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)

Back to work on Saturday

After having had 2 whole months off from working Saturdays, I will be going back to Ceramics Canada this weekend. My biceps have had 2 months off from shifting boxes of clay and I know they are not going to like this drastic change in activity level. It will however be nice to reconnect with the community of clay people. I have not seen the CC people at all over the summer and it will be nice to catch up with what has been going on there. To be quite honest, I am ready for this summer to be over anyway. Not that I had a bad summer, I just need a change of scenery and a few different faces (plus I get to go on a mini holiday in just over 6 weeks!). Having spent most Saturdays at the studio this summer, with not many people around has been a bit solitary and now it is time to pick the socialness up a little. I got a lot done this summer, not as much as I would have liked in terms of glaze testing, but I did fool around with some hand building, which just reaffirmed why it is best left to those that really know what they are doing. I don't have the patience for it. I tend to assemble too quickly, or not quickly enough and scale has always been an issue as well. My pieces always seem a bit unwieldy and wonky as I don't know when to stop (kinda like when I was a kid at a salad bar). For example, I made a flower brick/vase. Some of it was thrown, some slab, some pinched. By the time it was done, it had more of a “Noah's Ark” massiveness to it. The only good thing I can say about it is that it did not crack during the making process and it managed to survive the bisque.

On the crock front, I have completed the 12 8"x8"crocks for my friend's wedding. Here are 3 of them with the name stamped in cobalt blue slip. I have removed the smaller text, as it just read as blobs. I have a half a bag of the clay I used for them left over, so I will probably just make a few smaller crocks as well.