Some projects in the works...

It's been 3 weeks now since I posted, Christmas has come and gone. We drove to Houston to visit my older sister and her beau. We had an excellent time, and even though my sister's house was stuffed full of people and pets, things went very smoothly. Of note ceramics-wise during the Christmas break is that I received some great presents for my studio, including some great new tools, some slip molding forms, a hefty gift certificate to "Clay World", and some wonderful and very useful books.

So here are some new projects I'm diving into;

1) A 20" hemispherical moonscape made from fiber clay (craters, rough surface). After bisque firing it will become the form for casting a replica of it in bronze. The bronze version will eventually become my son Christian's bed side lamp shade (his room is done in a space theme). The ceramic version I will eventually glaze and fire as well, and use suspended from his ceiling or mounted on his wall (where it will be less likely to be broken).

2) A glaze study of the 30 glazes available at the Minnetonka Center for the Arts on MB clay (new clay for me). I will make a bunch of coffee cups all the same size and shape, then use each glaze as a primary on the exterior, develop a series of surface designs (carving, impressions, stamps, sprigs, etc) then choose a complementary glaze for decoration. I can throw most of these at home and bring them to the Art Center to glaze them. This is akin to doing a tile study, but more interesting than tiles.

3) I'm currently making a 12" tall bronze dragon, which is small enough in mass to not need an internal mold. I'm shaping it directly in wax, so again, I can skip some steps in the lost wax casting process. I'm building it as a part of a bronze casting class I'm taking from Heidi Hoy at the Minnetonka Center of the Arts. The dragon is almost completed from what I can tell, and when I asked Heidi if it was done she said, "We have a saying around here... We'll let you know when you're done." The photo above is one of Heidi's works.

4) We need to replace the tile in our bathroom. I sat down last week to develop a non-square repeating pattern using a computer graphic design tool. Angel wants the bathroom to have a butterfly motif, so some tiles will be butterfly shaped, and then others will form the shapes between the butterflies. There are about 500 tiles roughly 4" tiles needed for this project.

5) I want to make 12"x12" tiles for the floor in my studio. Again, I want to (lightly) carve and glaze each tile differently to make it look like one large ancient mosaic pattern. I figure the floor tiles will need to be 1/4" thick.

6) I still need to get my kiln's set up and finish the full set up in my basement studio.

It seems overwhelming I know, but I'm not the kind of person who gets discouraged with a mountain of work... I get busy.