Soda Fired Pitchers and Mugs

Here are the results from my soda firing last week.  I've been having fun pairing them up and seeing how nice they look in good light and on the nice backdrop.  I think I am going to be ordering some business cards soon so these photos will be great for that. I love to order my business cards from Moo.  They are my favorite! I still have a lot more pictures to take before I'm done so that's what I will be doing this weekend when I am not lounging in the sun.  I am so excited for daylight savings.  Yippie!  Next week we should be putting in another soda firing.  Have a delightful weekend.

Good Morning Breakfast

I love it when I actually take time to cook something for breakfast instead of just having a smoothie or pineapple and cottage cheese.  Mmm, saute'd veggies and scrambled eggs with fresh basil from my garden.  I have ruby red chai in this mug I made at Penland in the spring.  There were glazes left in the studio from the fall intensive with Suze Lindsay and Kent McLaughlin. I love how the layered glazes turned out.  Now if I had only gotten the recipe, sigh!  Molly Kite Spadone, a core fellow at Penland, taught me how to make that handle with the nice little ridge on top.  

In my last post I told you about my garden and flowers, so here are some eye candy pics for you.  This is the flower bed right out my front door.  My little bunny sculpture that I made in Susannah Israel's workshop just had to situate herself right in the middle of all the loveliness.

Snow and snap peas, kale, chard, bok choy, cilantro, carrots, lettuce.

Rainbow chard before the neighbor's kittens had a wrestling match in the middle of it!

Darn kitties!  But check out those luscious blue eyes.  Oil spots on the nose from hanging out under the cars.

Volunteer Four O'Clocks!

 Neighbors Rudabeckia

Next blog post I will have some pictures of the soda firing from last Tuesday.  Gotta go pay bills now.  

My New Obession - Soda Kiln Firing

I am so excited to finally be taking photos of my new soda fired work!  I really was starting to question what was wrong with me.  I didn't want to take photos, or post them to the web, or to my Etsy store, or to my Facebook page.  Truth is, I've been in kind of a funk for the past few weeks.  Maybe it has been a bit of a let down after having been to so many wonderful workshops over the past few months.  Coming back home and having to face the real world and try to catch up with things has affected me more than I thought it would.  

But I think I am finally starting to feel a bit better.  The new semester started and I am a teaching assistant in ceramics at Chico State University.  Plus, choir started and I get to do some singing which is always cathartic and uplifting for me.  On top of this, I moved into a new place where I finally have sun in my yard.  I moved in just days before going to Monterey for CSU Summer Arts.  I've been home for about three and half weeks and I guess I am nesting.  Furnishing and decorating my new digs and rushing a winter veggie garden in before I run out of time.  Oh, and the flowers.  I HAD, HAD, HAD to plant flowers! 

Back in the Saddle

Well, it may seem that my life is full of flowers and nature these days and that would be partially true.  I was extremely out of shape when I headed to Penland and felt like I had gotten in a little better shape by the time the eight weeks were done.  I wanted to keep that small edge and get in better shape when I got home so I have made my priority every day to get out for a hike, a walk, or a bike ride.  I can't help it if there are beautiful flowers all around.

On Friday I got back into the studio a little bit.  It was great to see all my Claymate friends and I had a number of pieces that needed to be glazed so that's what I focused on.  Now that I am home I am in the middle of apartment/house hunting so that is taking a little of my attention.  I am trying to figure out what my focus should be with clay for the next year or so before I head to grad school.  I feel like I want to get rid of most of the work that is starting to take over my space.  That would free up my mind to start on a whole new body of work inspired by my time at Penland.

While I am working all these ideas out I will continue taking hikes like this one scrambling down the path to a nice swimming hole.

The heading aroma of this scotch broom filled the canyon near the creek.

The swimming hole but oh was it cold!

And for your viewing pleasure, here are more images of work I made while at Penland.

