Getting back into Potting

So Zips has enrolled me in the ceramics class that is offered at the local art museum downtown. I've been at it since last October, after a 15 year hiatus since undergrad art classes (!!). This means I've had 50# of clay (Laguna Speckled Buff Stoneware) and access to some glazes (not a great variety-- but enough to get my legs back under me).

My early attempts at even centering the clay went poorly. I experimented with the colors and consistencies of these new glaze colors. One of the first successes I had was throwing a bunch of small pots "off the hump" (this means making 6 to 10 tiny cup/bowls from the same larger piece of clay-- cutting each off and centering the top of the hump of clay that remained on the wheel to throw again), and then flipping those pots over to make Japanese furin wind bells. I love the green iron furin we purchased at the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. I love how round their forms are, and how often poems and prayers are written on the paper tag that catches the wind.

My first three were experiments in scale and in figuring out how I would construct them-- how to hang them and where to install a clapper (which are actually cuttings from last year's Christmas tree branches that I'd cut into firewood!) . The glazes here are Robin's Egg and Shino

The next ten or so, I was ironing out shapes, experimenting with looping handles and cutting the holes into the furin body so that it was all a single continuous piece.

And I got a bit more experimental. The bright blue below is Amaco Cara Bien Stroke & Coat underglaze striped over light blue Shino, and blue Shino speckled with Gun Metal Gray (which has turned out to be my favorite combo!)

 

Zips called dibs on this one immediately. I haven't even had a chance to put a clapper into it to make it a proper bell.

Because the clay class has always been meant as a kind of stress management art therapy for me, and because I've grown rusty and out of practice in the years it's been since I've worked with clay, I've had to really work at allowing myself to focus only on throwing clay when I'm there. I get self-conscious, I lose confidence. The other folks who are in the classes seem like they've been doing this forever. I watched a guy make a huge, lovely bean pot in the time it took me to simply center my hunk of clay the size of my fist! Another guy pulled a chips/salsa platter, a young woman makes enormous, shapely bowls and planters. And since I feel my blood pressure increase and my confidence plummet as I feel my meager skills draining out of my body, I decided to stay small and threw a set of tiny bowls.

And I decided to purchase my own glazes (since they have such a limited, weird array there), so this is blue Shino with the Gun Metal Gray flecks (I love this!)

 This is light green Shino

This is light blue Shino

And this is the blue Shino painted on the outside (it was rather thin, so it turned out a nice, even dark brown), and Tamale Red Stroke & Coat inside. This is great, since it's a vibrant red while also being food-safe.

So this is some of my wares. Not everything, of course. I'm also giving and have already given a couple of pieces away. I felt weird that the very two pieces I made I gave to my parents for Christmas. I didn't know what else to get them, and they were very small and very wonky. I hope my parents understand that I wanted to give them something my hands brought into the world, however imperfect. I'm afraid it just communicated "I'm poor and I have no idea what you want."

My favorite pieces of them all (so far) are this trio of low Japanese-style bowls. The shallow, rounded shape is actually inspired by a set of inexpensive dishes I bought in Japantown in San Francisco. In any case, again with the blue Shino and the Gun Metal Gray. I think this first one was with the communal glaze bin at the art museum-- it has a lot of lovely inconsistencies in the dark blue that create a lovely galactic effect.

My subsequent efforts to duplicate this with the blue Shino that I bought are nice too. But that first little bowl is my favorite of everything I've made. Here's a larger bowl:

As I write this, I have a ton of greenware drying. That will need to be glazed. Something like 7 small plate/bowls, 4 large bowls, 2 jars, on top of 4 other large bowls that are already bisqued, and a small hunk of leftover clay that I'm going to hand-build things with until I run out. Zips demands a likeness. I may have to do the rest of the animals as well.

Most of the other folks who've been in class with me are very generous with their expertise and with their encouragement. I've learned tricks and gotten ideas for projects and how to layer the glazes they have. I'm probably going to keep purchasing my own (oooh! professional!). I already know I want to buy a white glaze and maybe a speckled yellow one. When these classes pick back up in the fall, I'll probably be there again. I've got to give better Christmas presents this year!

Green Grass in the Land of Xeriscaping

Well, technically, our backyard has "zeroscaping"-- xeriscaping in the front, but zero in the backyard. It's a major drawback of the house we currently rent. The backyard of the first house we rented here in Southern New Mexico was the single reason we chose that house before we ever set foot inside. It had a grand eucalyptus tree, it had rosemary shrubs dripping down the top tier into the lower half of the yard. It had white and pink oleanders blocking the neighbors to the east. It had roses. We spent so much time in that backyard. We loved it and miss it.

