Chicken anyone?

My prototype chicken cooker fresh from the kiln and then fresh from the oven, it worked wonderfully.

To use, add broth, beer or wine to the center tube also add your herbs or seasoning, sit your chicken on so that it is standing up by inserting the tube in the body cavity and bake. The chicken will become infused with the herbs and flavoring and be very juicy.
I've decided to make the bowl part larger so you can add potatoes or veggies. This was a pretty big chicken, but I would like to have more room to add extra goodies.

Stamping

On a whim yesterday, I made this set. The tray is 10"x4" and the dishes are 3". I really like how these are coming along, now to pick a color...

This little piggy

100 years ago when I was in high school I learned how to do hand building with clay. I was never a big fan of hand building, but I do love to hand build when adding elements to a thrown piece.
Don't tell.... but I'm making a load of these piggy banks for my 3 nieces and nephew for Easter.
I'll be listing some in my Etsy shop too :o)

I thought it would be fun to just combine a few pictures into a little movie showing how this piggy bank was born and of course I had to insert silly music ;o)

Sometimes I slip

Where does the time go? I haven't updated this since... wow it's been over a month. Ok so I'll cut straight to it. Things have been so busy, well.... that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it ;o)
Since I last posted I had my 40th birthday (January 13th).
I've been busy making pottery stuffs, I hate to say pots, because I don't make many of those. But I did turn out some super cute cupcake plates. Cupcake plates are totally consuming my time, I love everything about them. I altered one to look like a flower, OH I should take a picture, I'll add that to my to-do list.

I've also been making some birdy cups in a few sizes just to see what size I like. I bisque fired them this week, now I have to decide what color glaze to use. I'm thinking red and blue? Well see...


I sometimes fool around with ceramic molds and do some slip casting. I have a mold for a vintage 1965 piggy bank mold, that honestly I really hadn't thought much about using at all, until I got this thought in my head...
Salt pigs are pretty popular, if you aren't familiar with what a salt pig is, it's basically a vessel that you keep salt in near where you cook. I'm a shaker girl myself but I thought, how funny would it be to have a salt pig that really looked like a pig? (google salt pig and you'll see what I mean, they don't look like pigs at all). I poured the mold a few times and made a couple salt pigs and honestly I didn't think they would sell, I listed one and within 2 days it was sold, I love that. Not only that it sold fast which was great, but I love that someone else loved it, that made my day. Here's a picture of the cutie.

Well I better get back to glazing, I'm glazing my first round of cupcake plates now. I'm so excited to see them finished.

My wild weekend

Ok so... I didn't have a wild weekend, but I had fun. Mike and I went to the Kmart in search of a new puzzle, we use to put puzzles together when our kids were little, some of our friends would come over and hang out and play along. I think it was more of an excuse to sit around and drink and laugh but in any event, we like it. So... of to Kmart we went, we returned with a super cute 1000 piece puzzle which we put together after dinner. Mike made his super yummy chili and I made cornbread in one of my cornbread cookers.

We worked on the puzzle until 1:30am and finally gave up. Mostly because maybe I had too much to drink. I usually don't drink, but we found this wine at a local winery that I really like and well... I was one glass short of finishing off the whole bottle!

(excuse the do' it was cold outside and I was wearing a hat lol)

(Hey! There's Mike!)

Just point and grunt

I woke up in a good mood, I'm not sure what happened. The day quickly has gone to crap and it's only noon! I tried to correct it and insert some good sugary mojo with a stop off at The Krispy Kreme for a doughnut fix, only to discover after I left that the lady waiting on me screwed my order up. How to you mess up a doughnut order? You don't even need to speak, it's a point and grunt process really, but I digress...

Trying once again to shake my bad mojo I headed for my studio / basementio thinking clay would fix me, clay fixes most bad moods because you are able to loose yourself for hours and think only of the clay.

Yup... that picture shows how that trip went, that would be a cornbread cooker and a teapot.


So on a more positive note, I've been working on lots of new things and using my new signature stamp that a friend made for me (thanks Pam!). Pam was sweet enough to make me 4-5 stamps, I fell in love with one in particular and have been using it to stamp all of my pottery.

Busy busy

No matter how careful I try to be while working it seems I wear clay on my clothes. I usually have my overalls on over top of my clothing but... I broke the buckle thing on one of my straps :o(
I've been busy producing and "testing". When I say testing it makes me feel a bit better when I screw something up, if it comes out ok then it wasn't testing... it was intentional ;o)
Here are a few shots of my most recent works