Diabolical Clay

Hi internet, the big day has finally arrived.

We will be live streaming Veronica and Nathans wedding at 12.30 pm AEST.

If I have time I will come back and put a link in this blog post and do a test run at approximately 10. am AEST

If I run out of time the

Livestream link will be here on Veronica’s blog.

Tomorrow I will be post the wedding photos in a gala Sunday Selections.

Now I am off to do the final set up for the big day (squee).

I opened the kiln for a quick peek yesterday afternoon and  it looked to be a successful firing.

You have no idea how pleased I am to be able to type those words internet.

I used three new glazes, I made a further two glazes using very old glaze ingredients. I didn’t have time to take notes whilst I was glazing, as I was way behind schedule and I fired to a lower temperature than normal.

In short I was leaving myself open to any number of ceramic disasters.

But the Kiln Gods were smiling on me and I am reasonably pleased with some of the work that came out of the kiln.

The glaze I used on these slipcast cups is one formulated by ceramist Ruth Langman and it is a clear gloss glaze that fires well across the mid range to higher range of stoneware temperatures. I programmed the kiln to fire to 1250 degrees centigrade but cone 9 was well down so I think the kiln is firing 20 degrees higher than the temperature gauge is telling me. I added one and a half percent of cobalt carbonate to the RL glaze and this is the result.

*Ruth Langman clear.

silica  ————————— 31

Kaolin—————————10

Neophyline syenite  ———-30

gerstley borate  —————21

wollastonite   ——————–8

I added 1.5% Cobalt Carbonate to make this blue.

I used a combination of three glazes on these plates WCC Black, WCC Green and RL blue

Ben’s WCC Base glaze

Potash Feldspar –30

Silica  —————33

Whiting ————-17

Kaolin —————15

To make a black glaze add 5% Iron Oxide, 2% Cobalt oxide 2%Manganese dioxide

To make green add 4.5% copper oxide.

Here are the glazes on my slipcast cups.

I haven’t made a lot of blue work before. I have used blue as a highlight on my ceramic cups but I have steered away from blue because, because? Actually I am not really sure why I have avoided blue glazes.

Maybe because blue can be so overpowering and my environmental plates are all earthy tones suited to reduction firings.

But I think I might have to follow this lot of work up with some more blue things.

Now for a WEDDING update.

The preparations for the wedding are all on track. My grand son Isaac is recovering from his virus and I am recovering from the fright he gave me. My back is mostly better and my infection has cleared up.I didn’t fire as many plates as I would have liked due to the unexpected trip to the hospital. But I have five plates for my daughter’s wedding present that I am very pleased with, some serving platters that turned out very well (photos later) and a lovely large salad bowl.

I am now feeling quite excited about the wedding rather than stressed. Veronica and I tested the livestream channel on Tuesday and we will both put live stream links up on our blogs on Saturday morning so that you can watch the wedding either here on my blog or over on Veronica’s blog, Sleepless Nights

And now internet I am off up to the local hall to fill my trailer up with folding chairs so that we all have somewhere to sit on Saturday (squeee)

Hello internet.

I spent most of yesterday and part of today in the emergency department of our local hospital with my daughter Veronica and her small son Isaac.

Isaac has a viral infection and we were that worried about him that at 5.00pm we braved a trip into the hospital.

Isaac was finally admitted to the Pediatric ward at 2.30 am.

I then drove slowly home at 3 am this morning being very careful to avoid imaginary large black dogs and kangaroos on the  highway as my tiredness produced some interesting  hallucinations.

This photo taken with my phone camera at about midnight last night sums up all our exhaustion.

This photo says more than I ever could.

I am tired internet, I am slightly stressed and I have a fever and an infection as well.

We have a wedding in five days time.

But.

The plates are in the kiln.

The cake is made.

The sheep is being delivered tomorrow and will be killed tomorrow night.

A spit roast has been organised and I have rustled up some chairs and tables.

We will be testing the livestream tomorrow. I will tweet at you tomorrow so that you can tell us if it works.

I am sure it will all come together and even if we all just stand around in a paddock eating lamb and gravy rolls it will still be a wonderful day.

Because Isaac is now home again and he has eaten a bowl full of sliced peaches.

Wow 46 weeks of sharing my forgotten photos has been a lot of fun. Next week my daughter is getting married on the Saturday and I reckon that I will be exhausted from all the frantic racing around that I have done in the lead up to THE WEDDING (and yes I think of THE WEDDING in all caps now) So would someone like to host Sunday Selections for me next week please?

Rightio now on with the show.

