Epiphany

Whoa!! Hold the presses!!  You mean when you fire pottery at the temperature at which it was intended to be fired, wonderful things happen??

Yes, it seems that this is true............ so I finally realized what was going on between the clay and the glaze and the firing and told Dave to put everything in at cone 6.

Here are my latest pieces:

I love the vibrant colors!  I've been waiting so long for this!

Yes, I still have a ways to go with the color.......... I still see lighter areas.....Maybe I'm not letting it dry enough between coats?  Maybe it didn't all get three coats?  

I know that brushing it on is not the ideal technique, but it's all I've got at the moment.

It's not perfect, of course,  but there's nothing like a small step forward to make you giddy with excitement!

I may just bisque my huge platter and glaze it (very scary):

or my doormat plate next.......... Yay!!!

In trolling through previous photos to find this week's firings, I thought I would post some other pieces as well.

This plate was a gift to Julie, my best buddy.  The bottom is made from a sink strainer I spotted at Bath & Body......... the green matches the green in her house perfectly!

I like this piece because it has a retro sort of look to it.......... I used oleander leaves as imprints for the leaves.  It was also my first try at making my pieces thicker and I immediately liked the difference.

This piece has not been glazed yet (fear is the major reason behind this) but it has a funny story behind it.  The cruddy looking doormat piece next to it provided the beautiful geometric pattern----I found it laying next to the road in the dirt as Howard and I went on one of our walks around the neighborhood.

The last piece is the wall hanging I made for Dionne and Jared when they got married.  Thankfully I learned about Stroke & Coat glaze BEFORE I wrote their names on the already-glazed background.  The stick was a lucky find from school..........

Pottery: trials and tribulations

I got an excellent piece of advice today and decided to follow through.......... I've been dabbling with pottery for about 4-5 years now and should start posting some of those efforts.

I got a beautiful North Star slab roller in 2011.........I've warned my children it has a lifetime guarantee, so they'd better start thinking about who's going to get it when I'm gone.......

Here's one of my first endeavors............ you might say that was an ominous beginning.........

My first problems involved surface textures.  Nothing looked smooth and there were weird wrinkles everywhere ........ hmmm .......sounds like me in the mornings!  :))

But even so, they looked better before glazing than afterwards.......... So now, my current nemesis (what's the plural of nemesis??) is glazing, glazing, glazing.

Here's the past week's efforts:

On the plus side:  I like the free form and it was smooth and the edges looked much better than in the past.  The blue painter's tape worked really well and I like the jagged edges on the sun's rays.

On the minus side:  I thought the turquoise would effectively cover the yellow and while it doesn't look BAD ......... it doesn't look deep turquoise as I wanted it to, therefore not having the dramatic contrast for which I had hoped.

Possible problems:  totally novice-type errors........ the clay is a cone 10, the glaze is cone 6, and it was fired at cone 06.  What a mish-mash!

Plan:  buy a cone 6 clay at NM Clay........ talk to gallery owner I know and ask her how she glazes with a brush and yet ends up with no brush marks......... is it the firing process??  

The more I learn, the more I realize I hardly know anything!!!

This is Humberto.

Good news?? He's a very nice man. He loves to fish and host fish fries. He loves his garden and his kids. He goes to church and wants to buy a little boat someday.

Bad news?? He can't do concrete work any better than I can.

Worse news?? He's the one who made the concrete edge around our grass.

Our first clue was when he declared that for some mysterious reason, the truck didn't bring enough concrete. They had to wing it and mix some up right then and there in the wheelbarrow. Two concretes= two colors, two consistencies.......uh-oh. Did I mention they dribbled it everywhere??

The next day we discovered why there wasn't enough concrete: the forms weren't deep enough and the concrete drooled out the bottom and made a concrete floor all around.........

Then he pulled off the forms too soon and the concrete stuck to them and left holes in the edging............ So he patched that with concrete miracle patch.......yet another color..............

Meanwhile, he's humming the whole time and babbling how he loves pleasing his clients......oy vey ......

What's 13 feet tall, likes birds, and lives in my big flower bed???

One day last Fall, when I was visiting Howard, I happened to see this limb laying on the side of the highway to Sunspot.

