Friendly village soup cereal bowl

Bone china

Bone china is a kind of porcelain body first produced in the UK in which calcined ox bone, bone ash, is an important ingredient. It is characterized by high whiteness, strength and translucency. friendly village soup/cereal bowl may be an example of this process.

The first use of bone ash in ceramics is associated with Thomas Frye in in the late 1740s in which he used it to make a type of soft-paste porcelain. In In the late 18th century, Josiah Spode carried on with further developments, and subsequently popularized it, by combining it with kaolin, China stone and china clay to compete with the imported Oriental porcelain.

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

The manufacture of bone china usually employs a 2 stage firing where the initial "biscuit" is fired without a glaze at 1280°C (2336°F) giving a semiopaque product and then it is glaze, or glost, fired at a lower setting below 1080°C (1976°F). friendly village soup/cereal bowl is probably manufactured using this method.

Soft-paste porcelain

Soft-paste porcelain is a kind of porcelain and consequently a ceramic material.

Its history dates from the first experiments by European potters to imitate Chinese porcelain by using combinations of china clay and frit or ground-up glass; lime and soapstone were known to have also been added in some concoctions. As these initial formulations suffered from high pyroplastic deformation, or slumping in the oven at raised temperature, they were uneconomic to produce. Mixtures were later developed based on feldspars, kaolin, nepheline syenite, quartz and other feldspathic rocks. These were technically superior and are still in production to this day.

Hard-paste porcelain

Hard-paste porcelain is a hard, dense ceramic that was originally made from a combination of the feldspathic rock petuntse and kaolin fired at extremely high temperature. It was first produced in China in around the ninth century.

The secret of its manufacture was not known in Europe until the early eighteenth century, when Böttger of Meissen, Germany uncovered the formula. Despite attempts to keep it secret, the procedure was taken up by other German ceramic manufacturers and finally became known throughout the whole of Europe.

Hard-paste porcelain can be fired at a range of temperatures to make a myriad of individual end results. Depending on the firing process, hard-paste porcelain can be manufactured to resemble earthenware or stoneware. Most of the time however, it is unnecessary to utilize hard-paste porcelain for such lower temperature ceramics. Hard-paste porcelain can be utilized to create porcelain bisque, a hard crystalline product fired at very high temperatures in a pressure controlled environment. This technique gives birth to a semitransparent bright white ceramic. Unlike other bisque ceramics, porcelain bisque is almost inpenetrable by water, therefore it becomes unnecessary to glaze the body before decorating. Manufacturers such as Precious Moments, Lladro and Hummel employ hard-paste porcelain exactly for this reason, this could include friendly village soup/cereal bowl.