Art by Fuzzy

Pottery, Photography, Design - Brandon "Fuzzy" Schwartz

New Ceramic Supplies

I love Spring Break!  I recently did some internet shopping at Clay-King.com and Axner.com.  Both are good places to get ceramic and pottery supplies.

glazes by coyote and amaco

coyote and amaco glazes

Clay King was having a pretty good sale on glazes.  I ordered a few of my favorites (Coyote: Red Gold and Leopard Shino) and a few new colors to test (Coyote: Espresso Bean and Saturated Iron and Amaco: Frosted Turquoise and Iron Lustre).  I also ordered 10 lbs. of Pam’s Blue dry powder (by Coyote).  Finally!  As soon as I mix up the Pam’s Blue I will be able to dip and pour instead of brushing glaze onto every… single… piece…  This should drastically reduce the amount of time it takes to glaze a load of bisque ware.  I guess at first there will be a lot of blue mugs and bowls but if everything goes smoothly I hope to order some more glazes in dry powder form and mix up some large quantities.

hydrometer, sieve, glaze chemicals

hydrometer, sieve, glaze chemicals, kiln posts

Speaking of mixing glazes…  I needed a few more items to get the job done.  Axner had some pretty good prices on most of the stuff I needed so I ordered a hydrometer, sieve, kiln posts, and some other dry chemicals.  I hope to mix some of my own glazes in the future so I’m starting a small collection of dry chemicals.

In other not-very-exciting news I installed a more permanent light above my wheel and made a small shelf behind the wheel where I can put freshly thrown pots to dry.

In the somewhat-exciting department I have a few mugs and bowls drying on the shelf.  I just threw a few more before track practice today which need handles but I’ll try to put up some pictures before the bisque fire.  I’m trying a different kind of clay so I’m anxious to see how it fires.

Drying Boards for the Pottery Studio

I love summer break!  One small project that I finished recently was to make some drying boards for my clay studio.  I only have about 6 bats so I often need to remove a thrown pot from the bat so I can use the bat to throw something else.  Usually I just set the freshly thrown vessels on my wedging table but then I always need to move them somewhere else before they have begun drying.  Sometimes this is a pain in the rear because I’ll smash or drop the very soft pots.  So now I can take my new pots directly from the wheel and onto the drying boards and they will be much easier to move around if needed.

I bought a sheet of 2’x4′ plywood from Lowes for about $6.  Then I cut off a 18″ x 24″ piece to use for things like platters or slab work.  Then I divided the rest into 12″ or 6″ squares.  I decided to go with the deluxe model so I got out my router and gave at least one side of each board an angle so it will be easier to pick up when it’s piled with clay items.

Ceramics drying boards

Ceramics drying boards

easy lift drying board

easy lift drying board

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.