yarn bowl

Here is a cool idea for the knitter/crocheter in your life.  I can see how handy this could come in... I hate it how my yarn is always arollin' across the floor, collecting lint and dog hair.  A smart idea and a simple project:

Tim See: an excellent online resource for throwing demo videos.

I love Tim See's pottery... it is so zany and unique, and at times remarkably, technically precise.  Aside from being an awesome potter, he also does a series of very clear, well-explained throwing demonstrations online.  His website is an excellent resource.

Here is a link for beginning throwing videos.
and here is one that focuses on more advanced throwing techniques.
Finally, if those aren't enough to whet your whistle, check out his youtube channel here.

a few lovelies for the kitchen.

I have been browsing the internet for some pottery inspiration and stumbled across these gems on etsy.

I really love the pomegranates. But who doesn't love a ceramic pomegranate? (I totally just had to spell check that word).

my big fat pottery studio mess.

May as well start somewhere, and since this is a blog about, well... mainly ceramics, let me show you what I have been up to lately:

 

this is the space sometimes referred to as the Northwest Campus' Ceramics Studio

 

This is what it looks like after being the headquarters for the remodel.

This is what I am spending all my spare time on lately.  I am supposed to start teaching class in here next Monday.  Yipes!

I can't blame the remodel crew for all the mess, although I did clean up a lot of their crap. Many of us potters are pack-rats.  You never know what random object may just turn out to be the perfect tool for _____project.  When you have 12-16 pack-rats each semester over the course of five or ten years... you end up with a lot of random, ahem... stuff. This is kind of the story of this pottery studio I have inherited. Unfortunately, there is not enough space to house this clutter.

So I have been trying to go through this random stuff and get rid of what has passed over from useful possibility to just plain junk.

You wouldn't believe some of the treasures I have un-troved in here.  A few highlights:

a plastic cuckoo clock with a mouse that pops out instead of a bird,

4 shop vacs (all in various stages of functionality)

5 LARGE boxes of unclaimed, unfinished projects

2 more large boxes of ULPTs (unidentified little plastic "thingies")

3 shoes, none of them matching

A bag full of moldy horse hair

8 butane torches (2 of them still working)

250 cookie cutters
the ever-popular bag o' starfish

and, my personal favorite,

a chocolate fountain.

why?

But I am making progress, slowly, steadily.  I will, like Ron White says, "git-er-done."