But those owners wanted to move back into their house, so we packed everything up and moved literally one mile down the road. Now our backyard consists of lots and lots of hot, pointy gray rocks. And our midwestern cat and dog babies miss having a yard. We resorted to container gardening, and have potted tomatoes. We built a raised bed for baby red potatoes last year and finally decided to re-purpose that raised bed for a yard!

In fact, Zips talked me into purchasing not one but FOUR pieces of sod, even though one is all it takes to fill the raised bed. So I filled that bed, then filled whatever other container I could find. I have 3 wine crates, several terra cotta planters (one is now in our bathroom so Zips and Bijoux can have nibbles), and a 4x4 "yard" on either side of our back patio.   

 We even found mini garden gnomes to stand watch over the grass boxes.

The babies seem content, even blissful. And there are enough boxes allow each of them to have their own personal spot.

Since they're all in the shade of our patio and the rock wall that is closest to our house, the grass is always cool under paw, soft to lay in, and edible. 

"It'll do for now, human."

New Holiday Traditions: Crafty Exchange!

By the time you're reading this, my good friend L will have received her new quilt that I based off of  Susan Beal's "Bright Furrows" design in Modern Log Cabin Quilting. This, after a long facebook exchange where a former student of Zips' posted a link to the "Bigger on the Inside" shawl pattern with the note "if anyone can do this, you can!" Being a huge new Doctor Who fan, and not a knitter, I knew when to call for help. So I appealed to L, who is a knitter, and we struck a deal (after much enthusiastic "really!?" and many excited exclamation marks): I quilt her a lap quilt, and she knit me a cool TARDIS shawl!

Zips helps me iron the seam allowances away from the center square.

L gave me her fave colors: robin's egg blue, sable brown, and maybe some red-orange. I ran with it, and got a stack of quarters to work with.

And after piecing the quilt top, was left with several spare log cabin squares and a ton of leftover 1 3/4" strips, mostly in the blue and brown (it's one of those cut-as-you-chain-sew kind of patterns). So I went nuts with these in improvising the back of the quilt. I was really happy with how it turned out-- it turned into a kind of reversible quilt! 

 Here's the finished back (most of it, with Zipper patrolling the perimeter).

And the finished front of it too. Much more logic to the arrangement. Look at 'em furrows! 

I sent it off yesterday, and L should receive it tomorrow, just in time for Christmas. I can't wait to hear from her when she does get it, and I'm holding off publishing this particular post until I know she's already laid eyes on it. And you can bet I'll be posting pics when I get my hands on the shawl she's knitting for me. I can't wait! I'm really excited that someone other than my immediate family will be (hopefully) enjoying the fruits of my labors. I hope I have another crafty exchange with someone else soon. This was really fun!

White Elephants, iEnvy, and Other Holiday Things

I'll admit it. I'm a PC. I don't have an iPhone, and iPad, an iPod. Never have. Not sure I want one. It seems like switching from being right handed to left handed (or vice versa). All my music is on the amazon cloud, not iTunes. Like anyone else, I love the slick, feather weight, intuitive neato features of all of these iGadgets. I just don't have any and can't afford them and don't know if I'd ever want to make the switch. I've looked at the Kindle Fire thingy, and I don't know if I need one. I think I'm just working out iEnvy.

This doesn't stop me from going to a holiday party with a "white elephant" gift exchange where a contingent of the attendees do that thing where they bump their iphones together and whip out their ipads so they can shuffle through photos and play Angry Birds while everyone looks on with envy. Last time we got together, two of them set up their talking tom cat and talking ben the dog face to face and they repeated what the other said in their funny voices.

The gift exchange rules is under $20, and fair trade, homemade, or re-purposed. I decided to whip up an iPad cozy. Even better, I decided to whip up an iPad cozy that looks like an iPad!

I had to extract my felt from under Zipper, who has not moved from this stack (and is nestled in a ball in the same spot as I type this)

And did a lot of google image searching for the physical dimensions of ipads-- (and I'm not sure if they have a 1 or a 2!). And what the app icons look like. I'm also not sure what apps my friends have or would probably have. So I settled for Skype, Angry Birds, Safari, and the camera and photo album apps. I would've done the notepad, but didn't have a light yellow or brown. Same for the YouTube app-- that looks like a brown old-fashioned tv.

Stitching them on helped to add details.

I added a battery, and wanted to add more details to the top row, but decided to stick with simplicity

The cardboard inside is (hopefully) cut to the actual dimensions of the device itself. Secretly I hope the 3 ipad owners fight over who gets to take it home.

We figure this is the closest we'll ever come to owning one, but even holding the cozy makes me really wish I had something to stick inside it. Or maybe this is just iEnvy working on me again!

