Opening Porcelain to all designers

Hey All,

We've just opened the porcelain pilot to everyone.

You can read the blog post about it here, check the revised design guidelines here and talk about your specific porcelain questions here.

Please note, through the closed phase of the pilot we've learned some very important things about glazes. Some glazes are more popular than others and even though we love all these colors, we've determined that it makes more sense to offer the most popular four permanently and offer another four as a special edition, seasonal variety. So bye bye to yellow for now!



The decision to limit the glazes is based on our limited resources, its because each glaze behaves so differently we need to be careful about how we store, prepare and apply them. Our porcelain material is unique therefore we prepare our glazes specially for it.

Any idea yet how often the limited selection colors will change out?

More importantly, when is glow-in-the-dark coming online?

Pity about the yellow, I particularly liked WillLaPuerta's yellow Iris candle holder (and was toying with the idea of modeling one based on the molecular structure of sulfur). Any news on shipping unglazed parts, which would allow us to get the glazing or even painting done elsewhere ?

Cool thanks!

Bathsheba I think you know more about glow in the dark glaze than I do


The conversation about offering unglazed is going on over here if you want to join

Guess she is planning to make that whalesnail thing again, for an aquarium full of cute little smiling anglerfish or something.

If you will forgive me for hopping into yet another thread that is none of my business, and as I happen to have recently read up on phosphorescent pigments for puuuuuurely scientific reasons - from what I found, there are basically just two materials: Copper-doped zinc sulfide, cheap and not very stable (not even light fast) material that gives off a red or green glow that lasts a few hours at best (this is the stuff found in cheap glow-in-the-dark plastics items like toy skeletons)
and strontium aluminate doped with rare earth elements like Europium - expensive, but able to glow (green or blue) for hours.

Glazes from either would apparently have to be prepared afresh by dispersing the pigment powder in a clear glaze, recommended firing temperatures appear to be about 800C for ZnS, about 1000 for the Eu/SrAl2O4 . Phosphorescence efficiency appears to depend on particle size and crystallinity, so I suspect it would take some experimenting to come up with a process that does not damage the pigment. In daylight, both materials would probably look much like that sickly selagon glaze that you guys preferred over yellow.
(One good source of information is the website of the japanese company Nemoto)

Will the glow in the dark glaze still be food safe?

No reason why not - you'd mix a regular clear glaze with a sand-like material that contains a small amount of firmly bound heavy metal that is more benign than lead or cobalt. There is no radioactivity involved in the emission process either - it is just light energy that is stored on the electrons of the europium atoms in daylight and slowly released as they return to their normal energy levels in the dark.

Is the wall thickening tool functional yet for porcelain? I don't think there's another material with the 3mm min wall thickness value or thicker that can be used instead.

It is working, its just going very slow at the moment. We're looking into why but if you load it in a tab and come back a little later and refresh the page it should thicken the model to 3mm

That's good news! I wasn't able to come up with a thickening methodology that worked as awesomely as the SW tool for one of my designs.

When will we be able to offer porcelain products in our shops?

Thanks!

Pete

the 22nd of October