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This was a little underfired.

Really nice finish! Can’t wait to see it assembled.

I am making some flasks, inspired by antique versions I found in photos.

Flask… lying down  ;0)

This part of Nancy’s sculpture, glimpsed through a peep at the back of the chimney.

(repost from a yahoo group… edited somewhat. Tuesday night.)   I’m so tired I feel like I am sleepwalking, but I wanted to chime in before I crawl in a hot bathtub and then my warm bed. Yesterday was one of those rushed, frantic, trying-to-get-myself- packed,-my-bisque-unloaded,-my-kids-schooled days, but by 2:00 I had everything I needed……

My three hens live here, tucked into a corner of my yard, far from neighbors and under the protective wing of the little barn that houses bird seed, lawnmmower, garden stuff and beekeeping supplies. I built it with silvery, weathered wood scavanged from elsewhere because that’s what my great grandma Parker’s henhouse looked like, and my…

I make unremarkable but comforting pot pies out of leftover meat when we roast a chicken. When my brother was a bachelor I used to make extras for him. I made this one for Patrick at EMU. It’s a “pot” pie. Get it? See the pot? Am I hilarious, or what?

This was from the Toledo Potters Guild show at the University of Toledo’s Center for Visual Arts (on the grounds of the Toledo Museum of Art.) It was a lovely show.  I had three pots juried in and they all sold.  The one on the poster that looks like a portly woman in heels with…

The fancy details have long since weathered off of my bread oven, but I still think it’s a thing of beauty with it’s smoky patina and unapologetic functionalism. I am collecting images form medieval woodcuts of an oven like this that was portable, and could be taken to market on a two wheeled cart.  Bakers…

This is a close-up of the weathered surface of my bread oven. I love how organic patterns like this make you lose a sense of perspective. It would look the same under a magnifying glass,  at your feet, or from an airplane.  Wind-made ripples in sand look like dunes, exactly. Water carves rock in miniature…

This is the big casserole I’m working on, awaiting a knob. I have read that for ovenware, the bottom shape most resistant to thermal shock is a curve instead of a sharp corner, but I am not sure I like the way the base of this thing resolves itself, or the outward curve around the…

Isn’t rainbow chard lovely? This photo doesn’t really do justice, as the sun was setting and it looks best in the warm light.  The cold frame on the right has lettuces and arugula, the one on the left is mache/rapunzel (which we love) and spinach. Elsewhere is kale and snow peas. I like the hoop…

When frost threatened, I stretched the top over the hoop house, and yesterday when Jeff got home from work he helped me put the ends on as the nights are getting really cold. I had put the window-frame-lids on the cold frames inside, but it was still looking pretty frigid out there in the early…

In August I put up the frame of a cheap hoop house that I got on season-end clearance. I planted mache, lettuce, spinack, green onions, and arugula, and transplanted some of my cold hardy plants in the month that followed: beets from the farmer’s market were planted to provide beet greens, as well.

ok so i went and screwed myself up good tonight… carrying a board with pots and supper through our tight packed-with-grad-students, profs, pots and equipment workspace, i ran shin-level into a low dolly full of sculptures waiting to be photographed and went ass over applecart. i came down hard on my left elbow on a…

mel wrote: (on clayart, the ceramics listserver) “the acts of throwing, slab building and a thousand othertasks in ceramics…..are not art, metaphor, smarty pants…they are craft/skill. it is skill based. when you control the skill and understand your materials…clay/glaze/fire most anything can be done and you may sneakinto some art. far too many teachers in…

I’ll be selling pots this weekend, at the Sylvania Art Fair.  This year’s fair has apparently been upscaled, is juried, and has been moved to the Lourdes College campus on Convent Boulevard. The fair is from 9:30 to 4:00. I’ll also be selling with the Toledo Potter’s Guild at the Farmer’s Market, the following Saturday…

…that I would put this poem on my blog. We composed it together around the fire. Pardon a couple of inside jokes that won’t make a lot of sense. We are Team Savino, And we don’t have a cheer! We rode our bikes to Confluence, and all the way back here! We braved nine miles…

Ohiopyle State Park, Pennsylvania, Appalachian Mountains, USA.

I have never seen a more glorious rails-to-trails bike trail anywhere. Ever. We’re determined to plan our next camping trip with bike trails in mind.

I rafted this river in college, in 1979, with my pal Nancy DeCaprio and a bunch of dorm-mates. This trip, we paddled the more family-friendly portion of the river, with just class 1 and 2 rapids. Anyway,this was the view looking down from the wooden bike bridge.

