Yes, I am going to start out with a cheesy food photo. Since classes, graduation, and moving have been done, I’ve been having a little fun. My roommate’s roommates left some really nice local ground beef in the freezer, so I decided to make burgers from scratch– including the buns. I had a friend over to share it with who was all too grateful to partake 🙂

Lately all I’ve had to worry about is working at the herbarium and keeping the future in mind. Oh, and car troubles/registration, of course. I was without internet at home for about a week, and have been trying to get settled in, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been making studio progress as well.

This was the climax of my glaze testing this semester: I formulated it by throwing the base glaze I was working with into DigitalFire Insight and changed the fluxes out completely, just to see what might happen. It’s not copper blue, but it really is a beautiful accident. Maybe as good as chocolate chip cookies 😉 I will keep testing and trying to get the copper blue I’m after, but I will be keeping this glaze around.

I’m also using new subjects for decorating: this is a cannonball tree flower. They are incredibly strange and beautiful, so I am automatically drawn to draw them 🙂

In final critique last week, a friend suggested something I had never even thought of before. He suggested doing a color wash on the bare clay before applying the wax resist to carve my drawings through. I took the advice seriously enough to apply it, and it has me going a whole new direction. It is tying my work even closer to my watercolor drawings– I’ve just barely started using a spray bottle to get a more similar surface effect, and I’m excited to see how my newest ideas turn out. I think I just want to make enough to fill the Blaauw again. The top fires so cold that the tech told me to take a shelf out because the pots on top would be so under-fired. Here’s a quick photo of how the spray technique went the other day:

P.S., dunno if I mentioned on here that I got the tech job back east that I applied for, but I’m not there yet. I’m staying in Utah for most of the summer.