Feeling Glazed

Glaze kiln loaded. Check.
Glaze area shelves cleaned. Check.

Wish I loved glazing as much as I love making the pots in the first place. I don't. Glazing is my struggle and sometimes, my Achilles heel. But a woman's gotta do what a woman's gotta do. As my favorite husband says of even my best work, "It's not the steak, it's the sizzle." In short, make it red. Or blue. Or shiny. And here's another pithy and pertinent one, "No one wants to hear about the labor pains, they just want to see the baby."

This blog is about the labor pains AND the baby.

It's almost that honey time of year!
I'll be loading a few nice honey jars up on my website on Wednesday of next week. Check the site for the new ones. http://www.mimistadlerpottery.com

In fact, if you want to bookmark the sucker, that would be great.
Now if we can get the Contact and Checkout pages to work...

Shipped my First Pottery

Shipping my first sale.

Not grouchy anymore!

Grrrouchy Potter

Spoiler alert: This is gonna be a grouchy post. If you need my sweet side... better wait till next week. It was occasioned by a telephone remark when I said I had to go, I needed to get back to work. The other person innocently said, "Have fun."

You wouldn't think "have fun" would get me so unaccountably grumpy.

It’s like this. I mean, just call me defensively crabby, but really, it is like this:

“What do you do?”

“I’m a potter.”

“Oh, that’s so much fun!”

The “f” word. It's often followed by, "Can I come and make stuff?”

I confess. Making pottery is kind of fun. But add this: It's business, too. It must be the tiara and wings that are doing it, but be honest- do I look like the Good Fairy of Studio Gift Time?

A grandma visiting her local children, on discovering I am a potter, said, “Oh, that’s so much fun! The children would love to come over to play!”

Um??? How to explain this? A working pottery studio isn’t a great place for kids to play. There are sharp tools, and equipment they can injure themselves on. They need constant supervision and guidance. And my work in progress is very easily damaged by being bumped or jostled.

This ain’t no hobby. This ain’t no disco. This ain’t no fooling around.

I'm happy to say I'm pretty busy. I'm usually too busy now to offer lessons. I have one kick wheel and my own lovely, dusty, orderly disorder. Maybe someday I'll take students again. But unless I invite them (I sometimes do), there isn't place for playful little or big guests just because "it would be so much fun."

I like my work. I like it very much. I like the muscles I get in my arms as I push the dense clay around on my wheel. I like having the expertise to give form and grace to a grayish lump. It’s not as easy as it looks, and mastering it is cool. I even use the word "play" sometimes. As in, "I'm playing with texture." (Accountants don't get to say that.) It suits me way better than lots of other jobs.

But let that not fool you for a second. It involves sweat and endurance and tools. It’s dirty and dusty and makes a big mess that needs recycling and mopping up. Often, despite all I have to do in the studio, it's hard to get down to it in the morning. It requires being available at all phases of production, at all times of day, according to the needs of the pieces at hand. It involves lots of time in the basement, lots of bending and lifting and plain old shlepping. There’s bookkeeping and taking photos and marketing my work, and updating my website regularly. My studio is something like Virgina Woolf's "a room of one's own," the place where I turn ideas and plans into pottery and sales. As for guests in my workplace... the tiara is askew and the wings- you know I don't really have wings, right?

Anyone see the irony in the fact that “have fun” makes me really, really cranky?

OK, all done with the kvetching. Now for the photo of some of the pots made in this rawware cycle:

The operative number on these is ten. Ten shellac-resisted honey jars with lids, and ten matched saucers. Ten carved washing cups. Ten nice big serving bowls, though they didn't all fit into this photo. All on schedule to be ready before Rosh Hashana.

Next week: shellac resist on some of the bowls, a bisque firing for the rawware, maybe glazing bisqueware, and absolutely fixing the glitch in my website shopping cart checkout. And maybe, work permitting, inviting a friend to visit briefly at the studio. Just for fun.

Shellac Resist Honey Jars

Last week's honey jars were bone dry. It was time for them to get their surface designs. Instead of drawing on the pots, I decided to make raised designs on them.

That started with a pencil drawing. If you know me by now, you know that's probably leaves and stems to start, then random this and that as I go on. So it went today.

