Here’s what I have been working on this week. I made a couple plywood molds with a jigsaw. Working with power tools is always a little bit exhilarating. (You know, with the threat of cutting off your fingers and all …)

I made an asymmetrical mold because after all the wheel-thrown pots, my brain needs a little asymmetry. I also wanted to start making some tray forms because that’s really the easiest way to play with some new surface designs.

My goal with this one was to reproduce the look of bokeh. I tried to use a paper stencil method I learned in a Meredith Host workshop, but I had some problems. First, I was too impatient to let layers of underglaze fully dry before peeling off the paper stencils. (When you have limited studio time, you get impatient. Well, I do.) Also, I think my paper was weird. It was just copy paper, but it seemed to have some sort of coating, and the water turned blue when I soaked my stencils. Then the stencils stuck and shredded and tore, even when I broke down and let them fully dry, and it was not fun.

I need to figure out a better way to deal with the stencils, because I do still like the basic idea of this. The white areas may burn out more than I’d like, but this is an experiment. Next time I also want some of the bokeh blobs to go up the sides, too. I’ll show you how this turns out. Soon. I have a whole lot of making to do before the kiln is full.

I’ve been working hard to get ready for the holiday sale, but I had a bit of a hiccup last week. My kiln stopped working. I had glazed all the ornaments in the photo above, and they were loaded in the kiln. Then I turned it on, and it would either give me an error message or tell me it was -20 degrees in there. I figured it was the thermocouple on my kiln, and that is what it was. I had a new one installed today, and I’m back on track. I’m not sure how practical it will be to list ornaments on etsy at this point, but I’ll do my best, and I’ll have them at the sale.

Trying to get ready for this sale has been maybe a little too much for me. My days are already full to the brim with three small children, and this has pushed me into exhausted/weepy territory. So I expect this small business to stay super small until I can get all the littles into elementary school. That will at least lead me into a realm somewhere between part-time and full-time. Right now it’s more like wee-hours-time. Or during-The-Little-Mermaid-time. Or please-for-the-love-of-pete-stop-yelling-at-me-for-snacks-time.

I’ve been working on Christmas ornaments to sell, uh, soon. (Too soon! I’m running out of time!) Creating the templates for these geometric designs really stretched my dormant spatial reasoning skills. I also dusted off what little Illustrator skill I have. I swear, every time I start a new Illustrator project it is like starting from square one. Use it or lose it, I guess.

I’ve been calling these Gem Ornaments, but really they are a mix of cut gem designs and crystal formations. These are in the greenware stage, so the colors will be more jewel-toned after firing. I considered making them neon, but I hate to make Christmas decorations overly trendy, color-wise. In my mind, Christmas colors fall into one of these categories: traditional red/green/jewel tones, candy colors (turquoise, pink, red, etc.), metallics, white/neutral, and crystal/sparkle/glass. I think those groupings have stood the test of time, and I don’t want to make one-year ornaments! But neon would indeed have looked pretty cool.

Now that I’ve done a practice round of these, I’ll be working assembly-line style, one color per batch. In my factory of one.