 I made these in the first week when we were given a cup exchange assignment.  They have paper resist stencils with underglaze.  When Julie Guyot came to visit, she brought some commercial decals which I had never used before so on they went.  I really enjoy the transparency and how they layer over the stencil images and add another layer of depth and information to the mugs. Julie by the way is amazing, super nice, and a wonderful clay artist!

This is the first time I have made cruets and I enjoyed them.  Definitely going to make some more.

And, finally, I love, love, love these salt and pepper shakers.  Another first with more to follow.

That's all for now.  Have a delightful and creative week everyone!

Luscious Lichen

As some of you may know, I love lichen! So here is some eye candy from Monday's hike.  I especially love the chartreuse green contrasted with the orange that's going on here.  I don't make work that calls for the use of lichen glazes but I am tempted to with inspiration like this.  And if I had any idea what to do with felting or textile media I would somehow incorporate this.  Hmmm, maybe I should go back to Penland for a textiles class.  Just sayin'.

All the textures here are just so incredible!

I was feeling quite nostalgic for all the flowers that are planted around the Penland campus, especially outside Lily Loom.  Then I took a morning walk and found all of these beauties right in my own neighborhood.  Too bad pictures can't convey the smell of all the flowers that are in bloom right now!

Ah, but lest you think that the last few days have been all fun and games, I have been knee deep in the shipping and receiving department, otherwise known as the spare room.  Today I got eight of the nine boxes I shipped from Penland.  I'm going to have to research that ninth one.  Now I have about 50 items to ship out that are rewards for my Kickstarter project.  Let the fun commence:)

Goodbye Penland

Well, it finally happened.  Two months flew by in a whirlwind of clay activity.  This is the last sunrise I saw on Saturday morning from my bedroom window in the Craft House at Penland School of Crafts.  On Sunday I woke up at 2:30 am and was in the car by 3:30 headed for the Asheville airport.  I left with many mixed emotions.  There was sadness to be leaving such a beautiful place where I had many wonderful experiences and met tons of great people.  But there was also relief.  Being away from home for two months is quite an experience and I was feeling ready to get back.  Of course now that I am home, I miss Penland!

I wasn't quite ready for the flat landscape of home.  It seemed rather foreign after all the verdant rolling hills of North Carolina.  It is also drier than I remember and I think we are in for an early, hot, long summer.  After traveling all day yesterday I felt pretty cramped up and sore.  This first morning home I decided I should go for a hike in the park where there are actually some hills to keep my muscles active on and work out some kinks.

And here are some of the last photos I took of work I made with Helios porcelain.  Right after this pic they were bubble wrapped and packed for shipping.  I shipped home nine boxes of work and could have shipped home twelve if I hadn't run out of time.  I did all the packing on the last Friday and most of the work had just come out of the kilns a day or two before.  I did pack some stuff in my backpack and carry-on and dragged them through the airport and on and off the planes with no breakage, yay!

I had a lot of fun with these.  I was working on refining this tumbler form and incorporated three different techniques for the surface decoration.  I have silk screened slip transfers, ez-screen print transfers (which are essentially unmounted silkscreens with wider mesh) and sgraffito.  The botanical imagery was created from my own drawings and the water tower image is from a photo that I took here in Chico of one of the downtown water towers.  These are probably my favorite pieces from the concentration and I am looking forward to exploring this some more now that I am home.

I really enjoy the simplicity of these bowls.  I didn't have time to do anything decorative before they went into the bisque.  Then when they came out we were all in a rush to get everything glazed and into the final firings.  I quickly drew some lines and circles with black underglaze in a slip trailer and filled them in with tinted glazes.  Then I waxed them out and dipped into a fantastic clear glaze.  Viola, I love how they came out!

I wish I had more time to test glazes while I was there.  I am a total glazeaholic!  These dots were created by layering Steven Hill's cone 6 Strontium Crystal Magic (from the March 2012 Issue of Ceramics Monthly) with a copper tinted transparent glaze.  From tests that I had done, I figured the combo would run a bit and pull some of the black underglaze and it did not disappoint. 

It is only 9pm, but my body thinks it is midnight so I will get some shut eye soon.  Sleep well everyone:)