Why This Pot is a Second, or, the Slip-n-Slide of Glazing

Some have asked me about this bowl, recently mentioned as being so bad. They said they kind of liked it:

It isn't bad outside except for the uneven glaze smoosh at the top. It is stamped with decoration from a swirl stamp I made a while back, and the swirls became sort of naive-style flowers blooming in a sea of grass. So far, so good. It had the grace to dry nicely, fired well to bisque, and then...it was glaze time.

I got all fancy and did some dipping in nutmeg, then wax resist overpainting to keep the grass delineated. So far good, right? Then an inside pour and outside dip in the celadon green for the rest of the bowl, and that's where I started to mess up. The new coat was too thin. I should have held it longer in the wet glaze to absorb more. It came out of the kiln a little rough to the touch and looking a bit pale.

Re-glazing is not an easy feat because the pot isn't porous any more and won't absorb the new coat. A very thin coat will dry on it if you hit it quick with a heat gun, but results are hardly worth the effort. But this was a nice bowl and I hated to sideline it. I decided to use a handy dandy tip I'd read years ago but never tried.

Brilliant tip: Coat the shiny surface with a layer of Elmer's glue and let it dry. Glaze over that. A thick enough coat should stick.

Sure enough, it worked. Into the kiln went the glue coated, re-glazed pot. Hotter and hotter rose the temp inside the kiln. Out of sight, the bowl rose to red heat. And as the glaze melted, it ran on a glue Slip-n-Slide, down into a weirdly shaped pool in the bottom of the bowl.

There you have it.
Another one for the next Seconds sale...?

Addendum: September 18. Reglazed the bowl a second time. No Elmer's glue this time, just a very soft paintbrush and a dark green glaze that had been thickening in its bucket, forgotten for some months. The key is to use a really thick glaze, I guess, that glides on and doesn't run off again. Because now this bowl is no longer destined for the Seconds shelf. It is now fully moss colored inside, a greeny-brown like a fallen log.