Closer To Perfection

Not really perfect but closer to achieving the look I like -- weathered, mysterious, textured, ancient. This little guy is just about 6" high and is carefully packed away for our move.  The move?  Not yet but we are still packing stuff into boxes.  Where on earth did we acquire so danged much stuff?

Blog posts will be slim for a while but hang in there - we took 10 days off to go to New York City and Washington DC and do have some pictures and stories.   $14 for one little sandwich? Get real.

Where's Don?

Perhaps you were wondering why my blog posts have been so infrequent. Or maybe you didn't notice! The reality of it is that my Blog Wrangler and I have been getting ready to move. Stuff is everywhere and I have no idea where in the Everywhere anything is. These are some of the boxes we've put in storage at our new place because the new place isn't ready yet but the miracle of a potentially quick house sale set things rolling faster than we had EVER planned. We'll still be in Austin. More details once we actually get settled.

You probably won't see any posts for about a month, even though I have pictures of about 10 different pieces I have made. My Wrangler has said if it doesn't involve figuring out how to move from a house of 2700+ square feet (plus my garage studio) into a space that is 1300 square feet, then forget it. 

My New York friends probably think 1300 is big, but then they don't live in Texas, where size does matter.

Weaving My Story

When I got out of the Air Force the question was not Where to Go (I'm a native Texan, no question there) but instead What to Do? Susan was already finishing up getting a teaching certificate so I decided I would use the GI Bill money to get one also and we would both be Elementary school teachers. The counselors said that would be great, I could specialize in Grades 4-6 and Susan would be Grades 1-3 and it would make employment easy. 

They were right,  it was easy. I hadn't even finished the program before Susan and I were offered a team teaching job exactly as we had specialized, with the added bonus of free housing. The only hitch was that it was in McKinney, Texas, and the best way to describe McKinney is that it is 50 miles from a tree. We declined.

Susan taught for about half a semester and always says teachers are drastically underpaid. I never taught but that is another story for another day. Preview: It involves Arlo snarling in a kitty cage.

Backing up to school, the certification program required all sorts of Elementary eduction courses in order to give prospective teachers a broad background. We referred to them as Kiddie Lit, Kiddie PE, Kiddie Math, etc.

And of course there was Kiddie Art. My final project in that course was this wall hanging. Susan taught me the wavey stitch and I improvised the rest.  The Kiddie Art class was taught in the art building where all the real art students were and of course they sneered at us amateurs.  They were really ticked off when my piece was selected to be in the annual Art Student show.

Pod Peeps

I really get a kick out of making these Pod People or Penguin People or whatever you think they are. The ones above are high-fire glazed, each piece is less than 7" high.  The pieces below have been subjected to the raku glaze and firing and didn't turn out quite as successfully as I would have liked.  Shape and glaze, yes, but markings, no. I wanted a weathered, textured look and although I got the technique sort of correct I didn't "edit" down the texture markings the way I should have. I like raku firing because the results are relatively immediate, I enjoy the pieces that come out the way I want and take the other pieces as just another part of a learning experience.