It was love at first sight.

Howard thought I was crazy, not to mention

the fact that the rangers get a little irritated when you take wood out of a national forest without permission.

So last week I got permission.........and it was no easy matter either. I had to tell them EXACTLY where the limb was located...... and promise that I only wanted that ONE limb. It took 25 minutes to fill out all the paperwork.

This newest member to our backyard measured 15 feet from top limb to bottom. It took both of us to get it into the truck, but we did it! A little tying here and there, with a cute little flag hanging from the end, and we were off!

Howard's just pretending not to be as excited as I am............

Well, I haven't posted in a long time but a lot has happened so it's time to catch up.

I'll start with the good news: the summer garden has been planted and although it's only been a day, I'm sure those little seeds are already in the ground stirring. We planted all the usual characters: okra (fewer every year), corn, cucumbers, tomatoes, squash, limas, LOTS of peanuts, green beans, and black-eyed peas.

Newcomers are purple cosmic carrots----I love the name, don't you?? They're planted under the tomatoes.......we'll see if they like that spot. And then Howard found some funky yard-long green beans and those are also in the ground........I guess we could have ONE for dinner??

As you can see, the snow peas are growing nicely and starting to scale the fence.

Howard noticed some blossoms on several of the plants yesterday, so pea pods are not far behind!

I like to go outside and grab their little feelers and curl them around the fence wires----gotta get those youngsters going in the right direction!

We have both sugar snap and snow peas, but they're equally delicious. In fact, the sugar snap peas often don't make it all the way off the vine and into our house....... :))

In other news, the flower beds are starting to fill up. However, every year it seems as though I have more and more uninvited guests appearing. There are lots and lots of spiky little plants coming up that look suspiciously like dianthus. I've been assured by fellow Master Gardeners that dianthus don't spread, but........... Well, time will tell.

The strawberries have spread nicely and there are about 50 starting to grow and mature. Yummy!

Now for the bad news............you know what they say about the plumbing at the plumber's house, right?? Well, I guess the same is true at the Master Gardener's house.

Howard was gazing at his willow tree in adoration when he happened to notice several large holes in the trunk..........uh-oh.

I may not remember everything I learned in my Master Gardener training, but I know about those holes. As they say in prison parlance, that's a dead tree walking.

Those rather large holes (about the size of a quarter) are the EXIT holes of boring insects. Not boring as in, *YAWN* are you going to tell that story again?? But boring as in bore into a tree. What they've done is go in there, laid their eggs, and left through those holes. Their children are going to hatch and EAT their way out of our poor tree.

The worse part of that story is that there's no solution. There's no killing those little critters----they're in there and they're coming out, and when they do, they'll leave a dead tree behind.

We've pretty much decided on a Chinese pistache to replace it.........nice-looking tree and pest resistant. Poor Howard wanted to spend one more summer with the willow so I guess the new tree will go up sometime this fall.

Such is life.

Well, it's getting to be that time of year again..........The winter garden is dying and preparations are now in place for the spring garden.

Actually, let me rephrase that last statement: The winter garden was a dismal flop that never took off, and now we're ready to grow something (anything) again.

The far left row was the last of the turnips----if you'll look closely you might see a sprig of something green.........the turnips sprouted, took one look around, and promptly refused to grow. Yes, we had one inch plants for about two months.

The next two rows are collards and cabbages. I actually thought the collards looked good until Howard told me ONE plant should fill a pot on the stove and it's taking about three of ours.........

The last row on the right are the cabbages.......actually, they were going to be the cabbages. This fall they were the cabbage LEAVES. They came up, started to make cabbages, then stopped.

We're not sure what happened, but the 13 tons of topsoil (otherwise known as sand in the southwest) that we dumped in the garden might be the culprit. It helped with the salt problem, but had zero nutrients.

This weekend, Howard tilled in all of the dead plants he chopped down from the fall, plus the stuff lying under the debris pile in the corner of the garden. The soil looks 100% better----there are little bits of plants throughout the soil and it's a beautiful chocolate brown.

It's January 18th. Pepita 1927-2006. Feliz cumpleanos mami.......