Category: Uncategorized

This is my pretty elbow from where I wonked it Wednesday, breaking wood at the kiln site.  Gross, eh? My first thought when I hurt it was, “Wow, I think I’m gonna pass out” — my second thought was “Diana is going to kill me if this is broken!”. Hopefully it will be better before I…

OK, this entry will bring me up to date and then I’m walking away from this computer for a while.  I was up too late putting up the salt fire  pix and the crit results, and I’m cleaning my studio today to get ready for summer productivity. I was kind of background-nervous about my mid program review,…

The new salt fired pots are at http://www.primalmommy.com/saltkilnapril07 and results of the vote/crit please page (unfired porcelain ewers) are written up under each photo at http://www.primalmommy.com/critplease.html Thanks to all who send votes and comments. It’s really useful! I won’t wear out my welcome by asking for more and more critiques, but please feel free to…

I’m going to go put a whole page from this kiln on my website.

Whaddya think? (click on “comment” below if you like!)

If I had a dime for every time somebody said sarcastically, “you sure picked a nice day to fire”, I’d be rich. I had asked Patrick the week before if he was interested in firing the salt kiln and he said, “not especially”… so I decided I was going to fire it myself. Paddy ended…

This was one of my early ewers, still looking very thrown-and-assembled.  It’s not a look I have pursued further, but the glaze and salt saved this one from being really ordinary, IMO.

From the salt kiln also…

I always wake up hungry. I could drive to McDonalds and have a bag of breakfast, tossed out a window by anonymous hands into my lap. But there is no joy in that (and anyway, my 13 year old would lecture me about fast food, deforestation and factory farming.)� Artless, anonymous food can feed our…

Feel free to comment, advise, suggest, or critique by clicking “comments” below.  If you really like to give feedback, see my “crit please” post below these pix, inviting you to review some new pots at http://www.primalmommy.com

I don’t love the form but I’m happy with the glaze.

His hat comes off  ;0)

Wood fired pots begin below…

OK, here’s the idea: I’m getting ready to load some wet pots into my kiln, just the stuff I made this weekend. They are mostly porcelain, this time, mostly tripot feet, and mostly little ewer/cruet pouring vessels. I am not especially invested in any one of them, and I have about 15 more on my…

Two more..

This side got lots of ash.

A friend fixed these photos for me…  here are a few more pots.

This one fired on its side… the goofy drip is hilarious.  More pix below and at http://www.primalmommy.com/woodfirepots.html

o yes. I am a happy potter. It’s maybe four inches tall, and the little ball behind the spout is the knob on top of a long “dip stick” type stopper in the fill-hole. I’ll post a link to a whole page of these, yet tonight (it’s Wednesday the 4th)

This simple ewer form was unglazed. All the melt here is ash.

More of his mugs on the web page I’m making now ;0) Hang on… I’ll post the link as soon as I am done!

Friday afternoon, Patrick started a small, bright fire in the EMU train kiln we loaded last Wednesday. He burned mostly pine, kindling, and bits of the dry Christmas tree somebody left at the kiln site. It warmed the kiln slowly — not so essential, with bisque — but also left a nice sifting of ash…

This is where I just spent a sleepless night and a smoky morning/afternoon… I’ll write about the firing later tonight.

Apparently students at EMU are prone to driving through the yellow arms of parking gates — the kind that go up and down to let you into the parking lot (or not) when you scan your card. Along with hardwood strips from a flooring place, pine from Patrick’s dad’s pinebox derby car business, mulberry from…

When I close my eyes I still see swirling, licking, liquid flame patterns… maybe a good night’s sleep will cure it.

No WAY I was having a picture taken of me. I looked like a chimney sweep, smudged black with dirt in my smoky, tangled hair after firing 2am to 8:30 on my own. Not a glamour morning.

I pulled my pop-up to EMU’s kiln site yesterday, so we could sleep in shifts and still be nearby.

Wood firing: The cat’s away, but I’m wood firing this weekend with Patrick Green (fellow MFA student, pal, part time roomie and Dave McBeth’s former student. Patrick’s name is easy to remember, because if you cover up the “A” on the kiln posts they all say “P. Green”.) We had planned to fire on the…

NCECA report with lots of name dropping: Home again, home again, jiggety-jig. This is one of those nights when morning seems like a week ago, and the last few days feel like a movie I watched, or an epic dream full of exotic people, bewildering escalators and hallway-mazes. I suppose it will all process, over…

I am still not up to full speed, but life is settling back into a routine. Last night, with Jeff out of town, I loaded up the kids and drove to EMU, left them at Diana’s and went to printmaking to work on my etching of a beetle collection (in rows, on pins). Afterward, Ben…

