Art by Fuzzy

Pottery, Photography, Design - Brandon "Fuzzy" Schwartz

Finished Pottery (3 months later)

Happy Thanksgiving!

I decided to finally put up some pictures of the ceramic ware that I finished a couple months ago.  (See the bisque fired pots).  I got around to taking some photos a week or two ago using my homemade photo studio.  I shot everything really quick so some of the pictures aren’t exactly outstanding….  But on with the show!

I have lofty hopes of giving some sort of recap on the past few months in which I have been doing almost everything except updating the blog….  Maybe by Christmas.

Ready To Do Some Glazing

Bisque wares ready for glaze

Bisque wares ready for glaze

Amaco warm brown stoneware.  Mostly wheel thrown.  Mugs, bowls, jugs, etc.

As you can probably tell by the picture there is a lot of glazing to do in my near future.  Something that you might be able to infer: the new outlet that my brother installed didn’t catch on fire or melt like the old one so the first firing after Operation Upgrade was a success.  The cord to the kiln got a little warm but I turned the fan on and everything went well.  It’s a good thing because my brother (and his wife) are in Beijing getting settled in to their apartment and getting “orientated” to do some teaching.

Well, I better get to work.

Summer Pottery: Mugs, Bowls, and More

Recent pottery drying on the shelf

Recent pottery drying on the shelf

As you can tell by the picture, I’ve been pretty busy in the clay studio lately.  The past couple weeks I’ve been cranking out some wheel thrown items when I haven’t been in class or on the computer.  I worked on a bunch of different mug forms for a week or two and recently I’ve made some large bowls and jugs/vases.  I really wanted to try some different handle ideas because I feel like handles have been the most neglected part of my arsenal.  I felt I never really mastered pulling handles so I rarely enjoyed or even used the skill.  While I was making all the mugs I decided it was a good time to, in the words of Nike, “just do it.”  After pulling handles for most of the mugs I can tell that I have improved dramatically.  Sometimes I even enjoy it.

On a somewhat related note I added two more shelves to the drying shelves that I already had.  Now I can cram almost twice as much stuff onto the shelves to dry.

My brother and his wife came down a little while ago to hang out with us before they leave.  (At the beginning of August they’ll be in a little place called… China!)  My brother was nice enough to put in another light and switch down in the basement and he replaced my kiln outlet in the garage which overheated the last time I fired.  Sometime this week I hope to start loading the kiln for a bisque fire.

The “SuperChuck” beta testing complete

It works!  In my last post I described how I made a version of the SuperChuck.  A couple days ago I got to try it for the first time.  I threw a nice vase form and it turned out to be the perfect candidate to trim in the chuck.  The black shelf liner material I used provided enough grip and I trimmed the bottom of the vase in no time.  You can see an “in progress” shot and then a picture of the finished pot next to the chuck.

I only wish that I would have made the chuck a little taller because the other vase/bottle that I threw had a neck that was a little long for the chuck.  I got around it by wadding up some of the extra shelf liner to make the chuck thinner in the middle so the shoulder of the pot would have a place to rest.

The SuperChuck (for trimming pots)

A while ago I got an email from one of the ceramics newsletters that I’ve subscribed to and it had a video of the “Superchuck”.  In a nutshell, the device is attached to the wheel and used to trim the bottom of vessels with narrow openings or delicate rims (which would prevent them from setting upside down on the wheel).  It looked pretty convenient and not terribly hard to make so I decided to give it a try.  That was a few months ago….  I would like to think that the slow process was more about taking my time and getting it just right but that wasn’t the case at all.  The process could have been shortened quite drastically but work and graduate classes and track season got in the way a bit.

I threw the main form a few months ago and maybe a month ago I glued that to a spare bat with Liquid Nails.  Then a few weeks ago I started testing some material to glue to the chuck to prevent the pots from slipping as they rotate.  The video suggests neoprene but I would have had to order it online and I didn’t want to invest too much in case I never use this thing more than once.  I finally decided to try “Shelf Liner” material.  Yeah, the stuff you line shelves with…  It was pretty cheap and it seemed to have the attributes that I was looking for.  I measured it out and cut it and then glued it to the chuck with Krazy glue.  It seems to be on there pretty tight.  And the material seems to offer pretty good grip.  As soon as I throw something decent, I’ll trim it with this “Superchuck” and see if mine works as well as the one in the video.  I’ll even try to remember to post my results here.