Can You Spot the Difference?

Heh, heh.

Primordial Fire

It is an eerie sensation to walk into the studio when the kiln is ablaze. I can’t resist conjuring up imagery from Dante’s inferno. I know that if I lift the lid, all sorts of demons will pop out. This is my Pandora’s Box, but mostly good things come out of it.

As I’m writing this, the kiln is at 2150° Fahrenheit and still climbing. It is truly a mysterious process, difficult to fathom. I put in ceramic pieces coated with various drab looking liquids that have dried on the surface, and out they come with beautiful and vibrant glassy surfaces. It’s a true metamorphosis.

How Do You Like Them Apples!

It’s apple picking season here in New York and once again, we took the girls to our favorite apple orchard. The farm management got savvier this year and made the apple buckets a wee bit bigger and adjusted the price accordingly. But that’s ok, I’ll just make 16 pies. And strudel, and cider, and baked apples, and apple sauce, and apple fritters, and apple turnovers, and…

We had to walk quite a distance from the entrance to find some trees with apples still on the branches (rather than rotten or half eaten and lying on the ground).

Apple Girls 2008	Apple Girls 2009

Some people do the age progression photo album assembled from school pictures. We do the hatchback-pose-with-the-apple-bucket age progression album instead.

We’re so clever.

A Custom Order for Vered

Perhaps you have come across Vered Skolnik’s exquisite Etsy shop, veroque. All of her work involves intricate woven bead creations that are as much a marvel in design as they are a delight to behold. My daughter and I can spend forever just clicking through her entire shop. And she recently launched a second shop, ByTheBelt, which is no less impressive.

A few weeks ago, I was tickled positively pink to get an email from Vered asking me to make her a ceramic dish that she could use to hold beads as she works. She said she was flexible in the design and left it to me to come up with something, as long as it had a few sections to keep the different colored beads separate from each other. She gave me full creative liberty, what a bunny!

Here’s what I’ve come up with so far. Of course, the glazing can bubble up during firing, another piece can fall on it in the kiln and smash it into tiny, tiny pieces, I could accidentally drop it on the floor taking it out of the kiln…anything can happen. But so far, right now, today...it's the cat's MEOW!!

The Kid with the Halo

This past weekend, my daughter stumbled upon my kindergarten report card. I had Dr. Maas for a teacher (my parents were convinced that she went for the doctorate only because without it, we’d all have to call her “Miss Maas” which was just too much to ask of a class of kindergarteners).

I remember only certain (and mostly questionable) things about being in her class. By today’s pedagogical standards, her discipline tactics would force a gasp to leap off your lips quite involuntarily. Judging from her comments on my report card, though, it seems she had her finger on my pulse quite accurately.

She wrote…
“As you know, Jill is doing superior work. She sets extremely high standards for herself and may become distressed if she feels she is anything less than perfect. Jill responds well to praise and encouragement, however, so her own successes seem to have built a bulwark against the tension you were concerned about earlier. Jill is highly individualistic, and I suspect she will derive much satisfaction from grades 3 and 4 upward when she will be both ready and eager to plunge into sustained individual projects.
“I feel sure Jill will be able to forge ahead in first grade and achieve a superior level of success if she is not permitted to lapse into disproportionate negative emotions over small events. Your attitude was most helpful this year in this regard. Your continued cooperation will be beneficial.”

Funny how key character elements can be manifested at such a young age, and how apparent that can be to the observer.

A Lunchbox Worthy of the Cause

I'm not one to purchase anything in a museum gift shop, but on a recent trip to the Wisconsin Veterans Museum, I was won over by a Rosie the Riveter lunch box because:
(1) my kid needed a new lunch box, and (more importantly)
(2) it was a Rosie the Riveter lunch box

I don't think I'm the exact personality type to have been a suffragette, but I can promise you, I'd have been a riveter.


Rosie The Riveter by The Four Vagabonds

Never Too Young to Learn to Fly

Maybe we overdid it and pushed our children a little too much. But in our fast paced, ever expanding world, all sorts of life skills are not only advisable, they are practically essential for success. So with this in mind, we decided to give our children flight training starting from an early age.

You can argue that we got carried away with a little over-aggressive parenting, but we feel that we’ve done the right thing. Luckily, the financial outlay has not been debilitating as we negotiated a reasonable, per-minute rate. The kids too have responded well to this initiative and have easily adapted to my husband’s accelerated aviation boot camp.

To preempt the skeptics, we’re letting all of you in on our award winning “Fly, Be Free” program. Here are the operational components you will need to start your own program:

· A queen or king size bed
· A few soft blankets
· Many pillows
· A runway of at least…what, 6 feet?
· A burly-type guy able to toss approximately 70 pounds across the room
· A camera
· A kid or two

That’s it! Here are some shots of the solo flights.


The Young Cadets (Sheva and Tali)

Good to the Last Drop, Part II

In my Good to the Last Drop, Part I post, I described how I recycle as much as I can of the scrap clay that I generate while making pottery. Any excess clay that has not been fired and is not contaminated gets thrown into a plastic bin where I reconstitute it into reusable clay. After many days of throwing scraps into the bin and pouring water on top, the clay becomes what potters call “slurry”, that is very drippy, liquid clay.

In the large Chicago studio where I first learned the craft, they had an alcove with two large plaster covered surfaces which they would use to dry the slurry into usable clay. They would slop about 5 inches of slurry all over the plaster surface and then let the plaster slowly absorb the moisture and convert the clay for reuse.

Alas, I currently have a small studio and I cannot spare even an inch of table top space for a plaster surface, so I use small wooden bats to accomplish the slow absorption that the plaster does. Rather than slopping on several inches of slurry, I create little bridge shapes of clay.

The bridge shape not only allows the wood to absorb some of the moisture from the clay, it also allows a maximum of the clay's surface to air dry around and through the exposed external surfaces. Left uncovered, my clay bridges dry sufficiently in about 4-6 days depending on the temperature in the studio.

Have you seen the movie Amélie? One of my favorite scenes is right at the beginning where Amélie’s favorite things are chronicled documentary style. Among other things, she loves peeling dried glue from her fingers, she loves putting raspberries on each finger and eating them one by one, she loves cracking the sugar shell on a crème brulee, and she loves sticking her hand into a big burlap sack of dried beans at the street corner shop.

For the tactile oriented (and I include myself in this group) Amélie’s list makes us giggle with recognition…of course, we are all like this. Well, with that in mind, I want you to imagine the tactile sensation of digging down into the cold, wet slurry bucket to grab a handful of clay, shape it into a bridge, and carefully place it down onto a wooden bat so that it doesn't collapse. Mmmm, yummy.