Starting the Holidays Early & Tarte au Citron

After having such a rough fall semester, Zips is feeling even more festive than usual. We've got our Christmas tree all set up. I've got orders to climb up on the roof to string lights before the week is out. Mixes of contemporary and classic holiday songs are blaring from every room. We even splurged on a light-up flamingo with a festive red scarf for the front yard (it suits the Southern New Mexico climate. Her name is Babs Johnson.) Zips found an amazing pinecone garland from West Elm, but it sold out almost immediately.

So I took it upon myself to put something together that might make her happy and approximate how cool this would've looked. There are a few pine trees on campus, so we drove out there and filled two shopping bags with the nicest ones we could find (and only when I dumped them out on my living room floor did I think about the possibility that critters might live in them!). I tied them in slip knots to some jute twine and ended up with about 14 feet of it! (hey the West Elm one is only 6 feet!) Now that I have this down, I should go looking for acorns too!

I put the leftover younger pine cones into a glass bowl for decor too!

Meanwhile, we've been growing several scrawny citrus plants for more than a year now. We've got a kumquat tree, several lime trees, a satsuma tree, and a dwarf Meyer lemon tree that has finally borne some tiny Meyer lemons! They're lovely, very tart, and floral. We had four ripe ones at once, so Zips suggested we do something special with them. In that same Good Housekeeping, there's a recipe for a simple lemon curd. So we decided to half it and make some mini Meyer lemon tarts with our baby lemons! From scratch!

Tarte au Citron:

1/2 c. sugar

1/3 c. fresh lemon juice

1 Tb. fresh lemon zest

3 Tb. butter

2 eggs

**You should prep and bake your tart crust beforehand and let it cool. I use a 1/3 c. shortening +1/3 c. butter + 2 c. flour recipe. Baked 2 mini-tarts crusts for about 15 minutes at 400.**

In a saucepan, melt the butter with the sugar, lemon juice and zest. In a bowl, whisk the eggs. Once the lemon mixture is melted/dissolved/incorporated, spoon a bit out and whisk it into the egg bowl. Spoon a little more in and whisk (in order to warm the eggs up a little). Pour the eggs into the saucepan and heat over low heat, stirring continuously, until the mixture thickens (about 15 minutes).

Then I poured the lemon curd into the tart crusts. I cannot wait to eat these! I'll wait until tomorrow, but it might be the first thing I eat on Thanksgiving morn!

Happy Holidays!

Back to Getting Crafty

I can't believe it's been more than two solid months since I've posted anything. I'll have to compensate with plenty of fun projects and delicious treats. I've spent most of the today working on holiday decor -- driving past the local garden store to see if Christmas trees are in (they are), if I can have one (not yet), and figuring out how to stave off my desire to put replace orange and autumnal decorations with red and green winter ones. Zips spied a fun project in a Good Housekeeping magazine-- a simple reindeer head made from corrugated cardboard.

I'd seen more complicated ones everywhere from Urban Outfitters to instructables.com.

So I decided to come up with my own-- pairing it with Zips' immense love of classic Rankin Bass holiday videos. We have some cardboard boxes and newspapers in the recycling bin, so I made my own template for Rudolph's head, gave him a cross-piece for his ears and muzzle, and his mature antlers (more distinguished!).

I'm thinking of draping a wreath or some evergreen garland around where his neck meets the wall.

I'm happy with the way it turned out, and that I can post it in a rather central location by the front door. Next up? In addition to making Zipper's famously fortified rum balls for the end of the semester party, we're going to try out some spiced rum balls. And maybe something new for Thanksgiving? Mmmmm... Pie? Homegrown Meyer lemon curd? We'll keep you posted.

A Sad End to my New Quilt

This has already been the craziest winter I've experienced in a while. In the fall I taught four classes while writing and finishing my dissertation. I drove 1600 miles cross country for my dissertation defense, and then AGAIN for my graduation. For the remainder of my winter break, I did very little aside from eating, watching movies, and getting back into quilting (modern quilting). The two trips and the expense of participating in commencement and buying a very serious-looking diploma frame embossed with the university logo (hey! how many Ph.D.'s am I gonna get?) forced us to have a modest Christmas and I wanted to make something nice for my parents gift. So I went through all my books, scoured the internet for a good-lookin', do-able pattern and found this tutorial for a quilt called Tunnel Visions, a nice simple pattern with measurements I could tweak for my crib-sized batting. So I pared it down to 20 blocks (5 across, 4 down), pulled out some leftover off-white squares and triangles from my first quilt, and cut some corresponding colors.

