clay: an evening of underglaze

I spent a pleasant evening last night listening and occasionally glancing at the tv screen and painting underglaze on some of my ceramic pins.               

I didn't get to cut and carve out new pins on the slabs I had brought home, but maybe that will be this evening, my Friday night.

clay: pin friends

I posted a photo of some of my clay pins in progress on Facebook and then solicited ideas on what other pins to make. Am trying to run with their ideas. Anna typed, Om. Silvia suggested sun and moon and corgi  

And while looking for simple images online to re-create, this branding for an oyster restaurant caught my eye. 

I love this graphic design. The single image of an oyster shell that's just a line drawing with some cross hatches and shadings. The stark contrast between black and white and more importantly, black background. The fonts, especially the serif of a swirl of a Helvetica letter in the word, Pearl. The truncation of the word trademark and placement of the year the restaurant was founded. I would love to take Kat's class on typography because I don't really know what typography is and know how to render my fondness for letters and simple drawings.

I'm also noting the details on my new necklace. I do love it and want to render it in ceramic. I can't find my clay journal with all the measurements I wanted to tinker with for a candelabra, and so maybe today at the community studio, I'll just mist my coils with more water and save it to build next week. Or make a small coil pot. I need to deviate from straight cylinders and make some organic and curvilinear outlines in my pots. Or make a few of these pendants.

I also really like the mystic sun pendant.

However, much I intend to make the pendants in my sketchbook, I get distracted by all the tools in the high school ceramics classroom. Yesterday in order to decompress, I used stamps and silicon molds to make a bunch more pins.

 

This pin I made from a plaster mold, and I can't wait to glaze the pots on this pin in three different glazes.

I made a couple pins semi-identical with the llama and the dachsund stamps, and of course, I had to play with letter stamps.

I wasn't really fond of the heart pin I made until I slip and scored a dog outline to it.

And now it's just about lunch time, which means I've got a couple hours to get into the headset for hand building. Oh what will I make today?

chores: a pot of beans and window shopping

Hubs bought a package of cranberry beans from Gordo to plant a few, giving me the rest to cook. Even after soaking them overnight and simmering for a couple hours, the beans were still too firm for consumption.

 

And so I turned up the burner for an additional hour of furious boiling and chopped white onion and sliced lime and toasted garlic bread in the meantime. Finally our vegan dinner was ready for consumption.

The beans are still a bit too al dente, and so I plan to boil them longer along with a can of kidney and pinto beans with salt pork for another bean dinner. And so Saturday breakfast was fried rice with Chinese sausage and a fried egg on top, for which I could finally use up the carrots and onion in my fridge.                      

 

And these leftovers have served us well during a very busy work week. It’s the weekend, and my brain is a bit too tired to even ponder what to cook of thawed chicken thighs.

cook: widowmaker white chicken chili

I watched this recipe being made with Billie Eilish’s Bad Guy playing in the background. I've been wanting to change up my chili game. I’ve always cooked my chili with chorizo or ground beef and pinto and kidney beans in a tomato base for years now. Let’s do chili differently. Somewhere I've got dried white cannellini beans and more than likely a brick of cream cheese too in the fridge though I'm a bit dubious of that ingredient. And I just bought avocados.                           

 

And so here’s my first iteration. The ingredient of cream cheese, again, had me doubtful and definitely makes it a very Northern European dish rather than a Latin American one. All the dairy called for in the recipe makes for perhaps a too luxurious bean stew. However, I changed up the recipe by using kidney and pinto beans added to my leftover cranberry beans and had no green chilies though I did at least have green enchilada sauce.

However, I kept tasting as I was cooking because the chili was so awesomely delicious, and I packed it away for the next night for dinner when Patrick and I both had either a meeting or preparing for work the next day.

 

The next night, I set out condiments of chopped white onion, cilantro, avocado, cheese and sour cream (the dairy was to offset some of the spiciness for my husband). The semi-white chili was delicious for me even without the additional dairy. And so I will cook this again according to the recipe directions and maybe use only half the cream cheese (4 ounces is plenty) and again omit the sour cream. Also no seeds in the fresh green jalapeno to make it less spicy for hubs.

clay and composition: pins and drawing

I’ve been on a tear, making pins. Zan brought out the plaster slip cast molds, and I somewhat squared off this one to make a ceramic name tag for Meral.

And there are quite a few more I made on the greenware shelf at school. This past Saturday I made even more.             

I've had this drawing exercise book for a few years....obviously, drawing wasn't a daily practice as I left off on Day 7 a couple years ago.

But I did doodle and watercolor over the weekend and can see a wee bit of improvement. I think I’ll even make some clay mugs to turn these 2-D ideas into 3-D actual objects.

This drawing exercise to render tools of my trade (really not my trade but my passion) was very fun.               

At school before assigning kids to make a ceramic pin, I created an example in my sketchbook to share with them.                         

I, of course, plan to sketch more.

And here's a quote I can practice calligraphy on a watercolor wash in tribute to MLK, Jr.

The next exercise is to doodle to music, which I’ll draw and paint to this afternoon.

a ferris wheel: jean michel basquiat

 

a carousel: keith haring