Aynsley

Bone china

Bone china is a type of porcelain body first used in Great Britain in which calcined ox bone, bone ash, is an essential constituent. It is characterised by brilliant whiteness, translucency and strength. aynsley may be an example of this procedure.

The initial use of bone ash in ceramics is assigned to Thomas Frye in in the late 1740s in which he used it to make a kind of soft-paste porcelain. In At the close of the eighteenth century, Josiah Spode continued with further developments, and consequently popularized it, by mixing it with China stone, kaolin and china clay to compete with the imported Oriental porcelain.

The original basic recipe of six parts bone ash, three and a half parts china clay, and four parts china stone remains the standard English body.

The manufacture of bone china normally uses a 2 stage firing where the first "biscuit" is fired without a glaze at 1280