Once I finished the silk screen, I wanted to do a proof print to see how it turned out. I use block printing ink for this, as I have a lot of it in different colors.  Since I didn’t want to do it for nothing, I printed the crows onto some blank notecards I’d bought at Michael’s at the huge sale I gorge myself at every Thanksgiving. Now I have a small set of printed notecards, and I also could figure out where the issues were with the silk screen.

For example, you may not be able to tell by looking at this photo, but the beak has a tiny dot at the end of it, and the claws seem to be truncated. On the tee shirts, I touched this up with a brush, but on the cards, I just left them.  The last time I did crow silkscreens, I had a problem with the image not showing up very well, but this time I just did an extra flood sweep with the squeegie to make sure that enough ink went through the screen.

This is kind of a weird picture, because it’s a selection of the tee shirts that I silkscreened my crow onto. I’ll post pictures of the crow later, a close up and some cards that I did.

This is actually a new image, not the same crow that I did earlier. I had done the earlier silk screen, but wanted to use the silkscreen for another project, so I washed off all the resist. Sadly, the screen turned out to not be large enough for the other project, so I cleaned it for naught. I ended up doing another silkscreen on that silk, which I’ll talk about in another post.

Fortunately, my dad had a hand-made silkscreen frame he’d made for printing decals for his model airplanes. His silk had resist on it that was probably ten years old, so I had to buy a length of new silkscreen silk, which was fine by me. New silk is better than used silk, because sometimes not all the resist comes off.

To make this crow design, I traced a proof of the crow I’d silkscreened earlier. I traced it twice, one facing right and one facing left, and then painted over both of them with drawing ink. The resist overlapped more than I wanted, and one of the birds got ruined, but this one was still mostly usable. After I was done, I printed crows on everything that didn’t have a crow on it, including some new shirts I got on sale at Target. I also printed in red ink on my dark tee shirts, because the black didn’t show up. It took the better part of two weeks to silkscreen everything, because I did both sides. This isn’t even all of the shirts, because some of them were in the laundry.

I had a bunch of clay and wanted to make something easy, so I decided to make fake rocks. I started by thumping the lump of clay against a tree in a random pattern. After that, I put it on the wheel and carved out a little hole. I thought if I let it dry really, really slowly, I could fire it solid, but Bridget disagreed, so I ended up hollowing it out by cutting a flap and bending it back. You can sort of see the lines where I cut it, but only if you know where to look. Underneath, it looks like there ought to be a flap to hide a key, except that there isn’t.

I’ve had this terra cotta pot under my studio table for just about a year, waiting for the project I wanted to do with it.  Finally, I decided that I needed a pot for some succulents, so now was the time.

I started by coming up with a short phrase to put around the lip. This is really hard for me, despite being a writer, because nothing seems good enough to immortalize in ceramic.  The phrase reads “Let the sun shine, the Earth bursts forth with life!”  I got the letter spacing better this time, because I drew out the length of the circumference of the pot lid on scrap newsprint, and therefore had a rough estimate of the space requirements for each word. I used the french liner raised slip to outline each letter and then began to apply the low fire glaze.

Why do I always forget how *($^%# time consuming those %^$#$%! low fired glazes are?  It probably took me four hours just to glaze the rim, and it’s not even as even as I wanted it.  At least listening to “This American Life” while I paint makes the time pass swiftly.

After I fired the pot, I started to design the tile mosiac.  I used a stencil of art deco  flower designs from a book I’ve had forever and enlarged it for the flower design.  I cut the petals out of clear glass and used acrylic medium to paste some really cool art paper onto the back. After the acrylic dried, I applied more on the back. Then I cut out around the glass with a razor blade.

I laid the flowers down on my sketch of the surface area, and went through the stained glass I had to decide on colors. I have a nice collection of stained glass, but becuase I got them in a bulk purchase from a non-standard location, they’re all opaque hand-made art glass. Ridiculously expensive when you buy it most of the time, but I got an incredible discount. Ironically, I don’t like it much. I prefer cathedral glass.  Still, the blue was nice, and I had several different colors of it that resembled one another, so I cut out chunks. The chunks are about half an inch square.  I cut the stems out of a light green glass.  When I was done, I realized that I needed more to fill the middle area, so I cut out the leaves from dark green glass.

For the bottom, I went through the tiles I’d made earlier. You can see some of them on this site.  I wanted to use the leaf tiles on the flower stems, but they didn’t look right. I have a lot of the circle tiles, not because they work well in the design (I think they’re hard to use) but because they’re easy to make.  I think that looked okay.

I probably spent about eight to ten hours on this project, including mastic and grouting. (It took at least an hour just to clean the grout off the tiles.)  Am I happy with it? No.  It doesn’t look as colorful as I wanted it to.  I think that black grout would have helped. I should have used an opaque glaze on the rim.  The blue squares are too big, and I couldn’t fit them as tightly as I wanted to.  Also, the succulents I bought are in tiny containers, so I put a different plant (a piece of columnular cactus) in there instead.

Still, it holds a plant, so it’s not a complete loss.

This looks a lot like a smiley ball without a face, doesn’t it?  I wanted to do something as close to a sphere as I could manage, just because it’s pretty easy and it’s sometimes nice to have a heavy ball to roll around in your hands. I coated it with red iron oxide (as I did for the freaky rabbit sculpture) too.