The sun came out for real today, and except for a few blocks of ice in the northern shadow of the house, the snow is gone. At the UU I went to a meditation session/mindfulness class, and was reminded that there IS a quiet place in my head, where everything seems OK… if I visited…

It’s March, somehow… it has been a while since I posted, but as the sun makes its way back, I find I have a little more energy. I am convinced that we were meant to hibernate all winter. When spring comes I always feel like I am waking up from a months-long sleepwalk. Below are…

So I have this friend who called to ask if I would babysit her 30 gallon live-rock saltwater aquarium, while they try to sell their house. (Given the recent market, that might be a really long time.). I was instantly intimidated. Even my attempts with pingpong-ball carnival goldfish have been pretty dismal; I have killed…

I have always been a nest-maker, and life with small children has made me even more rooted in place, unwilling to consider any life changes that would mean leaving my house, my neighborhood, or my familiar, comfortable routine. But the last year has thrown me together with people whose stories are full of romance and…

To friends who have asked aboout Jeff’s cardiac catheterization: it was yesterday, and all is well. There was no blockage requiring angioplasty or stints, and he’s happy to have the information (though he’s walking a little slowly today). I got to see the video loop of the veins branching like tree roots around his pumping…

Winter has finally arrived, with the first lasting snow we’ve seen all year. The roads so far have not been too treacherous, and the kids have finally pulled out the snow pants and are enjoying snowball fights. For the first time, this year, they’re all old enough to really enjoy a good snowball battle, instead…

It’s January 20th, two weeks into winter semester. Diana doesn’t teach winter session, but will return from Florida every few weeks to offer critiques and see what we’re making. (She’s traveling to present at the “Extrudaganza” in Texas in a month or so.) Lee is teaching now, and while he has the same straightforward style…

It seems there’s a formula to the new-years-update letters we get around the holidays, usually from friends we only hear from once a year. There are the photos of kids who can’t possibly be that grown up already, and the news of everybody’s milestones and victories. It seems to be one of the last acceptable…

I just finished loading the bottom shelf of my kiln. I love how pots seem to nestle in together, like they are having a little meeting. Mug handles interdigitate, little low things nestle under the shoulders of taller things. These girls seem to be having some kind of board meeting, comparing notes around the coasters…

This is a gift for grandma that Molly and I made, with her drawing of Miss Bianca, a wine glass from the dollar store, and a jar of etching cream I found in a drawer full of craft supplies. It was great fun and I want to make more, but it will have to wait…

Next week is finals week and the last crit of the semester in Diana’s studio– followed, of course, by a pot lock at her house on the edge of campus. Tonight we all worked to clean the studio, sponging and mopping, labeling and organizing. Being mature and serious students we also took turns taping little…

Mid-winter makes me a restless sleeper, and I walk around all day half remembering surreal dreams. Here’s one: I was on a college campus, on my way to the studio. I was part human and part robot, with lots of attachments, arms, tools, and an r2-d2 type dome for a head. I tried to get…

Last night after class, by the time Patrick and I crossed campus to Diana’s house (and a cold beer, soba noodles and tomatoes with feta) I was so tired I could hardly wait to crawl into “my” bed. (The big brass bed in the guest room she offers for my weekly overnight, with a fat down comforter and Clary Ilian’s…

Reasons the clay studio is really NOT like the intense kitchen of a famous chef: Pace. I might have several “orders” being made at once, but it’s over a period of hours, days, weeks. There is no intensity of being “hammered”. It’s meditational, almost. Calm. It’s instructive to have to time yourself according to when the…

On the advice of my prof, Diana Pancioli, I bought Jeff a wonderful book for his birthday. I know it is wonderful because as soon as he is out of bed in the morning, or when he falls asleep before I do, I sneak a read. I’m halfway through. The book is “HEAT” by Bill…

The week is over, all the running around and classes and appointments and errands are done. Homeschool is done, my last Potters Guild class for the semester is done (we finish up with a potluck-critique). All my students signed up for next session again. Jeff’s in Connecticut. He got three deer, which is good news…

Yesterday morning we unloaded the wood kiln. The video guy was there. (Diana is documenting the process of our MFA experience. It felt weird, at first, to have a camera running every Tuesday morning, but after a while it’s easy to forget he’s there.) It was pretty exciting. I have spent a lot of years…

This was the view into the stoke holes on the wood kiln this morning. Swirling flame, and once in a while it would be just a clear deep calm yellow and you could make out the shoulder of a pot in the middle chamber of the kiln… This whole thing is just way cool.