The pencil drawing areas got a coating of shellac. I used amber-colored shellac, so I could see the design outlines clearly. I brushed on two coats for a tough, durable shell.

Shellac dries pretty fast on bone dry pots. In 15 minutes, the honey jars were ready for sponging. A well-wrung little sponge wiped round and round the jar cleaned off a superficial layer of clay everywhere except where shellac had been brushed on.

The whole point of this exercise is, the shellacked areas stand out. They are raised from the slightly eroded, wiped surface.

You can see the raised designs of grass, leaves, those Cheerio kind of circles... They really have texture.

The shellac burns off each honey jar completely in the kiln, leaving the entire piece
the same uniform white when it comes out of the bisque kiln (the one where pots are changed from raw clay to bisque ware). These pots will then be ready to be glazed with colors and fired again.

Looks like I have a new craze for the moment. This was waaaay fun. My nephew Yoni took some short video clips of the process, and I want to put them up on my website once I have shots of the glazed, finished honey jars.

Planning Honey Jar Shellac Resist

Decided to forgo studio and computer today to get some sunshine and movement in kayaks with my oldest child. Aaaahh. It felt like summer. The honey jars will just wait a few more days to get their shellac-resist treatment.

So far the honey jars have come out like this:

The next batch, if all works right, should have a raised design of leaves or other natural pattern on each jar. Photos of the design process next week!

The Debut of My New Website, or, How to Get a Website Built, Eventually

Finding a website builder the first time was easy. I wasn’t really looking. In the middle of a casual conversation about maybe selling my pottery online, my friend offered to help out. Although already versed in web building, she was looking to learn a newer website building program and this was her chance.

My friend, (to whom I am grateful for getting all this going,) told me right away that she would only have limited time to work on my site, since some pressing personal obligations had to take precedence. I was okay with this, since I didn’t know what I wanted in a website design anyway. I had lots to work through and decide.

She stuck with me (and vice versa) while we figured it out. In the end we spent a good bit of time getting most of the way there, but not quite all the way. Meanwhile, I sharpened my thoughts of what I wanted, and completion of the site finally became my priority. But my friend’s other obligations still had to take precedence over my site. We had to come to a parting of the web ways.

I needed to hire someone to finish my online shop. I really needed advice.

As I’ve seen many times, having an art education does not mean I know anything much about the business of art. In fact, when I was a ceramics student once upon a time at Kean College, e-commerce probably wasn't even in the lexicon.

So I had no clue, once I would find someone to do the job, what to ask for. How would I know what should be included in the agreement? What should the contract cover?

I contacted a fellow member of my potters guild, Kathy, who has lots of experience in web design. Our guild’s website design and hosting firm had disappeared mid-stream, and left the guild stranded. Kathy had regained ownership of the site for us, brought the site live again, and undertaken the job of advising the guild members how to maintain their pages. Well, it’s true what they say about getting a job done; ask a busy person. Although juggling a couple of jobs and babysitting a grandchild when I called, Kathy took the time to write out some questions for me to ask when seeking a designer, and what to specify in a contract. Here they are:
* * *
1. Ask if he will be giving you a proposal for the whole scope of work prior to the start. (Don't pay anything in full upon start - I usually do 1/4 of total project first - i.e. for a $1,000 job I get $250 to start, then out of the rest of the $750 I break that up into two parts. You would pay $375 at acceptance of the prototype; make sure you are 100% happy with it. The last $375 is upon completion, when the site is done with search engines, and everything is working correctly.

2. Ask if he charges for edits, and at what rate. My rate is per hour, based on quarter-hour increments. This rate should be clearly marked in his proposal or contract.

3. If he has to re-design, will he present you with a prototype first? I give my clients 3 prototypes.

4. Does the template have a back end? In other words, can someone else edit for you if his fees are too high for edits?

5. Will he supply text, or will he be asking as he goes along for the information from you? If so, how does he request this? He should give you deadlines, too - it keeps the site going. But there is a lot you can do to help prepare the site. Be involved as much as you can. After all, your site is an extended reflection of you.

6. As far as the search engine optimization - will he be pushing this out to the engines on a monthly basis, or is this something you need to do? If he does this, there might be a monthly charge.

7. He needs to add a sitemap on your site - metatags used to be the thing search engines use, but most are depending on sitemaps now.

