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.

I guess another year has come to an end.  Looking back I had a pretty good 2009, especially the last week.  My wife and I went up to Michigan to spend some time with my family during Christmas.  My brother and his wife were home from China so it was great to spend some time with them.  They made it back safely to China but apparently their sleeping routines are a little off.  I guess that happens when you fly half way around the world…

HP pavilion elite 9290f

Not long ago I bought myself a late birthday/early Christmas present.  My old hp pavilion (probably 6 or 7 years old) needed an upgrade.  It served me well and I never really had any major problems with it until I crammed it so full of programs and files at the end that it really started to slow down.  So I shopped around and decided to go with another hp.  Since I plan to have it for awhile I decided to go all out and I got the Pavilion Elite 9290f while it was on sale.  So far it has been awesome.  It came with Windows 7 which seems to be pretty smooth.  Plus I got a copy of Adobe CS4 and MS Office at a great price because I’m a student at IUSB.  Everything has run really well so far.  I can’t believe how much faster everything is compared to my old computer. I’m actually typing this post on the new computer.  It’s set up in the “command center” at the moment (also known as the living room where I have two computers, an LCD monitor, Wii, Xbox 360, and TV all set up and ready to take over the world.)

dell 2209wa

The desktop didn’t come with a monitor so after getting some cash and gift cards for Christmas I talked to the fine people at Dell and they offered me a great sale price on their IPS panel 2209wa  monitor.  Apparently it is a pretty decent monitor for photo editing without a huge price tag.

Now, as Christmas break draws to a close, I’m going to try to get all the computers and the new wireless printer we got at Sam’s Club to connect to each other through the magic of a wireless network.