Spring Green Birdie

My newest creation, inspired by the pigeons that sometimes come and sit among the plants (and sometimes on the plants too and snapping the freshly sprouted peas) on my balcony and seem to thoroughly enjoy it.

Easter Eggs

I have a soft spot for folk art and find it incredibly inspiring. Over the Easter weekend I visited some small museums dedicated to Sorbian and rural culture in our area. Sorbian Easter eggs decorated with traditional patterns made by the use of hot beeswax, feathers and needles are very famous and you could watch them being made. It's fascinating!

Some eggs in their early stages

Finished eggs with traditional motifs

All the stages an egg goes through - layer by layer wax and dyes are applied

Many years ago in my childhood I painted eggs with this technique for the first time but never with such precision and skill. It takes a lot of practice and a very steady hand to get this good, but it's fun regardless of whether you are skilled or not.

Here are some of my feeble (and untraditonal) attempts of this year's Easter. Inspired by this tutorial at Lil Fish Studios blog I tried turmeric to dye some eggs. It works like a charm and gives the most gorgeous shades of yellow! The first tries with the darkest hues were already eaten when I took my pictures.

The egg to the left is an undecorated white one dyed with onion skins,
the eggs in the middle are dyed with turmeric and
the one on the right first had a bath in turmeric and then in commercial blue dye.

The yellow is turmeric. Red and blue are bought colours.

The blemishes are caused by melted wax when the dyes were used when still too hot. Stains can also be prevented when you blot dry the eggs. These will be eaten so it doesn't matter that much but when you make your eggs to stay longer it's better to be more careful.

Spring has arrived

It's time to revive my hibernating blog. I worked very slowly and very scarcely on my pottery this winter. In January I made this vase and glazed it a few weeks ago.


I tried to scratch a pattern (inspired by the animation films of Hungarian Folk Tales) into the glaze but it didn't work so well as it did on my test piece I made last year. I'm not so happy about it but it just shows the unpredictability of glazes. It was applied a bit too thickly I guess. I'm so intrigued by this technique, I'll try it again!

It's thawing

I enjoyed wintertime, the glittering snow, the intriguing ice and the long cold and I feel very inspired creatively but not inspired at all to write about it.


I'm in lack of words and it feels wrong to tell about the difficulties the cold does to my hands and which kept me away from working with clay, and yet I love all the bright white crystalline wintriness. I'm fascinated by the colourlessness of the past weeks, the muffled sounds and the loud cracks caused by tension and pressure in the ice.

I made some drawings (Not the best idea when your hands hurt, but I couldn't help it.) of repeating but varying shapes. They might look simple but they are arduous exercises in drawing lines. To me they are more than sketches, they are this winter's creative representation.

The Rocky Pot

So far I haven't touched clay this year but I hope to change this soon. I'm also terribly behind with taking pictures of my stuff, so how about an older one, I haven't posted yet?

I made this pot in last March (a long time ago), inspired by rocks like these.

Experimental Again

I don't feel very much like writing at the moment but I'm still crafting! (The wet and grey and sometimes very chilly autumn weather of the past weeks gives me some additional pain that makes it quite hard sometimes.)

As I have the habit to try some experimental stuff every now and then, I made a little dish.

On the inside I tested new glass, that actually is rather old. My potter found it when she was tidying up some shelves. It's a big jar full of finely grained yellow glass, that someone gave her many years ago and that she never used. It was waiting for me, I like to think!

As yellows are prone to burn away during firing I expected a big mess but I was surprised by some unexpected effects. It must have some really good flux in it, it melted so well and with only a few cracks and no burning. This stuff is of high quality! The dish now looks like it's filled with honey.


On the outside I tried some glaze carving. I have seen amazing results of this technique at pottery fairs and had to try if it works with the white glaze we use. The pattern held its shape perfectly. I see many possibilities ahead!