This is where we usually ended up in the hot part of the afternoon…

I haven’t completely unpacked from our trip, yet — but I want to post a few shots, so I can show my grandma tomorrow when we go to celebrate her 92nd birthday. (Happy Birthday, Grandma Lowe!”) We just had one of those vacations where you just shake your head all the way home about how…

We spent part of every day wading in ice cold water, over flat, slippery rocks; swimming or sitting or sliding in different narrow, frothy streams… or exploring waterfalls close up. Molly was always on the lookout for salamanders. Connor had a first aid kit on his belt and was “medic!” for the inevitable scrapes that…

I have been in places before where you could hike in and take a picture of a waterfall… but these were mountains made of rock, with streams everywhere and a whitewater river running through it. So everywhere we biked, hiked or paddled we saw waterfalls. Mossy rocks, ferns, cool wet stone of every texture and…

When my grandma moved to a new senior residence, I was given her old canning supplies. This just tickles me to no end. Her farmhouse kitchen when I was a kid was a wonderful place where endless bushels of tomatoes were stewed and canned, where pickled beets stained hands and aprons and horseradish pickles sent…

After a rainy week we had a lovely Saturday for the annual pottery lawn sale at a potter friend’s home in Waterville. There were eight of us there and we each averaged a couple hundred dollars in sales. The best part is always the company, a group of potters sitting at a table in the…

Yes, I brought home a trophy… nicely discounted for workshop attendees, too! This weekend was spent at the lovely 577 Foundation in Perrysburg. The former estate of the area’s wealthy Stranahan family, the foundation has nature trails, education programs, community flower and veggie gardens, a geodesic dome full of steamy green plants and fish ponds,…

What a nice guy.

What a nice pot.

Stop by! Support your local potters! Bring wheelbarrows full of money!

This was a long weekend, the kind where you can hardly remember morning by nightfall. We saw various friends at the downtown Toledo farmer’s market Saturday morning, Unitarians and homeschoolers and potters. We only bought local stuff. I bought yams and red fingerling potatoes. Tyler bought green bell peppers, his favorite. Connor bought a cantelope,…

When I got home from up north, I pulled the pop-up into the back yard and opened it up, intending to clean and unpack. My three kids flagged me down one afternoon with a proposal: they wanted to sleep out there. So for the last three nights, 8:30 arrived and the three of them, without…

I was unable to get on line all day Thursday, because it was really our last full work day. I drove in the morning to a local dairy where I had seen pastured cows, and asked for a couple of buckets of cow manure. He led me to an indoor enclosure and gave me a…

I sleep so hard every night, here, that my pillows and blankets look undisturbed when I wake up. A pine branch stretches so close to the screen above my pillow that it touches the screen; this morning I opened my eyes to an obnoxiously loud bird song and startled the little singer inches from my…

My grandma is 92, and just moved into a small apartment in a senior complex in Midland, MI with a dining hall and transportation (so she won’t need to drive). I am hoping to stop and visit her on my way back through Midland on Saturday, and have been thinking about this latest move: she…

(This is the second entry in my sculpture project journal. Photos will come later. If you want them in order, read July 15th first…) Monday afternoon: stopped for lunch. I’m sitting at my lap top (an old model, second hand, with missing key, but a marvel nonetheless) in my little tent-trailer pop up. Outside the…

Day one, Parsons sculpture and design project, Lake Ann Michigan: I had spent a lot of the week getting ready to go, so I had some time to enjoy my kids on the weekend. Saturday had been one of those picture perfect family days. We had gone to breakfast and laughed all through the meal,…

So I had drawn several large sketches to present during my proposal today, of possible “straight line” column shapes, some with silo type roofs, some with flat tops of living sod. Some were simple and others more complicated. I built this scale model just to show how the armature would be made an how I…

I’m having lunch with Diana tomorrow so she can critique “a couple of ewers” I’m bringing for her to look over. Tomorrow’s the last day of sculpture at EMU. Next week we head north from Sunday to Saturday to actually build our sculptures. So tomorrow we present our proposals. I have a scale model, 5…

For a sculpture student who was hoping she could find some for a project she wants to do.

scrounged cedar to stack by the wood kiln tomorrow after class.

This is the moth I found on some rusty metal out behind the sculpture building, where “our” big kilns are. It had some spooky, fascinating wings with irregular leafy shapes, and these wonderful portholes dow one side of its body. Reading, and thinking about, and watching a dvd about Andy Goldsworthy makes me mourn for…

The sculpture class met at University of MIchigan’s campus one day to see the sculpture there. This is “Wave Field” by Maya Linn, the woman who designed the Vietnam Memorial wall. It’s really cool. If you sit in the middle of it and lean back into one of the waves it kind of cradles you,…

This is a photo we took Wednesday, when we went for family night. The first part of the week, I was truly not thinking much about my guys. I knew they were having a great time, the troop leader is a marvelous guy, and even though it’s Connor’s first year, they are together. Besides, the…

At the Order of the Arrow ceremony, where the ceremonial rituals were racing the thunderstorm…

July is already this scribbled…

Janis sang (to my generation, anyway)– Summertime, and the living’s easy… Fish are jumpin’, and the cotton’s high… Your daddy’s rich, and your mama’s good looking… Hush now, baby, don’t you cry…. I was born 46 years ago this midsummer weekend. Maybe that’s why I feel such an affinity for the midle of June, the…

