateware, inlay, and nerikomi.

You might want to fuck around with lichen and crater glazes for weird surface effects.

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>>970893
I think that guy means glass fibres, as in the same stuff that's used to reinforce fibreglass. There should be no plastic in that before it's made into a composite.

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You can use glass, blue or green from old bottles
don't know what happens when you put crushed glass inside the clay I only know pic related as inlay

>>971009
To my knowledge unreinforced glass fibers are not used in plastic ceramics, as they would not maintain a flexible thread or lattice structure when worked, giving no benefits, while decreasing safety. It's the strong, flexible tensile strength you want, not the silica content. Nylon fibers work just as well if not better than fiberglass anyway.

>>971023
Most glass has a much lower melting temperature than most clays, therefore when using it over ceramic you'd have to be very careful that gravity is in your favor. The COE's are different to cause massive crazing, as in your photo. The best way to ensure there isn't a total rejection in clay to glass fit (chunks of glass popping off) is to put down an interface layer of ceramic glaze that does match the COE of the clay body at the bisque stage on top of the clay, underneath the glass. Bisque fired ceramic > ceramic glaze > glass.

If you can manage to work glass into plastic clay without cutting yourself, larger pieces would melt out and do interesting/disastrous things to the work and kiln before the ceramic even comes close to vitreousness. Smaller glass particles would flux the clay body more evenly and simply drastically lower the firing temperature while simultaneously making it far less plastic. The logical conclusion to that line of thought is simply formulating a non-plastic, highly vitreous casting body like bone china in plaster molds, firing it in refractory setters to counteract warping.