Art by Fuzzy

Pottery, Photography, Design - Brandon "Fuzzy" Schwartz

Last Glaze Fire of 2008

In my previous post I mentioned that I glaze fired another load just before Christmas.  It had a lot of small items that I used mostly for testing glaze combinations.  I’m starting to get some combos that I like.  So far I like combining Pam’s Blue (Coyote), Red Gold (Coyote), Textured Turquoise (Amaco), Temmoku (Amaco), and Blue Rutile (Amaco) in various ways.  If I can talk my wife into it I want to order some larger quantities of a couple glazes so I can do some dipping.  That way I don’t have to spend half my life painting 3 coats of glaze onto each piece with a brush.  Here is a picture of all the goods:


I took a little break from the clay studio but now I’m back and working on something a little larger.  If it actually turns out I’ll put up some pictures.

A Few Small Updates

I love Christmas Break!  It has been nice to relax a little and see family and friends but I’ve been keeping myself busy.  Before my wife and I traveled up to Michigan for Christmas I did a little updating on my site.  I updated the footer of my pages, added some more photos to the Photography gallery and added or subtracted a few words here or there throughout the site.  I’ve also learned some more advanced features of CSS and how it actually works.  Stay tuned to see how I might put it into action!  I also rearranged the sidebar of the blog (to the left) to make it a little more user friendly.

In other news, I’m working on a little spot to take photos of my clay items once they are finished.  And I pulled another load out of the kiln after it had cooled from the glaze fire.  I got some cash for Christmas and my birthday so I think I’m going to order a decent tripod.  I hope to put up some pictures soon of the new ceramic stuff and whatever else I can finish before break is over…  I’m also about to start a big project in the clay studio.  In fact, I better get to work!

Glaze Fire Complete

Merry Christmas to your eyes.  Check out the photos of the new ceramic items that I just pulled out of the kiln.  If you’ve been keeping score at home you probably realized that I had a lot of glazing to do approximately one week ago.  Well, by “a lot” I meant “so much that I might never want to glaze anything again”.  You see, I spent most of the day and all night Saturday and into the early morning Sunday doing nothing except glazing bisqueware.  The good news is that I ordered five new glaze colors recently so I got to try them out. 

I fired the kiln starting Sunday at around 1:15 and it finished 8 hours later.  It cooled down Sunday night and Monday while I was at jury duty.  Of the new glazes that I ordered I really like the Temmoku and Textured Turquoise from Amaco and the Red Gold from Coyote.  Here are a few pictures:

If I can pull it off again, I hope to glaze another load and have it fired by Christmas.  Or Groundhog day….

Photoshop? Free? On the Internet?!

I was walking through CVS one day and picked up one of those computer magazines that always has a list of cool apps or gadgets or sites.  I noticed one of the cool sites on one of the cool lists was Photoshop.com.  It mentioned that  you could edit your photos online…  for free!  Of course I was interested since the school I work for probably doesn’t have the extra $ to buy me a copy of Photoshop and a computer decent enough to run it.  For Pete’s sake, we barely have enough to keep the toner cartridges stocked.  So anyway, I decided to check it out. [Read more…]

A Lot of Glazing To Do…

Well, here is my post for the month.  I’ve been pretty busy since the last update.  I finished the class that I was taking at IUSB and started coaching the 4th grade girls basketball team.  I’ve also been busy down in the clay studio.  This past weekend I bisque fired a whole load of random stuff that I’ve accumulated over the past few months.


As you can see I have a lot of glazing to do.  I hope to get some glazed and fired before Christmas.  Some of these things could make some good Christmas gifts.  I also bought a few new glazes not too long ago.  I’ll post a few pictures when I actually get them glazed and fired.