Hot and humid with a chance of raspberries and green beans

Oh my dear sad Maine. It is hot and humid and nearly unbearable outside. Mornings find me racing home from Jasper's walk to do everything I can in the garden before I slink into the house to hide from the heat.

What have we done, oh Humans?

But. The flowers go on. As do the raspberries. . . and the green beans are also bearing nicely. Tomatoes have set fruit but there is no sign of red color just yet. 

 It is definitely the season for the Day Lilies to shine. We have everything from the demure orange wild type to the wonky "look-at-me"s. The hydrangeas are also starting to come into their own, but they will (I hope) be plugging along well after the day lilies are spent.

The vase is one of John's Grandmother's cut glass vases. Tall, cylindrical and very heavy. Classy, I think.

Hostas also continue to bloom. The image on the right is backlit, so you can't see it terribly well, but it's a favorite bud vase type. Tall, narrow, embellished with botanical icons.

And speaking of vases that I make, the weather has me retreating into the cool of my studio. I've been slow to get back to making, but it's amazing the work that accrues if one makes a piece a day. . .maybe two pieces a day. 

Anyone who has read much of this online journal knows that glazing is Not my favorite aspect of making pottery. I bristle when it takes me longer to glaze than it does to make the pot! I LOVE making the form. . . getting my hands and brain immersed in that process. Seeing if I can bend the clay to my will, or if she will have her way with me.

But here's the thing. With these last (accrued) pieces, I spent a lot of time with glazing. I estimate that the glazing took me 3 times as long as making the pot did. So it shouldn't be a surprise that the glaze looks a lot better than it previous batches. There is still an unexpected aspect to opening the kiln. But this time it was less of a groan, and more of an "Oh! That sort of worked!"

Example 1. A dish made from a Striped Maple leaf. Bark brown and Arctic blue glaze, fired at cone 5.

I'm measuring the temperature in my kiln on various shelves using sentinel cones. It turns out that the arrangement of the kiln shelves makes a big difference in variation in temperature from place to place in the kiln.

That's not a great thing, since it means that I can't stack shelves over each other when I need to glaze 2 large pieces. Still. It's good to know, and will prevent the devastation of overheated glaze that pinholes and makes the work worthless.

The bowl to the right is one I really love. It's my biggest successful bowl to date, which started with 4 pounds of clay, and measures about 9 inches in diameter. The glaze was an overlapping dip technique. Worked well, I think

This is a slightly larger version of an earlier mug. Now it's a set! The glaze is Coyote Green Matt, and the brown drip is made with a rim dip of Ancient Jasper. The Ancient Jasper has been a recurring theme, as many of you will note, in my work. It's a funny glaze. If the rim is just dipped a tiny bit, it runs down the piece and mingles with the base glaze. It also does a great job of highlighting texture in a piece, since it sinks into the low spots.

This last piece is hand-built, and inspired by a book by potter Frances Palmer called In the Studio. I've had the book for ages, but was able to read it from cover to cover during my recovery. The impressions were made by a lovely little weed that I picked up on one of our evening walks. I also made a bisque stamp, so you may see this motif again!