Happy Holidays to All

 Enjoying a cold rainy evening by the fireplace this Christmas eve. This laptop is quite the heat generator, adding to the total affect 😄. Remember to take a deep breath, relax and reflect. It's good for creativity which, in turn, is good for us all. 🌟 

Spiffy and Sparkly

 This is a statue I made just for my own amusement.  It's about 6 inches tall. I threw it on the wheel as a thick-walled enclosed shape. Once it got to be a soft leatherhard, I carved away the excess clay to reveal this figure. I carved a space behind the hands to put a crystal or a tiny bowl for an incense cone as shown here. The sparkly robes are are from Cosmic Tea Dust glaze by Amaco. I used it 3 ways: alone, layered over a black glaze and over Iron Luster glaze (Amaco). The glittery glossy black finish is my favorite. The others resulted in a dark brown glittery finish which works well in texture and adds depth and interest to another wise dark piece. 

Happy Halloween 🎃

 Photo credits go to my daughter who inspired me to make her a pumpkin that uses a tea light to heat scented oil.

I Made 2 But I Have 3

 I completed my 2 pumpkins before Halloween.  Yay! I used Spectrum Saffron Shino glaze to get a realistic satin finish. It's exactly what I was hoping for. Now the third pumpkin is a furry one. She is a very sweet neighborhood cat that comes to visit me in the garden. I named her Pumpkin and she comes when I call her. 

Power to Pumpkins

 I recently enjoyed creating two small pumpkins. Many Halloweens have come and gone and this is the first time. Before I throw at the wheel, I find I am more successful if I make a little sketch. It usually winds up on the back of a junk mail envelope. Of course, that's when I wished I had worked in my sketch book to save for future reference. Especially when I include notation of  measurements. 

Anyway, the one with the thicker, cup-like stem is an essential oil burner and the other one will be for a tea light or incense cone. I made a hole in the stem to act like a chimney to funnel the hot air or smoke. A lot of adding and subtracting of clay to the fish bowl shapes, that I threw on the wheel, was necessary to achieve realistic looking pumpkins. There's lot of detail to a simple pumpkin.  🎃

Deer Feeder?

 I made this feeder awhile ago to feed the local chickadees that nest in a nearby hedge. Of course it's fair game to any wildlife that finds it. I happened to hear clicking by my front door on my front porch. Well not one, but three big bucks were hungry. The fact that it was a small bird feeder or a small front porch didn't matter.

An Order For A Friend

 Two smaller sized mugs were requested for a friend. Both are for her grand kids.  Custom made mugs ordered by grandma. How cool is that?! I like the idea of introducing young people to the arts and crafts. You never know what might enrich someone's life or spark a new hobby or even a career. I hope they like them.

 I haven't traveled much lately, in fact, not at all. But my mug made a trip. It went camping in a ruggedly beautiful and remote area of southern Utah. It sat on a rocky precipice to enjoy the views. It felt the wind on its handle and soaked up the warm sunshine. It even cozzied up to the campfire to watch the fire flicker. It had a great time so I've been told.

A Nice Surprise

 I was perusing around the internet for glazes and wound up on www.coyoteclay.com. I clicked on their Gallery tab and scrolled through all the wonderful customer submissions to previous contests they held over the years. I participated a few times but forgot all about it. So I scrolled down the page to Matt And Crawl Glazes and to my pleasant surprise was my large egg in nest! There's a typo in my name but I'm still 😊 thrilled. 

Christmas Came Early

 When I created this blog, I didn't  give any thought about how my pottery and pottery mark related to this site. I just had fun documenting my progress with clay projects over the years. It eventually acted as a digital portfolio for anyone who wanted to check out my work.  I stamped my initials on my work with no real link to this blog unless a customer managed to keep my business card that links the two. So an upgrade was necessary. Since my son just happens to have a cnc machine in his garage, I asked him if he would make a new pottery stamp that says Mom Cave Pots. I gave him the pencil drawing and voila.

 

It's been awhile again

 It has been a few months but I've been busy training my new assistant. Meet Allie, my Q.C.C. That's....quality control cat. As you will see in the photos below, she is very thorough with her inspections. 😅

Tiny Bowls Tuesday

 These tiny bowls are actually tests. I had two bags of medium dark brown clay and could not tell whether they were brown or a speckled buff.  Only after a glaze firing could I tell that both of the smallest bowls were of speckled buff clay. The other two bowls are a clay blend that I've been experimenting with to achieve a grainy looking elephant gray color. The blend uses Laguna b-mix and clay/dirt from my yard. I can have bands of the lighter clay show through if my blending is not thorough enough, as the mark on the middle left bowl shows. That could be a cool look for a bigger test on another day.

Happy Kiln Day

 

Progress, progress. Its slow but ongoing....thank goodness.

New Year...New Style

 I'm still trying to stay motivated to keep up the making process. It's a bit of a struggle but since I've focused on sprig molds for custom decorating, I'm looking at mug decorating a bit differently now. Instead of using glaze layering and the kiln to do the heavy lifting, so to speak, I'm searching for new shapes to make into small molds. The Roman lion mold came from a clay impression I made from a metal sun dial. I plan to use a dark glaze as a stain just on the lion decoration. The rest of the mug will get the usual 3 coats of brushed on glaze....colors are still to be determined.