Meet a decidedly unbeautiful pair of glazing shoes or, as one of my nephews said twenty years ago on espying my feet, "nasty gyms."
Some grousing: There's not a lot I like about glazing pots. Not wearing the HEPA approved mask to weigh out dry, powdered ingredients on a gram scale, and not mixing the resulting recipes with water to make batches of wet glaze in 5-gallon buckets. I don't think I'm alone among potters when I dislike sieving the heavy stuff from one bucket into another a couple of times to de-lump it. I'm not a fan at all of the inevitable splash-up while making glazes, or the dripping and spattering and spilling while glazing the pots themselves. I'm going to have to sponge and mop tables and sink and floor and everything everywhere really well to prevent the glazes from drying there, where it gets raised as powder into the air whenever I walk around. It's fine, insidious, health-threatening stuff, the kind that lodges in the lungs and doesn't like to leave. Rolling up the sleeves yet further to get it all cleaned up in a must.
And a reality check: This work keeps me pretty grounded. Not a bad deal. I'm not big into the princess thing.
Back to the shoes: Part of the mess ends up on my nasty gyms. And so my shoes live in the studio, never getting to pass the mat between studio and gallery, let alone go upstairs into the house.
An un-grouse: I may not like glazing. But that does not preclude having to do it well anyway. I sure like the results when my well-glazed pots come out as hoped!
I'll post results early next week from the glaze kiln I'm firing now.