Catching up

I have been a little distant lately. My apologies. Here are a few of the things I have been up to or that are going on. These are not in any chronological order, just the order in which I sent the pictures to blogger. First, we have some tea bowls. I threw these for the studio Open House coming up in June. We want to have a raku demo during the day so I decided to get these out of the way week or 2 ago. I had a bag of raku clay kicking around. I am not even sure where it came from. It has been sitting on my shelf since the studio moved locations 4 years ago. Needless to say, it was hard as a rock. I soaked it in a bag of water that I submerged in a bucket of water and then dried it out on plaster once it was all gooey. I did not relish wedging up a zillion little balls of clay, so i just threw the whole lump on the wheel and started throwing off the hump. I got about 25 tea bowls from the one bag. They have all been bisqued.

Next we have some really good ribs that I made. These were pork side ribs that I marinated for 24 hours. Here is the marinade recipe as far as I can remember. juice of 3 limes, a little balsamic vinegar, some olive oil, worstershire sauce, 3 cloves garlic roughly chopped, ground pepper, cayenne pepper, onion flakes, ketchup, fresh thyme (rough chop, brown sugar. Then I steamed them in a tinfoil lined pan for 2 hours in the oven and finished them under the broiler for 5 minutes.

Finally I have a shot of my crazy amaryllis plants that I started from seeds that I got from pollinating a store bought amaryllis about 6 years ago. If you ignore them for about a month in the winter and don't water them, they will flower (seemingly overnight)