Big things with inlay

For some reason, I've suddenly fallen in love with doing inlay.  I've been taking my different colors of clay and marbling them and then using that to inlay into a white vessel.  I've got a cauldron shaped bowl with an inlaid rim and another one with a pentagram, but look at what's drying now!

That's about 14 inches across and an inch and a half deep.

Closeup on the marbling.

And a bowl that's about the same size as the platter.

Oh goodness me I hope these survive!

And, uh, crud.  I've only got 100lbs of white clay left.  Better get shopping!

Score!

One of my issues with having an online pottery shop is storing all of the pottery that I have listed for sale.  I don't want to wrap it all and tuck it away because then when something sells, I have to dig through all of those wrapped mugs to find the right one.

I was cruising around the back of Starbucks today to get to the drive through when I found this sitting by the dumpster.  It's a display rack from the Staples next door which is currently going through a remodel.  I saw another one in the dumpster itself, this one just didn't fit so it was definitely trash.

Yay!  A place to store about 50 items in a way that I can easily see them.  I've started piling it up with stuff that I still need to get listed and it's right next to my desk so I have to stare at this display of stuff on my to do list every time I sit at my desk.

I don't know if this is going to be useful as a display at craft fairs, but even if it's not, it's still going to be a good storage device for at home.

Score!

Raccoons

We have raccoons.  They used to go in and eat Busters food every night so we stopped feeding him in the studio for a while.  After a while, I started feeding him out there again and for several months, the raccoons were completely unaware of the bounty that was on the other side of that cat door.

It was a fun several months.

A couple of days ago, I noticed that busters food dish was clean when I went out there in the mornings.  That means the raccoons were wiping him out at night.  Oh well, it's maybe half a cup of food, no big deal.

Then they discovered the tightly lidded plastic tupperware thingy I was storing it in.  Yesterday, I discovered this thing flipped over on the floor, the handles that click the lid to the body were broken off and the food shrapnel was all over the floor under the table.

Ok, so I can't store food out there anymore.  No big deal.  They can clean out Busters leftovers at night.

And then today.  Oh dear.  It seems they have discovered that they are not only hungry, but thirsty too.  Can't blame them, it's been hot out.  There's a bucket of pretty clean water under one of our run off spouts in the driveway so I figured they'd drink that.  Alas, they have discovered that they prefer clay flavored water.

I leave my throwing water bowl on my wheel and just toss a paper plate over it at night to keep bugs out.  And I have a kitty litter bucket of slop that becomes my reclaim water.  Wanna see what it looked like this morning?  Ok, I'll show you.

That would be my green throwing bowl you see there on the floor.  And the lid torn off of the white kitty litter slop bucket.  And muddy water all around.

*sigh*

I'd like to show you all Buster's new and improved food bowl location!

Fry in July

Well, summer finally hit Seattle today.  Here's the view from my desk.

The Buster Butt Mug is finally here!

Back in May some of you may have read about how Buster was helping me out with making my mugs.

Well, the Buster Butt Mug is out of the kiln, glazed in all of his colors and ready to find a new home.  *Edit - it already found a new home!  12 hours after listing this mug and someone has already bought it!*

Check it out!