The whole fam-damily loaded up this morning to accompany me on a trip to EMU, to help out with the wood firing. It was a grey day but not too chilly, and most of the trees stripped bare along my now familiar expanse of highway. We arrived to find Diana and a student stoking the wood…

Connor turned 11 this week. He’s a foodie, and wanted to have an “Iron Chef” party. Like most things, it turned out to be a compromise between the elaborate affair he had pictured, and the reality check that mom imposed. Still, it was a lot of fun. The redhead in the picture is Tyler, and…

Happy Halloween, all.

Make dilemmonade. Last night the salt kiln’s first firing had to be aborted due to frozen tanks and maybe a short stack, but it was really exciting to be standing there watching the creature we had built last summer, bricked up and breathing fire. The bricks used to be Diana’s kiln in Canada, and it’s…

A friend read my last blog and gave me a gentle scolding. It sounded to her like I was caving in, backsliding, losing my resolve to put my MFA work above all else and give it 100% for the two allotted years. “You have to make sacrifices”, she said. I thought about that for a…

This is the bigger shot of the timeline I talk about below. I have no idea how to do most of the tricks this blog requires, and have no idea why my posts come out with huge spaces between paragraphs or how to edit them. I also don’t know how to respond to guestbook comments.…

Once in a while you hear something so true, so directed to the moment you are living, that it resounds like a bell in your head. Most recently it was an African proverb shared by my friend Stephani — one which needs to be lettered in paint on my studio door. “Go fast”, said the rabbit. “Go slow”, said…

It’s week 5 of the MFA. In last night’s seminar, students from various disciplines went from studio to studio, discussing each others’ work — an incredibly useful, informative, and sometimes bewildering experience. When we talked about what we are learning, my self assessment was uncharacteristically humble. I explained that, although I once considered myself pretty…

On the left is Reem Gibriel, glamorous newlywed sculptor from Libya… yours truly, middle aged mother of three, on the right .. and behind us, a lion. No, wait, that’s Patrick Green, the softspoken Tennessee boy who calls us “Miss Kelly” and “Miss Reem”. The three of us have kind of made family of each other. The…

I’m home from the overnighter days of my school week — tomorrow is homeschool and catch-up, and then back for more class tomorrow night. One potter on yesterday’s clayart listserver wrote, “(My daughter) is going into the ceramics department at UNCA and I wonder, worry… is formal art training going to curb, stifle, bend, steer…

After the long drive home from class last night, I meant to sleep in, but woke up grabbing for my notebook — full of ideas for the studio about beetles, and diatoms, textures and forms. This afternoon I organized my studio and recycled clay, but on a whim I decided that I should harvest some honey from the…

This is one of my favorites in the ancient gallery at the Toledo Museum of Art. I keep thinking about making vessels that can’t be set down in the normal way.

This is a rack in a ship’s hull, built for the storage of amphorae during shipping.

I’m really enjoying a conversation at the clayart listserver about the origins of the amphora. I’m printing all posts, and following all links. Here are some details I have scribbled in my notebook at the library, just because they seemed interesting: Different shapes of amphorae seem to determine year and region, but more importantly,  what they…

I’m in the middle of week two at Eastern Michigan, and it’s very much the same feeling as post-workshop brain overload. I suppose it will become the norm but for now it’s a cross between adrenaline and exhaustion, inspiration and despair. I feel lucky that I am able to “compartmentalize”. I have a block of…

(The photo: a grape vine climbed in my open window and selected a little pit-fired stirrup vessel sitting on the sill. When I had to close the window against the September chill, it held on.)   Thursday, Sept. 13th: I’ve recently started reading Michael Pollan’s book, “The Botany of Desire”. It’s an interesting read, so far.…

I have come to realize that the main reason I decided, against all logic, to pursue this MFA, was that my sales pitch is — and long has been —  better than my pots. I write easily, (if not well), and enjoy the company of potters. As a typical firstborn, I tend to tap-dance for approval, and…

Back to School, the signs say. My kids have never gone to school, but this year the signs are for me. Our long Labor day weekend at the lake — with my grandma, parents, husband and kids — was, as always, the last gasp of summer. Cooler nights have made the lake too chilly for swimming, but we swam…

When my brother and I left for college, I wrote a poem about my mom called “Still Life”. The image was one of my mother — who had gone from baby dolls, to baby brother, to marriage and babies, and had considered mothering to be her most important role — suddenly left rattling around in a lovely…

These are the daily ones. Dinner, treadmill, gather stuff to donate/recycle/pitch, and check the kids’school work. Weekly/monthly ones are described in the blather below. Some nights Jeff or one of the kids will get the “cook dinner” tag, or dad will check the homeschool work because I’ll be at school. I just have these hung…