I think this is one of the smiley balls that I traded away for someone else’s pot.  This is the last of the smiley balls I had photographed, except the small ones.

Here’s another one of my smiley balls. I think I still have this one. I placed it near a fountain, hoping that it would eventually get damp enough to grow moss. So far it hasn’t, but then again, we do live in the desert. I bet it would make an awesome chia pet.

This is the last of the batch of mosaic tiles I made in this kiln load. The crawling design on the green tiles is from overfiring.  It is not intentional, but I’m going to pretend that it was.  I have so many of these that at some point I ought to think of a design that would incorporate them. Still not sure what would be the best way to showcase these yet.

The inlay technique has been used to awesome effect for centuries.  You create an incised design in a colored clay body, then add a slip in a contrasting color. When you scrape off the slip, the design underneath comes through in crisp detail.  I have never been able to make it work. For these, I used rubber stamps on Ward’s Red, then used the white cone 06 clay on top of it.  I’m sure I don’t have the right clay consistency, but I haven’t worked out the variables yet.

I saw a picture in a book of a tile mosaic that looked like a carpet made of leaves.  These are difficult in the same way that quilting is difficult–they take precision and a great deal of time.  To make the leaf vein pattern, I used a mulberry leaf.  The shapes are about an inch to an inch and a half long, and I cut them from a hand-rolled slab using a small set of cookie cutters.