Art by Fuzzy

Pottery, Photography, Design - Brandon "Fuzzy" Schwartz

Getting the Word Out

I’ve had myself a mini spring break the past few days. I had to take a day off Friday because my wife had an appointment. Then over the weekend my wife AND kid got sick. So I stayed home Monday to take care of them. It turns out that it is difficult for a baby to eat if there is no air going in through the nose. So I carried her around outside before she ate which seemed to help open up her nasal passages a little bit. The funny thing is that I had signed up two weeks ago to take a personal day today so my wife could go to her kindergarten roundup. I’m not sure I’ll remember how to teach when I get back to school tomorrow.

The Shelf with New Pots

The Shelf with New Pots

Bad news: I haven’t made one single lump of clay into anything for about two weeks. Good news: I’ve done a lot of other stuff that goes along with making pottery. For example, I went over to the Stone Soup Emporium and picked up my check for the month of March. And for the first month ever, I’m in THE BLACK! I actually made enough money last month to cover the cost of the shelf plus 14 extra dollars. (I sold four items.) Hooray for capitalism!

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Glaze Firing – April 5, 2012

Here are a few images of some things that I pulled out of the last glaze fire:

Not pictured are some small pendants, test tiles/cups and about 3 other items that I re-fired to fix some glaze problems.

I hope to post some images of my glaze test results soon.

Macro Fun: Ants and Glaze

Just a quick post to show some fun closeup/macro photos I took last weekend.  Taken with a Canon 30D, 100-300mm lens with macro attachment.  Some adjustments in Photoshop.

PBL and Boberosa Mugs

So… Back at the blog. I’m finally getting some photos of recent mugs uploaded. I had a pretty successful glaze fire on March 18th containing mostly logo mugs and a few other random items. All wheel thrown cone 6 stoneware.

PBL Mugs

These are all larger mugs, more “stein like” really.  All had Saturated Iron poured inside and dipped at the top while the rest of the outside was dipped in Pam’s Blue (both Coyote glazes). I really like this combination and apparently other people do too.

I took the liberty of trying different options on the logos. I used brown and black washes on some, all brown on some, black wash on a pair and the Saturated Iron glaze on the rest. The washes came out a variety of ways. A few seemed more purple than brown, maybe too thick or too thin? But the logos with the washes seem more defined than the logos with the glaze.

Boberosa Mugs

Again, I tried a few different options. Some mugs have Orange glaze over black wash in the logo imprints. I also did some bare clay logos with black or brown washes.

 PBL Experiments

I didn’t have enough Sapphire Blue glaze so I tried some different glaze combinations with glazes such as Really Red, Pam’s Blue, Alabaster Satin, Peacock Green and the black and brown washes.

A Few Misc. Items

A few miscellaneous items to fill the rest of the kiln including a yarn bowl and some pendants. A local customer found my website and asked if I would make her some custom pendants for aroma therapy purposes. I’ve made ornaments that were very similar so I said I would give it a shot. They were pretty quick and easy to make. Except I ruined a few trying to get the hole at the top and glazing each one with a brush was a little tedious. Maybe next time I’ll wax the backs and put some fishing line through the holes so I can dip them. The lady really liked how they turned out and bought 12 of them. Hopefully they work well for the aroma therapy.

I’ve got about 6 more WN large mugs and 6 PBL short mugs to glaze with my new batch of Sapphire Blue. I’ve also been mixing some test glazes from the book Mastering Cone 6 Glazes. I’m hoping to get a glaze fire finished before I go back to school on Monday.