Around the place this week

Above: I have decided to use my market peg board as a temporary hallway gallery and apron hanger (until I bang the kitchen door into it and smash one of my mirrors).

 Above: In the bathroom with Tom Polo last Saturday.  Spring 1883 at The Windsor was such a treat!

Above: The kitchen climber is now long enough to tickle the pencil holding man, but he doesn't look very happy about it.

Above: Mirror painting day last Wednesday.  These will be in my Etsy shop next week (please note that some are already on hold).

Above: I think that cake mixes are a crock but painting this one was quite fun.

Above: Please note that my window exhibition at Craft Victoria will finish at the end of Tuesday August 26, a week earlier than was originally advertised.  Most unsold items will still be available through the Shop.

Have a fine Sunday!

Ceramics class: from the kiln

Above: the result of our slab-building exercise: a little house based on the strangely proportioned one below. My proportions are sadly not quite as exaggerated as they could have been. The red roof was also an abberation but I have grown to like it. And I still love the house below and might use it as part of something else one day.

Above: by the way, never bring any special books or pictures to ceramics class or they will end up as ratty as this.

Above: the result of our first exercise, coil building, where (as the name suggests) you make coils and then build them upwards, smoothing them with your little tools as you go. In the last hour of our last class, my strange shape decided to become a pointy babushka type object. I am trying to decide whether to add anything to her or not (using acrylic paints that is -- ssshhhh).

Above: the boy gendarme, who also starred in this previous post. My relationship with glazing is a fraught one. Basically I don't 'get' it and am too much of a control freak to leave the results of painting something with a strange thick substance that looks nothing like the colour that it purports to be on the jar to an oven that may or may not blow it up in the process of cooking it at well over 1000 degrees celsius.

But I still love making things out of clay. Maybe I will commit the ultimate ceramic traditionalist's sin and paint them using acrylic like I did many years ago in my TAFE class. Although this time if I am tut-tutted by the ceramic powers that be I won't care a jot now that I am a big girl.

Ceramics class homework 2: friend or foe?

Franz the Little Wooden Man isn't sure what to make of his somewhat more nuanced friend. At least Franz can stand up: his clay mate, whose belly is already heading southward as he poses for this photograph, is a case in point.
I'm really looking forward to my teacher's help on this one.

Ceramics class homework

I have played with clay from time to time, but I can't remember ever being given homework for a ceramics class. I like it. Somehow I imagined that you had to be in a special room in order to make things out of clay, so I've been pleased to discover that I can build little things in my own studio. Obviously getting them fired is another matter but I believe that my school offers an ongoing service. I must admit that I am a bit excited by the prospect -- it opens a creative door which had been shut for a while.

Above: the homework was to build a mask. Mine started off as a female but somehow had a gender re-assignment half way through and became a boy gendarme (he has since lost that shoddily built collar). Clay is stubborn like that, especially in the hands of someone who has barely touched it since 1994. I will paint it with one or two colours of glaze after it comes out of its first firing. Ceramics, colour and I have had a tenuous friendship, but that's a story for another time when I am in a darker mood.

For those in Melbourne: Northcote Pottery just off Lygon St in East Brunswick is highly recommended for all sorts of ceramics classes. Good value too.