Art by Fuzzy

Pottery, Photography, Design - Brandon "Fuzzy" Schwartz

Summer Pottery – Mugs, Vases, Bowls

I glaze fired a number of items way back in July.  Then I got busy doing other projects like making a backdrop for photographing ceramics, redesigning a website, and getting settled into a new school.  Finally, you can see the finished pieces from that summer glaze fire below.  I haven’t really been in the clay studio much since then but I’ve got some ideas rolling around in my head for the next time I get some time at the wheel.

All items are glaze fired to cone 6 and are either Warm Brown Stoneware from Amaco or Speckled Stoneware by Laguna.

Mixing Ceramics Glaze – Pam’s Blue

About a week ago I mixed up some glaze from a pre-mixed powder.  The powder was Pam’s Blue by Coyote and it was my first attempt at mixing any kind of glaze outside of the Huntington Clay House.  I got to purchase some new tools and I did some research and even talked to a few people on Clayart.  In the end it wasn’t too hard.

respirator

nice respirator

I talked my wife into helping and she had a lot of fun….  She took a couple pictures so I could share my experience.  The first thing you want to remember is: Safety First!  I got to wear a new respirator so I didn’t breathe too much of the dust when I was dumping the powder into the water. It’s a good look!

mixing glaze

mixing glaze

My wife mixed the water while I slowly dumped the powder .  It got pretty thick, even when I used all the water that the directions called for.  I was supposed to use 1 gallon and 1 pint but added a lot more by the end of the process.  I used my cordless drill and a 1 gallon paint mixer to mix the powder into the water. Even after mixing it with the drill mixer for a while it was still pretty lumpy.

glaze sieve

glaze sieve

I put it through an 80 mesh sieve three times.  After letting it sit overnight I mixed it up again with the drill mixer and it was ready to be applied to some bisque ware. I even checked the specific gravity or “density” with a hydrometer.

I’ll have  a full post on the items that I pulled out of the kiln.  The Pam’s Blue that I mixed from powder actually looks different than the pre-mixed pints I’ve used.  Check later to see how!

Pottery Sale / Bisque Fire

I’m finally getting a chance to bisque fire all the stuff I made over spring break.  The kiln is on and firing!  I noticed as I was loading the kiln that I was rapidly running out of shelf space.  I decided to haul a bunch of my finished pieces to Ligonier for an “End of the School Year/Clean off the Shelves” Pottery Sale.  There was a really good response and out of the twenty-some pieces that I took in I only brought back four.  I consider most of the pieces I sold “my experimental work” as I was mostly trying glazes and different forms.  A few people requested items of a certain shape or glaze color for next time.  Now that I’m officially on summer break I plan to spend a good amount of time in the clay studio.  I’m going to head down to the hardware store to get a good respirator and one of those long mixers that can be attached to a drill.  Then I’ll be ready to mix up some Pam’s Blue glaze.  I’ve got about 3 weeks left of my class at IUSB but when I’m not in class or doing homework I hope to be glazing the bisque pieces and throwing some new items.

Glazed Clay Items Make Good Gifts

During Christmas Break I was trying to finish throwing a few items on the wheel, then bisque fire, glaze, and then glaze fire everything in about a week. Though I had no team of pointy-eared short people dressed in red and green, I got everything finished up in time for Christmas. I think I glazed the whole load in about a day and a half. Still using the dip-the-brush-in-the-glaze-and-paint-the-glaze-onto-the-bisqueware method which is ridiculously slow but didn’t seem quite as tedious this time. Probably because the glaze thickness on each piece was directly proportional to my patience and time left before Christmas. As in “I made some of the glaze really thin to save time.” This resulted in some of the pieces having a different result than I had gotten before. Some had different colors and some were just a less glossy finish. Most of them turned out okay, just a little different than expected but a few I want to re-glaze or re-fire. Below you can see some of the finished pieces I pulled out of the last load.

I gave away a lot of these pieces, especially the mugs, as Christmas gifts. I also gave away a few items from the last load that I fired. I got some positive feedback and haven’t heard of any handles falling off or mugs shattering.

As I was shooting the photos of these pots I experimented with a Circular Polarizer filter.  It was a cheap filter but it was interesting to find out how much I could control the reflection.  On some of the bigger items I took two photos with different Polarizer settings and then combined them in Photoshop to get a pretty good result.  Now I just need to upgrade my gray Walmart fabric to a gradient backdrop so the wrinkles won’t show up behind the pots in the photos.