Everyone seems to really love my smiley balls. I’ve ended up giving away over half of the ones I’ve made.  I wanted to have some to give to friends I’m going to visit in the spring, but carrying full-sized ones in my luggage wouldn’t do, so I planned to make small ones.

These weren’t as easy to sculpt as I thought.  Like the doll heads for my faeries, it’s hard to not damage the part you’ve already done while putting pressure on it to create the next part.  I made a couple dozen of them anyway.

Second hardest part–glazing them.  Here’s a picture of a tool I made to hold them while waiting for the glaze to dry.

It’s two forks duct-taped to a champagne cork, with a rubber band for tension.  It works fairly well. I just wish I had four or five of them.

I bought this pot specifically to re-pot a gardenia plant I have in my front yard.  I thought about using tile mosaics, or glass piece mosaic, but my mosaic-tile production wasn’t coming along fast enough so I decided to glaze it instead.

I’m always startled by how patchy the glazes come out.  Even when I take extra care to make three even coats, it never seems to come out the way I think it ought to.  If I could go back in time, I might consider using underglazes and a clear overglaze instead.

I wanted some words around the top, but I don’t like the way that English words can dominate a piece of artwork, so I looked on the internet for something in Latin. I found this phrase: saepe creat molles aspera spina rosas.  The translation was something like “Sometimes flowers come from thorns”.  I tried to calculate how much space each letter would take, and divide the rim evenly, but I re-figured it so many times that by the time I started drawing the letter outlines, I confused myself with the surfiet of pencil marks.  The first word, “saepe” took up more than its alloted space, and in an effort to conserve space, I made the As smaller in the subsequent letters. Still, I didn’t have enough space for the last word, so instead, I drew a picture of a rose.

I drew the prickly pear using black wax, using some photos I took last April as a reference.  I debated whether or not to add shadow and highlights, and once I remembered what a nuisance low-fire glazes are, I decided to simplify it.  I did use three different colors for the flowers.  Here’s one of the photos I used for reference.

I think many people would admit that the prickly pear flower is stunning. The fruit is equally pretty. I don’t know if I got many photos of the fruit this year, but we should have more in June.

For the spines, I used the “French Impressions” which is something like a slip, I think.  I only had white, black, brown, and red. If I had light green, that would have been the best color for the thorns.

I had so many of these, I didn’t want to put them all on my blog at once.  Now they are placeholders for different photo sessions.

I don’t know what that hair is, but it might be cat hair.

This is the last poppy plate.  Why poppies? Do I have some fascination with them?  No, not really, but since they grow very well, I have plenty of photographs, and I know what they look like.

This was the first pumpkin I made at the workshop I attended last Saturday. Many of us had trouble getting good grooves using the optic mold, because it cooled the glass down so quickly we couldn’t blow it out hard enough.  The grooves on this look good, mostly because it stayed small. It’s about six inches in diameter.