Liquid Quartz™ is the brainchild of Made OF Australia’s founding director; an artist & industrial designer whose ceramic arts practice became known for its focus on the (then relatively seldom practiced) alternative firing technique known as “saggar firing”. At the origins of this “primitive” firing practice, the naturally occurring oxides & minerals found in organic waste materials are vapourised while trapped in containers with low fired ceramic pieces & become fused with the porous clay body under the right conditions. This creates unique & unrepeatable markings, patterns, & textures on the surface of each piece without the use of any glazes, mined minerals, or synthetic chemicals.

Made OF Australia (or MOFA for short) was founded in 2012, &over the course of a decade of constant experimentation& refinement, developed anew & innovative method of successfully saggar firing even fully vitrified stoneware & porcelain clay bodies (something previously considered impossible due to their low porosity). MOFA became famous with food stylists, photographers, chefs & high end restaurants around the world for creating sustainably fired, organic feeling, yet fully functional commercial grade ceramics using only the mark making capabilities of naturally occurring minerals & oxides found in native Australian flora & fauna. Often referred to as “pure alchemy”, this signature saggar firing technique was the result of iterative problem solving processes learned throughout the founder’s previous decades in the industrial design arena. A book about the journey is in the pipeline, so stay tuned for that…

The same approach was used to problem solve the age old issue of food safety in unglazed ceramics, as even a fully vitrified plate will have a porosity of about 2% (so still too porous for commercial tableware, as fats & oils could still penetrate & later go rancid, causing obvious health & safety concerns). Nothing existed to solve this problem, leaving unglazed ceramics out of the food service picture entirely. A sealer was desperately needed if unglazed ceramics were to ever be enjoyed by those who coveted a more organic & sustainable alternative to glazing.

This sealer needed to be natural enough to be food safe & user friendly. Too many products in the ceramics industry are toxic –some even requiring breathing apparatus to use safely & causing long term health issues in users (which is why our founder started saggar firing to begin with…toxic chemicals were just not an option for someone who can’t even breathe in the cleaning isle of the supermarket due to the toxic chemical smell!). It also needed to be high-tech enough to do what every other “solution”before its inception had failed to achieve. So after much research into what had already been tried (but failed), & what had not been explored yet, that industrial design brain went into overdrive & finally understood where the solution was to be found.

An exhaustive global search for the right minds (that were attached to the right hearts & hands) ensued, & 2014 MOFA partnered with a Melbourne company (already experts in the field of innovative nano-sealers for a multitude of surfaces) to create the water based, food safe, hydrophobic & highly effective sealer known today as Liquid Quartz™. Once tried & tested in the field, MOFA set about revitalising the unglazed ceramic arts community by making it available to everyone who wanted it. LQ was born!

To this day, Made OF Australia ceramic ware furnishes the tables of some of the world’s best restaurants with commercially viable, completely unglazed, saggar fired tableware. Their original pieces (created & sealed back in 2014) are still in use in those same restaurants today, & some pieces have even been sold on to other restaurants who continue to use & wash them in commercial dishwashers daily. All these pieces continue to maintain their waterproof, stain resistant, & food safe properties, over a decade later, often outlasting the original restaurants themselves!

As the industry innovator & leader in the food safe sealer revolution, Liquid Quartz™is proud to have solved this age old problem & humbled to have been able to provide you with the safest, most effective, & very best sealer for unglazed ceramics since 2014. You can read more about topics like certifications, safety, & shipping etc. in the FAQ section, found HERE.

The Liquid Quartz™ central warehouse is located in Melbourne, Australia, & ships worldwide from here, but is also focused on opening local distribution hubs around the planet to service our global customers better & faster. Our first international distribution centre is in the USA, & will be followed by the EU & then beyond. We will continue to ship directly from Australia to any country with a postal service wherever we do not have a local warehouse. Please see the FAQ section for more information about shipping to your location.

To keep up to date with our latest news, & to hear about any upcoming events or promotions, please join Liquid Quartz Sealer’s mailing list found here. We keep announcements via your inbox to an absolute minimum (we hate unnecessary emails as much as you do!) so you can rest assured we’ll only send them if we have something really exciting to say (like a new warehouse opening near you, or a flash sale). You can also follow Liquid Quartz Sealer on social media for all the latest info by clicking the links in the footer directly, or check in via the blogs found at the bottom of the About page of this website.

Feedback:

You can email your thoughts or suggestions about either the product or this website to feedback@liquidquartzsealer.com & we will endeavour to action your ideas wherever possible.We might not always be able to accommodate everyone’s preferences, but we appreciate every suggestion & thank you in advance for taking the time to share your thoughts with us, good or bad, that’s how we improve.

Questions:

The answers to all the common questions we’ve ever received can be found in either the FAQ or User Guide already, to make learning what you need to know before using LQ much easier.

We understand your time is better spent doing the things you love, so we update the FAQ section periodically with any new questions that come up repeatedly over time to add to the arsenal of information already there. This helps you troubleshoot in real time no matter where you are on the planet, rather than having to email us & wait for a reply from a different time zone. This saves you (& us) precious time & effort, while also helping us to reduce our response time to any new or unusual questions you might have. Less time repeating ourselves helps to keep our admin costs down too, so we can pass that saving on to you! With this in mind, if your question has already been covered here, we will simply redirect you to either the FAQ or User Guide, rather than repeat the information already provided in these pages.

So please, enjoy the read before you begin, you’ll not only likely find answers to your own questions, but also lots of useful tips & tricks to help you get the most out of your purchase. You can even download (to save or print) a PDF version of the User Guide to keep with your bottle for future reference,if you prefer to have a hard copy on hand.

If however you do have a question that is not already answered in the FAQ or User Guide, please email hello@liquidquartzsealer.com so we can address it directly & get you on your way to successful sealing.

P.S. (Don’t forget to tag @liquid_quartz_sealer in any images of sealed work you post on social media, either in the caption, in a comment, or in the image itself, so we can find & feature your work for the world to see!).