Botanical

I'm still so very fascinated by all the shapes and details of wild herbs and plants and tried to make a few more things with botanical imprints.

It's getting harder to find suitable leaves and grasses as summer fades and they dry and wither. Also in many places these beauties are mowed down. (It's such a sad sight.) Apart from the pot and buttons in the photo above I also made another wall panel I'll show at a later stage. I couldn't take a proper picture of it.

This sponge vessel is another thing I made. I nicked the idea from bptakoma on Flickr and just had to give it a try! It takes some time and patience (and for me some pain in the wrists) to cover a pinch pot with a surface like this.

A new Bowl

This is the only crafty thing I got done in the past couple of weeks but it was quite labour-intensive. A seashell was my main inspiration. More and more new ideas keep piling up and I also feel the weird urge to try wheel throwing again.

Blues

To prevent insanity I took a walk in the woods and on my way picked some cornflowers and grasses at a field.

At home I put the small bunch into one of the vases I made and I am so delighted how well the colours of the glazes I used match the natural blues and greens of the stems I had picked.

A Rocky Pot

Last week I made a small sculpted pot at home (and skipped the class for a birthday party). The surface of my pot is inspired by geological formations like you can see them in pictures here and here. They are truly fascinating! The design is also an advanced version of the sculpted vase I made some months ago and that I like very much. It's done in a bigger scale this time and in dark clay.

I still haven't taken proper pictures of this old vase as well as of all the other finished pieces of the last months due to bad light, bad health, bad mood and bad photography skills. I hope to get this done quite soon though. For a start you can sneak a peek above on my new blog header.

A Pot and a Book

This week I made a pot in class but I forgot to take a picture. One of my friendly helpful mates rolled the clay for me and then I pressed a doily into the surface of the slab, cut it into a rectangle and wrapped it around a newspaper-covered plastic pipe and attached the bottom. I smeared the pattern when I put the seam together and when I had to shorten the slab to arrange it to fit, so my pot won't look that nice. I intend to use it on my balcony for flowers once it is finished and this time it doesn't matter that much to me if it has some flaws, although I usually want everything to be done especially careful and neat.

Another one of my friendly claymates lent me a deeply interesting book about ceramic jewellery. She said she had to think of me immediately when she saw this book. This is so nice! It contains many useful tips and I think I can learn a lot from it. It's influence might be visible here sometime soon.

Paper Beads

Here's another crafty task that can be done in bed. This time the idea is inspired by jessprkle and all the pictures of her beautiful paper beads. I wanted to try and make these since I saw them for the first time. I also found a tutorial but never got around to try it out until now.

It's a bit fiddly but quite easily done, although not exactly hand-friendly. I ripped up an old Intro magazine and started with beads that are 3 cm long (the yellow and the mainly black and white ones in the picture).

The beads of my second batch (the green ones) are 1 cm longer and were a bit easier to roll up. Then my hands said that's enough for today but this is definately something I'd try again.

I like how this technique produces beads of certain colour schemes while no two beads look exactly the same.

Papercut

My crafting spirits revived while recovering and lying in bed a lot. Yet still too weak to work with clay I nevertheless wanted some exercice for my feeble hands. Some ideas came to my mind and one of it is that I wanted to try a proper papercut for a long time. I've seen many breathtaking pictures of very intricate papercuts on Flickr and elsewhere, but I have to start small and simple of course.

This beautiful picture by Skinny laMinx especially sparked my interest. She also has a neat tutorial on her blog, so I thought I should give it a try. The shapes of my flowers are totally stolen from hers, because I didn't know where to start myself.

My papercut only is the size of a postcard (and was done in bed) but it took more than two hours to complete. My hands got crampy and shaky almost immediately (And I was thinking to myself, why of all things did I have to start with something like this after such exhausting weeks of illness?) but I finished it. All those papercut people must have really strong hands or sharper knives than I have. Probably both. I don't think I'll try this again too soon. I'm quite pleased with my first try though. I neither cut myself nor a wrong line.

