strange occurance

So I was at the water fountain yesterday filling my bottle. The stream kept moving up and down, though not in any orderly way--it was like someone saw where I moved the bottle to and adjusted the water pressure so I had to move it. It was kind of creepy. I did actually look around for a camera, but maybe it was just a ghost.

My haul!

Ooo ooo ooo I had tons of stuff come out of the gas kiln today! I'm not going to try and move pictures around so their descriptions are next to the pictures, you're just gonna have to figure it out ;)

The vase with the red, pink and purple is a gift straight from Cheesus! It's a chemical reaction that occurs during the reduction of the glazes near the end of the firing, and it is not guarenteed! It flows from a beautiful tropical aqua to purpley pinks and then pinky reds. Unfortunately it has a big ol' flaw! This would have been my best piece from the gas if it didn't :(

That weird looking bowl with the three triangle slices of deep blue is actually a glaze test. I took a base and made three variations of it, all with 10% cobalt. Unfortunately I couldn't get good pictures, but trust me-one of them came out awesome ;)

I also have pictures of the slides I made for Jimmy. Mom thinks they might be too short--I have no idea, I just asked the advice of a friend who plays bass. Coincidently, the green slide is the same color of the vase, just not blessed by Cheesus.

The rest of the pictures are just bowls and vases I did test glazing on. One in particular came out absolutely fantastic, looking like there's a sun in the bottom. I applied all the decoration to the bowls in a slip trailer.
Praise Cheesus!

Computer Crap

Well my life has been sucking pretty hard lately, since it revolves for the most part around my computers--of which I have two, and of which *neither* are working.

It started with the new rabbits after two months finally deciding they do in fact like to eat cords--so I had to play musical keyboards with all the other computers in the house trying to find one. Then my laptop stopped working with a monitor. Since the screen is cracked, I can't use it. I gave it to a friend to fix and can't get into contact with him, so I can't use this awesome case Dad got for me today to use its drive as an external. (This also causes major problems because all of my listing pictures for my store are on lappy) In the mean time I'd hooked up compy 386. It started having boot errors, culminating tonight in its total collapse. Turns out the hard drive is bad. Thank god I haven't saved anything terribly imporant on it yet since it's only been since last week that lappy has been out of commission. Dad had another, larger, drive sitting around that he threw in here but it's taking forever to reinstall all my programs and get everything the way I like it. And it has internet explorer 8 on it! I had been boycotting 7!

Wish me luck!

Apparently I still don't have the hang of arranging pictures correctly

It's been a while and I've been busy

Today we loaded a gas kiln. Marina said more stuff more stuff so I glazed the, oh, twenty extra test tiles I had from Sarah's class. I made bowls so that's them there in the lower middle. Alot of those small vases are mine as well. Tomorrow around nine she's going to start body reduction, to change the red iron oxide to the black, and give the body that nice grey color. I told her maybe I'd be there and maybe I wouldn't. She'll do the glaze reduction later in the day so I won't miss too too much.

Here are my majolica tests from Sarah's class.

The Galburg opening is tomorrow, I'm excited about that. However it's given me my first chance to be the "disgruntled artist." I told two seperate people my eggplant is *not* a floor piece--of course it ended up on the floor. I'm sorry if you don't have the right size displays, you shouldn't accept pieces you can't display properly! I didn't attatch the two pieces of the eggplant on the same slant, and the higher it is the less you can tell. I'm upset because there's monetary rewards involved and now is a time where I could *really* use it!

I learned to cross stitch over the weekend. I bought a set of stamped pillow cases when Hancock moved over to Lombard and finally had Mom dig them out the other day and say "hey, are you ever going to make these?" Check them out

Candles and Majolica

My procrastination has once again led to me scrambling to get things finished. Tomorrow I'm supposed to have two pieces ready to bisque for majolica glazing--I threw them tonight, hopefully I can get the feet trimmed on the bowl and plate and the handle attatched to the teacup tomorrow. I'm sure I can finagle them into a bisque sometime this week so no one will be the wiser. It would be much worse but Marina pushed back our due date on the teapots until she gets back from NCECA *turns green with envy*

I got a compliment from another potter on Etsy who said I had a niche with my mushrooms and my candles. Then another seller who runs a not for profit http://www.saveabunny.etsy.com/ selected a candle as a possible piece to go into her store. This persuaded me to make a few more for my store--check out pictures of some candles in progress and a couple done!

Chris and Jeff's friend Greg has been giving me tips on how to take better photos, one of them being how to build a two dollar light box. I meant to have it done but made a wrong cut on the box and am too tired to fix it tonight.