The Blurb

I take a lot of photos and most of them are just sitting around in folders on my desktop not doing anything. I thought that a dedicated post once a week would be a good way to share some of these photos that otherwise wouldn’t be seen by anyone other than me.

I am also remarkably absent minded and I put photos into folders and think that I will publish them later on and then then I never do.

So I have started a photo meme that anyone can join in and play as well. The rules are so simple as to be virtually non existent.

Just add your name and URL to the Mr Linky.

Publish your photos on your blog using the “Sunday Selections” title.

Link back here to me.

The Photos

This photo is for Elephants Child. Last Sunday I published a photo of misty trees in my backyard and in the comments I mentioned that I had a photo of an eagle in the same tree. And so here it is. This photo was taken with my Lumix point and shoot in 2009.

This is a small Bream that I caught and The Spouse is holding. We let this Bream go as it was too little to eat and I am concerned about heavy metal toxicity in fish.

This is a photo of a seagull. I really like this photo.

The Zinc works is a huge factory on the banks of the Derwent River. I am fascinated by all the industrial paraphenalia, the pipes and railings, the smokestacks and the conveyer belts,the tanks and rusty roofs. Once I have had my fill of photographing the heavy industry of the Zinc works I like to take photos like this one to remind myself that life could possibly just be a dream.

I seem to take an awful lot of photos of insect’s having sex. My business cards as well as my Sunday Selections Photography meme logo is an arty shot of some discrete ladybird porn.

A friend asked me about this fascination the other day and I am sure he was disappointed when I told him the real reason that I take so many images of insect porn.

Which is of course, while insects are busily occupied with procreation, they tend to stay fairly still.

Even if the male of the species does tend to get a bit annoyed when being followed around by the paparazzi. Look at this grasshopper, do you think he looks a bit cranky?

I also have a post up on Digital Photography School if you would like to go over and have a look. Here is the link, “Live with your photos before you delete”

I have a very active imagination, I create wonderful “what if” scenarios inside my mind complete with multicoloured layers of alternate realities. This can be a good thing as it enables me to visualise work that I need to make and I can quickly fill pages of my visual diary with ideas that will keep me happy in the studio for months.

This can also be a bad thing as when I am feeling especially maudlin, I can spend an inordinate amount of time brooding on possible futures for my family, all of them grim, and so my mood plummets. Ehlers Danlos Syndrome and Autism don’t make for happy daydreams.

I try not to think of the long term ramifications of my daughter dislocating her good knee yesterday. I try to block memories of a particularly harrowing post, written by my bendy cyber daughter in England from my mind, as the thought of a dislocating trachea is just too horrible to contemplate. Yet it happens to my bendy girl and I worry.

I must not allow myself to dwell on all the medical problems that beset my family, my sons anxiety, his high blood pressure at 17, his pain. The fact that my husband at 48 years old, requires slow release morphine patches  in order to walk, and as I wrote those very words on this blog , The Spouse came into the kitchen to say good morning and as he kissed me, his right hip dislocated and then his left decided to do the same. The Spouse has gone back to his bed to lie down until his morning nausea abates, then he will get up and push through his pain barriers and finish building his new garage, from timber he milled himself. And I will gently chide him for working too hard, knowing that his pride will not allow the pain to win and also knowing that tomorrow he will be in slightly more pain that he was today.

I need distractions from my reality otherwise I too will begin to fall apart.

And this is where you come into play, internet.

You are my escapism.

Twitter provides me with countless hours of escapism. News links to all the current events that interest me. I follow the Occupy Wall Street movement closely, I keep an eye on various anonymous news feeds, I follow human rights abuses here and abroad. I subscribe to prostitutes and politicians, skeptics and believers, anonymous street artists and the world’s great museums and they all keep my mind occupied.

My Die Churp Die twitter revolution, complete with its own #occupychurp hashtag and catchy graphic designed by the inimitable Zoey from Goodgoogs, is an attempt to entertain myself, whilst not so subtly pointing out that I think my fellow tweeters are worth much more, than the few cents churping  promoted tweets will provide.

But this is only my opinion and my opinion is only one amongst the millions. If you don’t like what I am saying on twitter, please unfollow me rather than send me snarky emails with dodgy hotmail addresses.

My dislike of the principles behind churp are as inconsequential in the scheme of things as my love of Zombie Klout. But if pressed, I will admit that  it is the complete lack of originality in the churp churp logo that offends me the most.

