Tasty

Growth

I'm terribly exhausted and stressed-out. I need some good things to happen!

For the moment here are some balcony impressions:

Tomatoes are ripening. (How I like the shades of colour!)

There are plenty of green peppers growing.

And the nasturtium is just lovely. The blossoms and leaves are edible but I haven't tried them yet.

Sweet Red and Delicate Pink

Yesterday I picked my first ripe tomatoes and they tasted so sweet! They are small cherry tomatoes of the only sort I kept from last year. It's the plant that sprouted last and now is the tallest of all.

Some days ago I was at the pottery studio and due to the tiring hot weather got nothing else done than adding some newly purchased colours of glass to a textured plate which should be fired a third time.

I tried out pastel pink, purple, and green, and a dark pink for the first time along with some blues I tested earlier and which melt to very nice shades of bright blue. Pinks and reds are delicate glass colours that easily burn. I hope they don't. That's the excitement of working with glass.

I can't stop taking pictures with William Morris patterns in the background

These are the last peas of the season. They grew just perfectly this year. I harvested 202 pea pods, all of them maggot-free and absolutely delicious.




These chanterelles didn't grow on my balcony. I went mushrooming in the woods and found them all on the same spot.

Blue and Green

I'm always intrigued by my glassy ceramics! It's fun to play around with glass. I have complete control of the process of texturing my pieces but I can't influence the melting of the glass. I arrange it in a certain way but I never know exactly how it will turn out. It's always a surprise.


Originally the blue one was meant to be a wall hanging but the holes I left on the backside to attach the piece to a wall filled with glaze, although I did clean them before glaze firing but it seems I didn't do it carefully enough. Nevertheless it also works very well as a low dish.

Flower Garden

Last week I also made this very elaborate and hand-wrecking piece. (I couldn't hold a thing with my right hand for two days afterwards.)

Perhaps you remember the stencilled plate I made a year ago. I wanted to try this technique again ever since. As I'm a slow crafter and like to brood over an idea and go through the steps of the working process over and over again in theory until I'm confident enough that it might work out practically, it took until last week to try it again.

I carefully cut out the stencils (Some might look familiar to you from my felt flowers.) and prepared the slip less watery this time. It had a great consistency.

You can see the steps the dish went through in the next picture. It's good that I took photos because I wouldn't have retrieved all of the stencils from under the layer of slip without a picture to locate them. Digital photography came in very handy at this occasion.

After I removed the stencils I used my selfmade stamps to imprint patterns. On the following day these were accomplished by carved lines and finally I tried out the Sgraffito technique for the first time and carved through the layer of dark slip, so lines of the contrasting white clay show up. It was very laborious and time-consuming and I hope my dish will look good after firing!

Some new Works

These are two new dishes I made last week. The one on the right is formed from my mould and I wanted to try this for ages. I can't wait to come to the stage where I can add the glassy parts to see if they turn out better this time than in the prototype.