I have 22 listings ready to go for my Etsy shop, but in the interest of keeping them higher on Etsy’s search pages, I’ll be listing two a day for the next eleven days, starting on Saturday, August 16. I’ll be adding things every morning and afternoon.
If you follow ameliastudio on instagram, I may even send out a secret coupon!
My neglected blog doesn’t show much of my recent work. Here are some photos to remedy that!
If you want to stay up to date with me, Instagram and Facebook are the ways to go lately.
I’ll be taking all of this work to the Strawberry Swing in Kansas City on Sunday, August 3. I’ll also have some of the necklaces and ornaments that I have left from last winter’s show at the Kansas City Clay Guild.
I hope to see you there!
I’ll be there on Sunday with lots of mugs, hanging planters, platters, bowls, hair ties and necklaces! I’ll try to get some photos of my new work posted here soon.
Summer is over. Where did it go? It wasn’t spent here, as you can tell by the complete lack of posts.
A lot of it was spent in the swimming pool, wearing that same Lands’ End swimsuit that has lasted me three summers and is still going strong.
A tiny bit of it was spent on our fourth night away from children in EIGHT YEARS. Real clothing! Hotel! Being out in the dark!
A large part of it was spent driving, and driving, and driving. We drove from Kansas City to Colorado, Utah, California, Arizona and back. We camped a lot. We saw friends and family whom we love and miss every day. We saw mountains and arches and canyons and the OCEAN!
I managed to fire some platters.
I finished this custom wall platter. I’m still trying to decide whether I want to do this sort of custom work regularly.
And there was so much more. Family came to visit. Two of my girls learned to ride bicycles. One of them jumped off the high dive! Two had birthdays. I had a birthday. Chris had a birthday. We have another birthday coming in a couple of weeks.
All the girls are in school — preschool for one, elementary for two, and college for me. I am back in school, taking graphic design classes again. I haven’t had time to touch clay in a month, and that makes me sad. It has been kind of insane trying to keep up with the kids, the house, the dog, the cooking, the shopping, the bills, the laundry, the dishes AND go to school. There’s no room for clay. So I don’t know what to do about that.
I should perhaps make some choices, but if I know myself, I’ll just keep trying to choose everything.
I am now the awful blogger who only posts about store updates. So. I am updating my etsy shop. The end (for now).
I’m lame and forgot to mention a while back that I had updated the etsy shop with a few new things. There are some pots and some buttons and this little jellyfish wall tile. Most of the buttons are white; I need to restock on brightly colored ones. Anyway, check it out!
I disappeared there for a bit. Where did I go? I went into the iphone black hole. I got my first smartphone.
Actually, I’ve been around, just not here. I don’t really like sitting at the laptop now that I have this handy from-the-future toy. I bought a used phone and am using a value service, so if we get rid of our land line, I’m on track to actually save us money every month! I didn’t think that would be possible with an iphone, but there you go.
I’ve signed up for instagram and vine, and I’ve been having fun taking little photos and videos. If you would like to follow me, I’m ameliastudio on instagram, and I’m Amy Harding on vine. I suppose I should have made those the same, and actually I thought I did, but I don’t know — I’m new at this.
I’m already starting to get a case of texting thumb, which is apparently possible even if you don’t really text and can only type about two words per minute.
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.
These are the first couple pots of 2013. It took me a while to get back to work! I guess I have been working — it has just been the boring stuff: listing things in the etsy shop, setting up bank accounts, paying state sales tax. I suppose it all needed to be done, but now I’m out of throwing practice. My arms were a little sore after wedging up only four balls of clay. I don’t know if I’m not used to it anymore, or it’s because my studio is very, very cold and the clay was pretty stiff. (probably a little of both)
While my sister was visiting for Christmas, we decided that I should make a tiki mug version of my inverse mug. So the tall cup up there is my first attempt at this. I don’t have the best handle on shrinkage rates, so we’ll see if this is the right size. It seems a little wide to me. I can calculate the shrinkage — I just can’t visualize it very well. Anyway, I hope to make a bunch of these cups. They’ll be great for tiki drinks or any tall cocktail.
My work last night was accompanied by Kate‘s best of 2012 mix on Spotify. Since I’ve had kids, I don’t have as much time to seek out new music, so I have become a big fan of end-of-the-year music wrap-ups. They help me do all my new music scavenging all at once. I haven’t had a chance to check out my usual go-to yearly lists from Pitchfork and The Onion. So I’ll link to them here for your sake and mine:
I listed some pots on etsy! This is the first batch of pots I’ve listed since around the time Charlotte was born. So, over five years! I just took Charlotte and Margot with me to pick up some shipping boxes down in a warehouse near downtown, and they were completely bewildered by how dirty and warehouse-y it was. Sheltered children.
Anyway, I have a few more pots and some buttons that I still need to photograph and list. So this will be it for round one. Check my shop out here. Thanks!