I am a hypocrite of the first order as I will ask you to give me a +K for Zombies and I will tweet those links at the same time as I will use a Die Churp Die avatar. I will retweet links condemning Klout for creating Klout profiles for unauthorised minors, at the same time as I will declare that I am The Great White Crocodile Hunting Zombie Film Maker on Klout.

Why do I do this?

I do these things, simply to amuse myself, internet.

To take my mind off the things that grieve me.

To give myself a few minutes relief from the things in my life that hurt.

It is that simple.

In ten days time my daughter Veronica is getting married. I have been to the edge of hysteria and back a couple of times in the past few days, but as always it has been the mental picture of Tim Brooke Taylor running around shouting, “I am a teapot” that has saved me.

I am a potter after all and I know a thing or two about teapots. Fiddly bloody things they are. Tea pots require precision and patience, two virtues that I am not overendowed with at all, and when one’s only daughter is getting married in ten days time there is never room for hysterics. Mild panic and hyperventilation I can deal with, but hysteria will never do.

I had grand plans of making stacks and stacks of plates for Veronica’s wedding, lovingly crafted and beautifully glazed. I had visions of friends and family eating cake  and commenting on how lovely it was to eat from handmade plates.  Of course whilst not wanting stealing the limelight from the bride, I nonetheless discretely basked in the glow that was my due as Mother of the bride and erstwhile creator of fabulous plates.

It was a lovely daydream, I was even wearing a fabulous hat with purple roses.

But of course time is fluid in my world and suddenly all the time I had to make those glorious plates had vanished in the twinkle of an eye and my deadline was looming. It was November the first and I of course was plateless as well as hatless.

So I set to work and made some plates for my girl. Not the hundreds that I had seen in my dreams, but enough for a lucky few to admire from a distance, if they make it out of the kiln in time.

The kiln is cooling down as we speak and I should be able to open it tomorrow. If the Kiln Gods are smiling on me, all the wedding ware should emerge unscathed and uncracked and I can get down to the serious business of glazing the bloody things.

The deadline is now, rather tight.

Look I made a button for you.

The Blurb

I take a lot of photos and most of them are just sitting around in folders on my desktop not doing anything. I thought that a dedicated post once a week would be a good way to share some of these photos that otherwise wouldn’t be seen by anyone other than me.

I am also remarkably absent minded and I put photos into folders and think that I will publish them later on and then then I never do.

So I have started a photo meme that anyone can join in and play as well. The rules are so simple as to be virtually non existent.

Just add your name and URL to the Mr Linky.

Publish your photos on your blog using the “Sunday Selections” title.

Link back here to me.

Easy Peasy.

The Photos

An alternate title could be, “Killer Cigarette Lighters Used in Artwork” or “Nothing is Disposable Really”

But I will stick with “Fired Up” because it is the title of the show.

I have been asked to participate in a group ceramic show in the north west of the state in early March next year, the title of this show is “Fired Up.”  The Curator has asked us to produce, up to ten pieces of work that will demonstrate what gets us fired up, what we are passionate about.

I have known about this show for quite some time now but I have been deliberately only skirting the edges of the idea, as I had four exhibitions all falling in the latter part of 2012 as well as a wedding (15 days people) to occupy my thoughts.

The last time I dived headfirst into something I swam alone with my memories for weeks. I obsessed, I picked mental scabs, I cried a lot and you my dear internets were subjected to an awful lot of posts on the subject.

I think that is why I have been holding back from fully committing with my heart as well as my head to the Fired Up project, as I am a little bit frightened of where the obsessions will lead me this time.

Today I formally begin the process of really thinking about the work I will make for “Fired Up”and I have yet to tell my husband. “The Spouse” also suffers when I am in the throes of an obsession, as I am emotionally absent when I start to swim with the creative sharks and I am only half focused on the real world. It isn’t until the work is done that I start to come back to myself and realise how hard I have been to live with. My minimalistic approach to housework flies out the door and I make more mess than usual in the house. This time though I will try and be tidier and not leave piles of things everywhere.

These cigarette lighters came out of the stomachs of Laysan Albatross Chicks on Kure Atoll, Hawaii in June 2009. The Laysan Albatross Chicks died just before they were ready to make their first flight out to sea.

I am not sure what I am going to be making yet but these lighters will feature prominently.

Thoughts about disposable lifestyles, disposable people, how our laziness is killing us, all these things are in my head but nothing is concrete yet. I am still at the stage where I am tossing around ideas to do with ceramic lighters, dead albatross bowls, ceramic balls similar to the dragon eggs bound together with brightly coloured rope.

I dont know yet.

But.

Today I have started and I have some serious work ahead of me. I only wish I could afford a cleaner.