I fell off the earth but baby I'm back!

My last blog post was in 2013, 6 YEARS ago! I had a grand baby on the way and guess what? He is 6 years old and he is fabulous. But wait... there is more! I have a 2nd grandson too. Let me just take a moment to introduce you to my boys.

John is 6 

                                  
                                                             

Daniel is 6 months

So this is where I have been spending my time over the past several years. They are the absolute joy of  my life. 

On another note, I sold my house a little over 2 years ago and purchased a house with several acres in the country. My pottery work has been on hold since John was born. Unfortunately the new house does not have a studio space for me to work, yet! Hopefully before the end of the year I will be back working in clay, I miss it.

2013, How did that happen?

Wow so it's 2013 and I haven't posted since October. There's a good reason for that I'm sure haha! Actually I've just been busy and still have a lot going on so here's a quick catch up.
1st and most importantly my grand baby will be making his appearance anytime now and because I am hopelessly in love already and have a severe case of grandbaby-itis and I find my self buying ridiculously cute shit like this dog.

Speaking of dogs, my 2 guys are doing great, they have company right now. I'm dog sitting for a while for my friends 2 dogs, they are cha-wennies (yeah I know lol) also ridiculously cute! But bad as all hell and in everything.

Oh I got my hair cut off last week

like 8 inches gone! 

I've been sewing, made grand baby a blanket. 

I had a pottery student for a day, hopefully he'll be back soon. 

That's the short version of the last few months. I'm back at work kind of, my studio is flooded again due to the crazy amount of rain we've been getting for the past week, so I get to clean up that horrible mess.
Well it's late, bed time for me.

OH!!!! My grandma name.... wanna know what it is? Yiayai which sounds like Yaya and I think that is the actual spelling I'm going to go with (Yaya). It's greek for grandmother, no I'm not greek but I don't think I'm a mom mom or a granny or a memaw either and I don't really like nana or meme or any of that grandma stuff so I picked Yaya the day after I learned I had a grand baby coming. Plus Yaya sounds fun and sweet and hey.... You tell me this picture doesn't have Yaya written all over it LOL

Let's face it...

I made a few faces. 

Oh wait... I was talking about terracotta faces! Not my silly face! 

I made a large press mold for the face itself. After I remove the face from my mold I decorate it. 

In the end I have these beautiful Garden Goddesses. They would be at home hanging on any wall or outside near your garden.

Love

May only Kindness cross your lips.

Have faith in the words you speak

I'll be listing these lovely ladies in the Etsy store tomorrow. 

Somebody That I Used To Know

I love his mouth. Is that weird?

The good, the bad and the ugly and...

It's been a while since I blogged, geeze so  much has happened I'm not sure where to begin. I have good and I have bad so I reckon I'll just start with the... bad? Ok so at the end of August we made a emergency road trip to Maryland after being contacted by one of my oldest and dearest friends Allison, that her dad had pancreatic cancer and stomach cancer and was given less than 2 weeks. Her dad Gordon was also my husbands high school teacher and really helped guide Mike into his profession Gordon always claimed that my husband was his favorite student ever and Gordon really meant a lot to him, he was Mike's mentor. Gordon passed away while we where there. My other bad news is my father in law has been diagnosed with Alzheimer's, I can't put into words how I feel, I love my father in law dearly and this just sucks. The other bad, well kinda good, but bad news is my mom had surgery yesterday on her leg, she's been walking around for over a year with a broken leg. Her original doctor put a rod in her leg after she broke it in a car accident, well he made the rod too long and her bone never healed. It's a mess. I tried to call her but haven't heard anything back which worries me, she lives in Florida so it's not like I can just stop by, but I know her husband would call if something was wrong. I'm sure she's probably just doped up and probably hating life right now. I hate waiting. But at least she'll be fixed.

Quick change of subject wanna see my foot? It's gross. Let me tell ya how I did this trick, I was carrying a load of laundry out to the garage, there is one step down into the garage and of course I couldn't see where I was going because I had my arms full of clothes and when I took the step down into the garage BAM! instant pain. I stepped on something but didn't know what, so I held my breath, limped over to the washer and loaded it and came back into the house before I looked at my foot. Well turns out that a plastic cover to something on our lawn mower with screws sticking up out of it was laying in the floor and that's what got me. The screw head was sticking up and when I stepped in it the screw bent and drove the screw head up into the arch of my foot which left me with a 3/4 inch wide gash which was equally as deep and boy did I struggle to hold it together. I irrigated it myself and cleaned it really well, it was pretty intense. In any event, it's healing pretty well, the bruising has finally gone away, the whole arch of my foot was bruised black and blue.
This is shortly after it happened (if you read my blog regularly you know I'm gonna show you my boo-boo's and if you don't read me regularly... guess what? I show my boo-boo's).

Ok so moving right along. 

******

Check this out, I can't tell you how much this picture makes me laugh when I look at it.

My Precious

OK So switching gears now that I've grossed you out. Wanna see what I've been working on? I've give you a peek. Here is one of the Berry bowls I finished trimming today.

And I did this bowl today. 

And here is a quickly peek at some boxes and soap dispensers drying out. 

I have projects all over my studio in the drying phase. I've switched what type of clay I use which kind of makes me nervous and I have 4 new glazes that I just mixed so that adds to my worry. Of course most all potters tell you to test before you glaze your pots. I'm one of those people that just says screw it, glaze everything and see what happens.
I also took a try at making Christmas ornaments on the wheel, here are 2 samples of what I ended up with.

Ok So now do you wanna know my really, really BIG news? 