As it is here, all laid out, is how I had wanted it. I never anticipated I could mess it up. The darks and lights and the sort of three-D box repeating pattern makes sense to me. I even carried the pieces square by square to the machine, and row by row, so I wouldn't mess it up.

But no sooner did I start sewing than I started messing up my own plans. I messed up the positioning of the middle 1/3 of the blocks in an entire row. I sewed one row together vertically instead of horizontally, I sewed the blocks together backwards. Everything. Probably compounded with the fact that I was going to gift this to my meticulous mother! I just kept going and eventually had a quilt top that was (mostly) as perfect as I could get it.

Of course the fun part of quilting is making the top. The rest of quilting-- the actual "quilting" part is where everyone stalls (including me). I suck at basting. I'm too impatient (like my baking skills!). Zipper and Mini love to chase the tail of whatever thread I'm using, making all of my careful smoothing and taping and un-bunching of the layers completely useless.

But I did it. I made it. I finished and did the binding and made up my own quilting style.

Here's Bijoux enjoying its luxurious, colorful comfort under his paws.

When I presented my parents, who live three hours away, with my freshly finished quilt, a gift, after all, for Christmas, my dad shrugged and suggested my mom would probably be the one to use it, since she's the one who lounges under blankets on the couch (let alone brightly colored ones). While both of them were standing there, I self-deprecatingly told them not to look at the back, since that's where its pucker-y imperfections are the most visible. They promptly looked unfolded it and looked primarily at the back. Then my mom asked if I had washed it yet. I hadn't (I just finished it the night before). She took it, folded it back up, and put it in the laundry hamper in their bedroom.

Zips has half a mind to drive up there and get it back. I'm just going to keep sewing one for myself instead. It'll be even better, and more perfect. And I know Zips will love it and appreciate my hard work every day.

Quilting in the New Year

I've just discovered I fit into a category: Modern Quilter. This is an actual term. A glance at my list of crafty bloggers there on the side will give you an idea of what that entails. Mostly non-traditional forms, creative patterns, lots of bright colors with solids. And the celebration of a prevailing aesthetic of "wonkiness." Yay! (this means my inability to sew in a straight line will not deter me!)

For the past couple of years, all I want for my birthday is a gift card from the fabric store. Since my birthday is in late November, this gives me a chance to stock up on supplies to keep me busy through the holiday season. (one year I gave my parents handmade bathrobes and pajama pants and something like pencil cases for Christmas, thinking they would cherish gifts sewn by their daughter. I'm still not sure they realize I made them... they never said..)

This year, I didn't have a chance to buy fabrics until after the holiday, but I've blown through my fifty bucks, mostly in pre-cut quarters. I stacked them up with some of my leftovers from previous projects-- I like the spectrum! Oh the possibilities!

The local Jo-Ann's here is rather small and always packed, so just grabbing quarters gives me the chance to just grab a bunch of different bright colors I like and GO. And I got queen-sized batting. I'm excited. I am also the proud new owner of Boo Davis's Dare to be Square Quilting. I have a couple of cream and taupe fitted sheets that we no longer use, so I've had my eye on them to cut 'em up and work them into a quilt (I've also saved a lot of beloved pajama pants that I've worn literally to pieces...I'm thinking jammies and sheets used to make a quilt that I will continue to sleep under has a nice poetic quality).

I was initially going to make the "Does Not Compute" robot quilt for my first project for the new year, but fell in love with the look and name of the "Two Left Feet" pattern. So I cut and stacked the 304 pieces---
And started putting them together, one by one. This was mind-boggling because each of the 20 major blocks was TOTALLY different, but also because the colors of the one in the book were blue, gold, and brown. My dominant colors were red, blue, and "other" (green/yellow/orange). So for all the blue pieces in the pattern, I subbed in my reds. For the book's golds, I used my blues. This got REALLY confusing when I would look at a blue strip in the pattern and a blue strip of fabric in my hand and wonder what I was doing next...
But I made it through-- I think I started cutting blocks on Dec. 30 and finished sewing the rows together on the 4th-- and now have a great quilt top... that Zips won't get off of.

After I spread it out on the bed to take this photo, she parked it (as you see here), and then tuckered down and stayed there all night. Then all day the next day.

I'm glad she likes it. I worried when I was picking the colors that with all the red and blue and white, it would look patriotic-- but I think the blues are more mediterranean and the overall effect of the different fabric patterns is kind of Japanese. I'm going to use one of the taupe sheets and some leftovers to piece together the back of the quilt-- then comes the tedious sandwiching, machine quilting, and binding. I think I may do the pj pants mini-quilt before that happens. (to get back into the groove of quilting and binding before a queen-sized project) Hopefully before school starts next week!