This is a picture of my front yard.  We used to have a lawn, but I killed it because I hate Bermuda grass with a furious passionate loathing.  In the summer, I let it go dead, but in the winter, I have a vegetable garden and I overseed with flowers. Last year I threw down California Poppy seeds, but this year, I added Flanders Poppies to the mix. That’s what you see here. The default is red, but after a few generations, they spontaneously mutate, so we have some that are white, some that are pink, and some that are red and white. I’m quite proud of them.  They have almost inspired me to take up photography seriously, but the rational part of my mind says that I have too many hobbies and interests as it is.

I made this core-formed vessel especially shallow so that I could have something completely vitreous to use as an inkwell.  I like how the turquoise and ivory colored glass work with each other. The inside still has rust from the steel wool used as the form, and I haven’t been able to clean it all out yet. I’m afraid of breaking it by scrubbing too hard.

This is a technique that I came up with to provide a raised surface design without the fuss of jacquard bottles and slip.  First I used a linoblock and cut a fish into it, trying to make it a simple line drawing as much as possible. Then I rolled out a slap about a quarter of an inch thick. When the tile was the desired thickness, I ran it through again on the same setting with the linoblock face down on the wet clay.  I have another design, that of a dragon, that I have yet to glaze.

The dots in the background are crystals from the glaze. It’s a specialty glaze.

This was another experiment with the Duncan “French Impressions” glaze that I just bought.  I’m not very proud of it, as one of the birds looks deformed.  Thought I’d post it anyway, as a…as a warning or something.

Maybe it will look fine from a distance.

This is another one of my tarot tiles. I have almost a dozen that aren’t yet glazed, but I’d made them just before my old kiln went on strike so the bisqueware is sitting in my cabinets.  They take quite a while to glaze, as you have to have three or in some cases four layers of glaze over each area.  I still don’t know what I’ll do with them.  They are high-fired clay that is not vitreous, so they won’t be terribly sturdy in the weather, and because of the raised surface, they need to be vertical instead of horizontal.