I finally framed my papercut and can put it on the wall now. The silvery background is the inner surface of a Tetra Pak and I think this looks just fine.

Catching Up

My hands do very badly at the moment, so only a few words today.

Last Week

... I exercised (or maybe tortured) them by making more textured dishes, that are going to be wall hangings, if they turn out alright. They are very flat and fun to make.

One of these has more than 750 indentations and the other one around 500.

On this smaller one I counted 150.

At the weekend

... I went to Berlin to see the great Paul Klee exhibition at the Neue Nationalgalerie. My arms loathe train rides, but the rave of colour and spending a day on art was worth it.

At the Pottery

... I held another glazing session.



Yesterday

... I was sewing a very simple felt coaster to move my swollen fingers.

My mother wants to have some because the undersides of my ceramics sometimes are a bit scratchy, although I always make them very smooth. This happens when tiny crumbs of clay get attached to the surface in the kiln during firings.

Gift Wrapping

I rather enjoyed wrapping presents for Christmas this year. I wasn't very satisfied with the first ones I decorated with some doodles, but then I remembered the gift wrap ideas I saw at Bugs and Fishes and was inspired by the paper snowflakes. (Look also at this lovely winterly curtain!) I changed it to square designs that look quite folkloric in my opinion and used almost 30 year old gummed coloured paper, that has a backside like stamps. (As you can see, I never throw things away! I'd like to know if something like this still gets produced.) It still was incredibly sticky and worked really well and I had fun like a little child!

The "Eleanor" Plate

Remember when I stencilled this plate? It was inspired by Eleanor Hendriks' snowflake tutorial and I'm very happy how this turned out. The pattern doesn't look as smeared as I assumed and the contrast of the colours works so well.

The dark parts are a bit streaky, so I guess the slip should be prepared less diluted when I try this again and I'm itching to give it another try!

Sea Urchins

Many, many beautiful sea urchin shells from the Croatian seashore. The fabulous Juliane collected them in her holidays and gave them to me.
I'm in wonder!

This one still has what I think must have been its mouth or maybe the opposite.

An inside view.

She even brought along some that still have their spines.

The spines are attached to joints.

Some broken sea urchins.

Sea shells with iridescent mother of pearl inside.

She also gave me heaps of wonderful big broken and quite smelly snail shells that look like they're a thousand years old. I haven't taken pictures of these yet.

A huge THANK YOU goes out to Jule and Katja who dived for and collected these treasures!

In the Woods

Some impressions...

These are lichens.

Harvest Time

This week I was still knocked out by the pinching and carving of my three little bowls (How sad is that?!) and the wet and cool weather didn't help either. Sometimes I feel overwhelmed by melancholy. I'm reminded of the damp, frustrating months of last winter and how miserable I felt in my pains. So I tried to recover and to relax, skipped my class (and still don't know how the glassy stuff turned out), did no crafting at all, but got a lot of inspiration by nature.

Today there was bright sunshine, yet it's very autumnal, also on my balcony. I plucked the little pumpkin because there was no green leaf left on the plant. I love those stripes. Even my green glazed pottery matches them perfectly and looks so natural.

I also harvested the sunflower. The seeds make such a beautiful hypnotic pattern I don't like to destroy.

This is my new heather. (It sits in one of those folded pots, that I like so much and take as an example to try myself.) I've killed my old one by excessive watering. I'm so used to give my tomatoes and peppers a proper amount of water, that I didn't realise that I drown the poor heather. I hope it can recover, but it looks very bad.

The heathers in the woods are blooming as well. (Is there a better smell than the smell of mossy forests?) I was out collecting mushrooms and found 1.110 grams of chanterelles, yellow boletuses and bay boletes (Those English names sound weird. I just had to look them up. It's Pfifferling, Steinpilz and Marone in German.) They made a great meal! They not only taste good, they also look good. Look at those gills!