Oh my gosh, I'm so excited I could bust.

In January I will have a new name. 

I'll still be Denise to friends and family 

and Mom to my kids

but in January I'll also be known as

GRANDMA!!!!  

and guess what else? 

It's a BOY!

Edible clay? Ooooo

My husbands birthday was a few days ago, anyone that knows me knows that I love birthdays (not my own of course haha), in my household we not only celebrate birthdays but we also do birthday eve and believe me, we all milk it for all it's worth. This year I got a little crafty with my husbands cake. Just to give you some background info, my whole family goes caving and my husband and oldest son are both on the cave and cliff rescue team for our county. Well obviously that's exactly where my mind went when I came up with this.

I wish you could see the sparkles :o( 

Caver resting against stalagmites

Cave accident! Call rescue! (haha you know I had to play with it)

 I mixed 2 cakes mixes and made the cake marbled, the caver and formations are made of rice crispy treats and covered in fondant. It was soooo yummy.

My hand has been giving me trouble lately, I tried to get a descent picture so you can see my knuckle.

That is a knot that has come up on my hand, it looks like another knuckle and hurts when I work too much with my hands or if I put pressure on it. I've had problems with that whole knuckle area of my hand since my unfortunate run in with a stubborn goat, he tried to head butt me and ended up pinning my hand against a pole. I've been trying to take it easy hoping that the knot would go down, no such luck.

I've hatched some new birdies!

It's been a while since I made any of these babies. I'm glazing them now and they will be fired in my next kiln load.

Back from vacation in one piece

Sitting on the beach in the dark reading a book with my headlamp on and suddenly out of the corner of my eye I see a sea monster that has come to kill me and drag me off to the sea monster baby nest so I can be shared. I jumped, my heart skipped a beat and then I discovered it was a tackle box and the shadow of my own foot. True story. Then I look up and notice I'm alone, the 3 guys that were with me left and went way down to the other end of the beach without telling me, or they may have told me and I completely blocked them out (I was blessed with the man gene that allows them to block out women when they are talking except in reverse, I have a bad habit of blocking out men and women and pretty much anyone that is talking to me especially when I get distracted by anything that moves or is sparkly. (Or it could be because I'm a really fast listener or be because I have the attention span of a grape). 

Totally me

I have a few rules in my "Denise rule book" I don't go into the ocean because I can't swim, well I can swim a tiny little bit, almost. I'm not scared of the water, I'm mostly scared of drowning in it or being eaten by something in it. I also don't usually turn my back to the ocean while I'm shell or sharks tooth hunting because I'm scared something will sneak up and grab me and drag me off to eat me, or because I've seen way too many scary movies, whichever. These are real fears of mine and I don't do swimming pools unless I can touch bottom. Well guess what, I totally swam in the ocean, well I snorkeled and swam, only had 15-20 mini panic attacks. I worked through it and swam! Better yet I found treasure! Sort of. I went snorkeling for sand dollars and I hit big time, it was awesome. I had an odd little fish stalk me for over an hour, it would just swim around me and check me out which made me nervous as all heck because I had the feeling he was all like 'here she is sharky... come get her'. Then I started to worry because I was pretty sure I was gonna get stabbed in the heart by a sting ray and they were basically laying on the floor of the ocean like IED's waiting for me to pass over them when I was snorkeling.

Notice the barb halfway up his tail, my brother caught this on his fishing line, I made/begged him to free it and he'll forever hold it against me :)

It didn't help that my brother caught a sting ray the day before (the one in the picture above is the one he caught and released) and you know that's  what killed Steve Irwin. I'm an ocean accident waiting to happen. So after the whole sea monster shadowy thing I'm like damn it! I should have a glass of wine, but at that point I'm so paranoid and freaked out about something that may or may not try to get me that I'm too scared to go up to the condo to get a glass. This is exactly why I should have a cabana boy.
So now that I have all that out of the way, my vacation was spectacular. I was on an island accessible only by boat for 7 days and nights, I was on the beach every night until 3-4am, I fished, I swam (for real! I totally swam, it was awesomely terrifying) I collected lots of shells, sand dollars and sharks teeth.

 I saw a manatee and 2 sea turtles that came up on the beach to lay eggs (which I stayed away from until after she laid her eggs and she was heading back to the water, then I took a few quick shots with my cell phone (no flash photography only a dimly lit head lamp because I didn't want to stress her out).

She was HUGE and absolutely gorgeous. 

umm what else? Oh I fed a great blue heron whom I named Uncle Melvin because he was all weird and shifty like I think an Uncle Melvin would be. 

Uncle Melvin (you have to admit, he looks a bit shifty)

I visited my mom (who lives like 30 minutes away from where I was) and I relaxed, I laid on the beach and got some sun and I had almost no cell phone coverage  at all. It was fabulous.

I thought these crabs were pretty

He was totally casing my shells or my shoe.

I've never seen a pompano (the fish picture below) before, so of course I had to play with it and torment my husband. (the fish was dead, which doesn't make playing with it any better but I think a live fish would have been freaked out being up that high. By the way, I don't like seafood so of course I didn't eat him. My husband, son and brother did though. Poor fishy.)

Hey uhhh buddy uhhh whatcha doing? 

My niece Taylor and I while visiting my momma, I look delirious, but I like this picture,  mostly because she looks like me and that pisses my sister off haha!  

Oh and the hat I'm wearing is hiding a big knot on my forehead, I walked into a large wooden beam and damn near knocked myself out before I went to my momma's house, maybe that's why I look delirious, it's just my concussion.