Glaze firing on Mother's Day.

Glaze firings always make me nervous. 

I just never know how they'll turn out.

I've been under-glazing and glazing some ceramic pieces I made a while back.

It takes 3 coats of underglaze, covered by 2 coats of clear glaze, 

to get full colour coverage.

Loading the kiln.

The dog vase, mug, bird and sunfaces are the pieces I am most anxious to see completed,

 as well as a "boob cup" that I'm firing for someone else. 

    
    Checking the witness cones before shutting the lid.

10 hours later, I've unloaded the kiln.

A successful cone 06 firing!

Here's all the glazed pieces that were in there.

The dog is adorable, the sunface mug turned out sweet.

 The colourful bird needs eyes, and the sunfaces need cords to hang by. 

It might be a while, before I get around to taking better photos,

 but some of these pieces might make it to my Etsy shop.

If you see something you'd like, contact me.

A quiet Easter weekend

These are the 1st spring flowers, growing at the base of our walnut tree.

This beetle was crawling up my pantleg...on the inside! EWWW!

Had me doing the funky chicken and yanking all my clothes off

in the living room. Thank goodness I wasn't on Skype!

On the bright side, this little bird (pine siskin?) posed on one

of my big garden pots. (No, I didn't make it, but am resisting the urge to paint it.)

I did a bisque firing, and these are all the items I fired.

I can't wait to paint them. (some of the small weird items

are actually press moulds I'm experimenting with).

These 3 birds were in that load, and are ready to paint. The big one is my 2nd big bird, and he's the same, (or slightly bigger) than the 1st one. I haven't decided on what colours to paint him.
Any suggestions??

I started painting the bear and the medium bird, starting with a base-coat.

I hate waiting for paint to dry, so we went to the beach
 to enjoy the sun, the birds and watched the ferry cruise by.

Big bird clay figure- in progress photos. Part 4

See previous in progress photos (part 3)

Here's a peak inside the kiln as I prepare to fire it up.

After a tiring day at work, I was excited to be going home to open the kiln,

and see how my bird fared in the firing.

As you can see, he's fine :)

I ate a quick soup & sandwich to finish the last of the turkey (thank goodness),

then got down to painting.

I always do the eyes last, so he'll be blind for a little while yet, but he's close to

being complete & ready to fledge...

Tonight..

Tonight it's hard to calm my thoughts...

Short version:

I've been stepping out of my comfort zone and am trying to return to it, so

I fired my kiln today and wrote a simple poem.

Long version:

These past 11 days I've been caught up in a whirlwind. The Occupy Wall Street movement and a Global show of support- planned for Oct 15/11. I thought I'd help get the word out about it, and see if our Community was wanting to participate in this worldwide event.

Occupy Nelson was created by an expanding group of concerned people...but there were many things that needed to be done... without knowing if 20 people, or 200 would show up for this event. There was one week to organize.

The event was an amazing success, and where it goes from here I don't know. (I'll write a separate blog about it, but there's some photos here.)

I've been busy helping to get the word out. Reading, learning, talking, Twittering, Facebooking, etc... But being an "activist" is not my nature. If you know me at all, you understand that. Wherever there's a crowd, I'm usually quietly, headed the other way, so it wasn't easy for me to be a part of this. Here it is Monday and my head's still buzzing, with a different kind of energy, thoughts, questions ...

3 pieces from the decal firing.

I'm finding it hard to get back into my calm, creative place, so last night I decided to prepare to do a firing. I had promised someone I'd fire a decal on a vase for her, so I went through my stash of ceramic decals and gathered together some of my plain white dishes so I'd have more items to fire.

Decals are easy to apply, but the ones I have are about 20 yrs old and I wonder if they'd still work ok.

It's a sparse load, of 4 mugs, a plate and a vase, but the vase is the important piece.(See the photo).

It was very dark when I went out to the shop (to unplug the peek holes and flip the breaker off.) As I write, I'm wondering how it turned out, but they have to cool slowly, so I can't open the kiln until the morning.

Walking back to the house, I stopped to enjoy the cool, quiet, night and gaze at the dark, clear sky and this poem came to me, so I thought I'd share it...

Tonight...

I looked at the night sky

and saw a star.

It made me wonder...

the longer I looked,

the more I saw.

It made me wonder...

even more.