Decals and Firing

over-fired cat decal looks faded and dull

In March, when I was at the NCECA conference, I noticed lots of people working with decals, especially gold decals. I bought a few and tried some out this summer and fall. 

gold and black cat decal sheets with some of the cats cut out and used already

I wanted to try them and see if they'd be useful for students or for my own work. Unfortunately, when I bought them they didn't have anything attached to them that indicated the name of the company. I might have had a business card or receipt, but by the time I was ready to use them, I'd lost that. 

faded dull kitty

This sounds ridiculous now, but I looked up how to apply them, but somehow misremembered or misread the firing instructions from the seller or from the internet. I assumed they could be fired to a low bisque temperature, so that's what I did.

some of the over-fired gold cats cracked and shrunk (perhaps because the glaze melted a bit)

Perhaps surprisingly, some of them worked out ok. The colored decals seemed basically fine and some of the gold decals were ok, but others faded out to varying levels on different glazes or cracked and shrank on the surface.

black cat decal before firing

Realizing I was doing something wrong, but still pleased enough with the good results to try again, I finally looked up the firing directions online. The company is Milestone Decals, by the way, and the application and firing directions are not hard to find on their website. The error here was all in the user and not the product.

black cat decal before firing

Anyway, it turns out I had fired the decals much hotter than I should have done. Last week I received a small order of mostly cat decals to replace the ones I fired poorly. I layered some of the cats over the existing cats, though a few original cats look just fine. I bought both black and gold cats to replace the gold cats I had before. 

gold cat decal, over-fired but looking basically ok

I've got a few cone 6 mugs I made this summer and will try to get the decals on and fired (to cone 017, it looks like, not cone 08) this week. If they work out well, I plan to take some of them to Oak Hollow for the holiday show starting in November.