This is the second core formed vessel I made in Laurie Nessel’s workshop at the Mesa Art Center I had an idea of making a vessel that was whorled and striped like the planet Jupiter.  The ivory came out brighter in contrast to the red than I had anticipated, and the eye looks a little creepie than I had anticipated, but it does stand.

When I was cleaning the iron out of this (part of the process) I got a little enthusiastic with my scrubbing and accidentally broke it.   I glued it back together, but it made me afraid of cleaning the other one.

On this one I used the Duncan “French Impressions” glaze/paste underneath the low fired glazes.

I bought some glaze/paste called “French Impressions” by Duncan that I hoped would create the same effect as the tinted slip trail, yet not have to be done at the greenware stage.  The bottle said nothing about whether it had to be done under or over the glaze, so I tried it both ways. Equal success.

This one has the “French Impressions” impasto/glaze stuff over the low fired glaze.

To make this design, I used B-mix clay and a slab roller. Then I tinted some b-mix slip with black stain and used a jacquard bottle to trail the lines.  It is neither easy nor the best technique.

The angel statue image was dramatic enough that it felt done with an orange and a blue butterfly (the cut-out and the stamp) to make the front and back of the covers cohere stylistically.

I had the inside of the crow from the stencil, so I adhered it to the cover, hoping it would serve as a focal point.  Unfortunately, it got lost in all that black, so I did the spiral design with red paint marker.  Then, to make sure the edges didn’t buckle from the glue, I laid wax paper over it and put a weight on it. Uh oh. The edges of the crow stuck to the wax paper, and lost some of their culture. I”m not sure if this is a bug or a feature, but I’m leaning toward the former. Not yet sure how to fix it, but I may yet tinker with this.

The metal work on the back was to satisfy my “stuff for the fingers to feel” urge. I started with medium weight aluminum sheeting, and looked up latin phrases on the internet. I think this one means something like “I strive to improve.” Latin isn’t just for webtemplates anymore!  After I found a good, short, phrase, I picked a font from my calligraphy book and used my incising tools to impress the metal.  The glue on the back should keep it from flattening too badly, I hope.  The inks are alcohol-based inks, good for non-porous surfaces.  I believe that with time the ink will get rubbed off everywhere but the letters.

I began this book by putting black gesso on to some printed calico in what I hoped were random patches.  Once that was done, a book on photo transfers inspired me to attempt to transfer a photo. I found a photo of a landscape, and transferred it onto the cloth using a thin layer of white gesso.  The colors were too bright and white for the mood, but a thin wash of color dulled it down. Sanding it dulled it down further.

The crow on the back is black gesso from a stencil i cut, highlighted with paint marker. I’m not sure what I originally planned to put in the rectangle.  By now I knew what the mood of this piece was, and I hoped to find text to write there. I’m a writer too, but I usually get very self-conscious using my own words on my pieces.  Shweta Narayan, a fine poet who happened to be a Clarion 2007 graduate with me, posted a draft of her poem “Epiphyte,” on her livejournal and graciously granted me permission to use it on this piece.

At one point in the poem, she references “bottle glass eyes.” so I used the bronze charm piece and a photograph of a dark child’s eye with an epoxy sticker.  Going through old toys we found one of those dynamo lettering tools, and I fed some copper tape through it (used for stained glass).  It looks like it says “elate,” but it doesn’t, not quite.  I love the copper color though, and think it suit well.

The end papers are flocked brown and black with a victorian design.

I originally made the base of this as a drum for my husband.  I made two, actually, but this one had too-shallow of a shape, so he said he wasn’t going to use it. I decided, that since I’ve been planning to make a fountain for a while, that I would use this to make a practice fountain.  For those who didn’t see the earlier post, it’s about 14″ high, and shaped like a birdbath except that it has a hole running from top to bottom.

My first step was to make a sphere. I made two, actually, in the same manner that my smiley balls are made: two pinch pots adhered at the lip and then smoothed. These got too dry to smooth out, so I sort of lathed them on the giffin grip, which means that they have a concentric circle pattern from several different ordinals.  I used shiny white glaze on one and kind of  a stoneware glaze (spodumene) on the other.  Our water is very salty, and anything that has water running over it gets a rime after a while.  Each of the spheres had inch diameter holes in the poles.  I ended up choosing the larger white sphere, because of the pleasing proportion with it to the base.

I chose a site for the fountain, then dug a hole to accomodate a plastic storage bin, sans lid.  The pump sits at the bottom.  On top of the storage bin lid I placed a metal grate, then some hardware cloth, and finally metal screen, each with holes cut to allow the plastic tubing to extend upwards.  I put the birdbath part on top, and threaded the sphere’s holes through the tubing.  I accidentally cut the tubing to exactly the right length.  Don’t count on happy accidents.

Once I’d cut a pipe to put the cord in, and buried it, my fountain was ready to fill.  One problem I didn’t anticipate was that the water seeped out underneath the sphere.  I thought I’d put a ring of foam as a gasket, but I couldn’t find any, so instead I used sheets of thin plastic.  This slowed down the seepage enough that the water filled the basin as I’d intended.

Since it seemed to be working fine, I started to cover the screen with river rocks.  These rocks were too heavy, and bowed it down alarmingly, so I just put them in a ring and used a handful of pea gravel to obscure the screen.

Next time I do a fountain, it will be a wall fountain, and it will be much more elaborate.