ClayZeness Ocarinas
The Seattle ocarina makers Sandi and Richard Schmidt, their website, and what the museum has preserved from it.
A note from the museum
This page is the museum’s account of a website it has preserved material from. It is not by the people who made that site.
ClayZeness Whistleworks was Sandi and Richard Schmidt, who made ocarinas in Seattle and sold them from what their site called a four-foot “Daytable” at Pike Place Market.
Sandi — then Sandi Bushnell — began making them around 1979, and sold them at craft fairs before the Market. Her first were dragons, single- and two-headed. In May 1983 Mother Earth News described her sending its columnist a list of flute and ocarina makers, a news sheet on ocarina design, and “a cute little handmade, four-hole ocarina shaped like a dragon”, on letterhead already reading ClayZeness Whistleworks. Richard’s own first ocarina, around the same time, was one of her dragons.
They were at the Market from 1984, through the “From Mud to Music” exhibitions they staged there in 1986 and 1987, and for more than thirty years after. Richard died in November 2013 and Sandi carried on alone. In June 2019, as she was leaving the Market, thieves took her sales cart and her whole inventory. She was firing her kiln again that December. By the time the pandemic reached Seattle she was no longer at Pike Place.
Chronology
Dates the museum has been able to establish, and where each comes from. Dates given as “in conversation” are Sandi Schmidt’s own recollection, given by telephone in September 2026; the rest are documents.
| 1975 | Sandi buys her first ocarina at a craft fair, maker unknown | their site |
| c. 1979 | She begins making ocarinas — her first are dragons, single- and two-headed — and sells them at craft fairs | in conversation |
| May 1983 | Mother Earth News describes “Sandi Bushnell, from the state of Washington” sending its columnist a list of flute and ocarina makers, a news sheet on ocarina design, and “a cute little handmade, four-hole ocarina shaped like a dragon”, on letterhead reading ClayZeness Whistleworks | Mother Earth News, May 1983 |
| Aug 31, 1983 | Alan Albright writes to her from San Francisco on window size against interior volume | their site |
| c. 1983 | Richard’s first ocarina is one of Sandi’s dragons | their site |
| 1984 | They begin selling at Pike Place Market | in conversation |
| Apr 1986 | “Ceramic Sounds — a national survey of clay musical instruments” | their site |
| 1987 | “From Mud To Music” at the Clay Occasion Gallery, Pike Place Market: 27 makers, with pieces from Latvia and Norway. Richard writes “The Sounds of Ceramics” for its program | their site; the essay |
| Apr 1998 | Sandi and Richard write to Barry Jennings and learn whose four-hole system they have been using | the correspondence |
| Feb 13, 1999 | They found the Ocarinaclub, an email discussion list | their site |
| Nov 29, 2013 | Richard Schmidt dies, aged 61. A celebration of his life is held in the Pike Place Market Atrium on December 14 | obituary, The Herald |
| Mar 2016 | Back-to-back surgeries and a long recovery stop Sandi working | The Ocarina Network |
| Jun 14, 2018 | “Ocabanda at the ClayZeness Whistleworks booth in Seattle” | David Erick Ramos |
| Sep–Oct 2018 | Photographs posted from the booth at Pike Place | ClayZeness Whistleworks, September 1 and October 13 |
| Jun 2019 | Leaving the Market, Sandi has her sales cart and her entire inventory stolen | Sandy Hruska, June 19, 2019 |
| Dec 17, 2019 | Still making: she fires her kiln again — “Second fire in the north. My brother-in-law is tweaking my sad old digital kiln along… an so she fires!” | ClayZeness Whistleworks |
| Dec 2020 | Yahoo deletes its Groups archives; the Ocarinaclub’s twenty-one years of messages are lost, and the Internet Archive holds none of them | — |
| by 2023 | clayz.com lapses to a holding page | Internet Archive |
What the site held
Their website, clayz.com, described itself as “a continuing collaboration of Sandi’s and Richard’s endeavor to bring a little peace through music to the world.” The Internet Archive’s first capture of it is from December 1998. It was still offering ocarinas at ten to sixty dollars in 2019; by 2023 the domain had lapsed to a holding page.
It was not a catalog with some writing attached; it was a working shop’s website that had accumulated everything its owners cared about. Ocarinas for sale, from ten-dollar pendants to porcelain flutes. A songbook of tunes arranged for the four-hole ocarina, with fingering charts. Photographs of instruments they had made and of others they had collected. An essay on clay musical instruments. A page for the Ocarinaclub mailing list, which they founded in February 1999. And a long run of correspondence — with Baz Jennings in England, with the flute players of Usenet, with Alan Albright, who had taught Sandi and whom they spent years trying to find again.
Richard also kept a mirror of Baz Jennings and John Taylor’s Ocarina Originators site after Baz’s death, at Baz’s request. That story is told with Baz’s history of the ocarina.
What the museum has preserved
Published here:
- The Sounds of Ceramics — Richard’s essay for the 1987 exhibition From Mud to Music, on why instruments of clay sound as they do.
- The Taylor/Jennings Connection — how the Schmidts learned in 1998 whose four-hole system they had been using.
Held privately, as provenance rather than for publication: a copy of the site as the Internet Archive recorded it, kept so that what was on clayz.com does not depend on any one archive staying up. It is one of several such copies.
What the Archive holds. Captures run from December 1998 to 2026, across about 1,050 separate days, covering some 1,150 distinct addresses on the site — though the site itself was gone by 2023, and the later captures are of the holding page that replaced it.
What the museum has taken from that. Assembled from the captures that carried real content:
434 files, 12.3 MB.
| 143 | pages |
| 3 | pages transcribed to plain text |
| 146 | photographs and illustrations |
| 27 | sound recordings |
| 1 | video clips |
| 113 | small images that are page furniture rather than pictures — buttons, rules, spacers |
The recordings are the part least likely to survive anywhere else: short demonstrations of single tunes — Twinkle, Sakura, Camptown Races, Arirang — attached to the pages of their own songbook. The site does not say who is playing.
What it has not preserved, and why
Most of clayz.com is not the museum’s to republish, and saying so is part of the record.
The songbook is the largest part of the site and the least publishable: the arrangements are for songs by the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Rodgers and Hammerstein and Gershwin, none of which the Schmidts could license. Much of the rest is correspondence, and while Sandi’s and Richard’s own words are covered by her permission, the people writing back are not — a single page may carry half a dozen voices. The site’s own photograph gallery notes that some images were “borrowed” with attribution unknown. And the catalog, order forms and price lists belong to a business that has closed; reproducing them as though they were live would mislead.
What remains, and what the museum takes, is the writing that is plainly the Schmidts’ own.
Permission
Sandi Schmidt gave permission in September 2026 for articles from clayz.com to be preserved here, reformatted but verbatim, with any corrections shown in a note. That permission covers her and Richard’s own work. It does not extend to the words of other people quoted on their site, nor to the Ocarina Originators mirror, which was never theirs to give.