And God Save the Queen. I was all but resigned to having lost my hive this summer. My queen was infertile or damaged, my package of bees burning out it’s lifespan, and a worker bee was laying only drone (male) eggs, so the hive was doomed . I posted about the friendly beekeeper in Michigan…

This was our annual no-boys-allowed weekend at Camp Libbey, near Defiance, Ohio. We had a great time. We slept in the pop-up in the tent field, ran into some folks we knew and made some new friends as well. They had campfire songs, climbing wall and ropes course, archery, trail riding, speed stacking, tomahawk throw,…

Last summer, Molly took one look at the really high scary climbing wall and said, “No thanks!” This year, she was up for it. She made it about halfway up before giving up, but when her spunky little friend Pilar made it to the top, she got back in line and climbed even higher the…

It was almost sunset and we were the last trail ride for the day. Here, Molly and her friend Pilar are waiting for the horses that would take us on a ride in cool, dusky wooded valleys, along the Maumee and the waterfall over the dam, and we saw a lovely leaping doe…

Here’s my girl at the archery area, next to the building where we petted a skunk and held ferrets, and the astrolab planetarium. Camp Libbey rocks.

A good weekend. Saturday, Jeff and the boys went to church to climb the steeple, a tradition for those who have finished the coming of age program. It turned out the Old West End festival was in full swing by the time they climbed down, and they got to see a parade. They waved at…

Remember my friend who brought over the salt water aquarium? She’s a clever one. She invited friends with kids for a cook out, Monday, and “oh by the way, my six-week-old kittens who have had their first shots and are ready to be adopted are upstairs in the bedroom, if you want to go see…

After two years of keeping a humming, populous hive, I lost my bees last winter.  No sign of the infamous colony collapse, though I’ve been forwarded more articles and theories than I can count to explain the nation’s disappearing bees: cell phones, pesticides, genetically modified crops, overuse of antibiotics and miticides by beekeepers, and on…

Last summer, before I started school, I tore out the fence around my 30X40 veggie garden, dug up the perennial plants and mowed it flat. It’s lawn, now, though volunteer arugula replaces the crabgrass and clover we usually grow for grass. I knew I wouldn’t have time to tend, water, weed and harvest my usual edamame,…

Sunday was the last regular sunday school class at church. The lesson was about recycling, animals and our environment. The guest speaker was a woman who brought in several pet snakes, and taught the kids about their habits and habitats. She had a small tank full of snake babies, since one of her pets had…

I went up in the garage loft and pulled down the old bike trailer I used to use for toddlers. Now I use it for groceries, clay tools, packages for the post office and general shopping trips. We’ve complained in the past about businesses popping up all around us, traffic and noise… but now that…

It’s a lovely weekend here. Mornings have been misty, with the intoxicating smell of lilac floating through open windows. Afternoons have been warm with fat floaty clouds, and the grass is growing so fast you can almost watch it happen. Evenings are cool, pleasant enough to eat out on the deck, and no bugs yet.…

This morning, Tyler’s Coming Of Age program at church (the UU version of confirmation, I guess) had their graduation celebration, in a service led by the 16 junior-high aged kids. They each read the “credo” they had come up with for themselves during meetings, discussions and retreats, and Tyler played “Amazing Grace” on the sax.  Those…

May 2: Sad rat story Connor (11) took his beloved, almost two year old rat to the vet today. She’s getting a frequent bloody nose and is losing weight. He looked in her mouth and said there’s a tumor pushing down on the roof of her mouth, nothing he can do. She has maybe a…

We were sitting in the sun room doing our homeschool and we heard a thump behind the wall. No clue. We looked in the pantry, checked around, went back to doing our studies. Maybe ten minutes later, we heard the unmistakable, miserable chitter of a baby raccoon calling for mama. Yep, it was right behind…

He’s waving goodbye before I climb up the ladder and stuff him into the roof vent his mom tore open to make a nest in there earlier this spring. Yeah, that’s right, I am putting raccoons INTO my attic. At least until mama decides to take them all out on a night raid. Then I…

This is what Jeff came home to, today. I didn’t know about it until I discvered it this afternoon — Tyler had put up the letters, and the kids set up some snacks around his reading chair (an extra pillow on the chair) and set all his turned wood bowls out on the piano for him to…

This is how I staked out my territory in the mfa studio before I left. My only real disadvantage is that there’s “pull up a chair” space (something we tried to eliminate) but it’s behind me when I am on the wheel… I miss my space but I’m organizing my studio at home, which has…

The end of winter is like waking up from a long, wearying, troublesome dream. Suddenly we have neighbors again, chatting over the fence; sheets dance on the clothesline. Car windows are open and people notice each other again, after a long season of being hunched over, clenched and cold, bundled into coats and hoods, sealed…

My dad used to say, “Spring is sprung, the grass is riz, I wonder where the birdies is…”

About 16 years ago when we bought this house, we took out a chain link fence that ran across the front of the yard, and I planted a quince and a red twig dogwood out there. Later we discovered that the old lady who had lived (and died) here had planted red tulips all along…