8. Will he be providing you with site stats? I have a couple of ways my clients can see how their site is being hit, but mostly they receive a monthly email from my hosting company that provides how many hits their site has, what pages, and even lists who and where these people are.
* * *

I followed some leads, spoke with five or six designers, and whittled the list down to a designer who came well recommended, Leah Helfgott of www.i-pointwebdesign.com. I asked Leah to have a good look at my site-so-far. I suggested where she could be most useful and listened to her own thoughts on the site.

Keeping in mind Kathy’s suggestions (and giving her thanks in my head as I proceeded), I clarified price and time frame with Leah and discussed the other items mentioned. She had clear and specific answers. My site had been started in Wordpress. I asked to see what websites she had done that were specifically artsy, Wordpress e-commerce sites, besides the ones already listed on her business site. She sent me links to several. They were clean-looking and attractive, purposeful and easy to maneuver. Only then, sure that she could produce what I needed, I asked her for a contract.

Now that I had a plan, a partnership needed to form that would only work to enhance the plan. I made sure to cover all points that were important to me before signing anything. I was sure this would be a good partnership. Having a contract would protect Leah, too, by keeping me from contacting her too often with thoughts about this or that item. (I have a tendency.) In that way, we were both protected.

She sent me an informal contract via e-mail. I clarified a few further questions, received satisfactory answers, affirmed, and then sent her a check for half her fee, as laid out in the contract.

In one eight-hour day, during which I was available by phone and e-mail, Leah fixed some layout, dealt with several other issues, and taught me how to put up my own photos and text. I had really been wanting to "take ownership" of my site. It was a huge buzz learning to do just that. Almost everything was complete in one day, except the shopping cart, which I asked Leah to work through.

I paid the second half of Leah’s fee after the 8-hour day. Our contract had set an hourly rate for anything further. Since service so far only indicated that she would follow up properly, I had trust. My confidence was rewarded quickly. Within a couple of days after the rest of the work was completed, Leah had contacted and had an answer from the template theme creator, and repaired the broken shopping cart code.

After that, I had more to learn, photos to take and edit, text and photos to add to the site, and some questions for Leah. She put in about eight more hours of work, about 16 all told. I put in many more. Long story short, I have a website.

(I couldn't figure out how to make this>> a clickable link to the website, but continue reading and you will find one...)

These are the main points: If you are going to build a website to sell your art, do your research first. Look at websites to find their best aspects. Think how your online gallery will represent your work. Think about what colors will frame your art best; you can go to www.colorpicker.com for that. When you are ready to find a designer, look for experience. But trust your own insights, too.

Read everything you can so that you can gauge the winds that are the current rules, trends and touchstones that guide the Internet marketplace. It is not my first web builder’s fault that we did not finish the first time around. It was to a good degree my own lack of planning and casual attitude early on. It was not a good template on which to build a business or a business relationship.

As for my website, I'm very happy to send you to www.mimistadlerpottery.com! check often in the beginning. It is starting with just a few pieces, but I have more photos of work to take and put up on the metaphorical shelves. Meanwhile, I will continue to be hard at work in the studio, making new pottery. This week: honey jars and washing cups! Bisque firing, glaze firing, cleaning the studio, fixing up my little gallery space bit by bit, there’s an awful lot to take care of. And now, add website maintenance to the list. A potter has to wear many hats indeed! And I do not mind at all.

More Teasers

More fun with photos, as the deadline to bring the website "live" comes whooshing up:

Zoooom

Website is going up fast! Teasers:

Figured it Out

I figured out how I was messing up the pictures on the website. Fixed 'em.

August 10th, about 1 PM, I will say in the voice of Igor, "It's aliiiive," come what may. I have some wee itsy imperfect things going on, but so what. Mistakes and all, I own this sucker now.

Now to spiff up the homepage, and connect the URL so you can find it when you want to.

Adrenaline.

I'm Following Instructions, But

I really am following instructions.
At least I THINK I'm following instructions.
Photos are going up on my new website prior to launching.
At least, they are SUPPOSED to be going up. I think I am doing the right things, then pressing "Publish," and the (insert expletive) photos are not publishing. Guess I am not doing the right things.

This, for example, will not publish on the website but happily goes up here on blogger:

(The vase is 7.5" tall, and 4.5" wide at its widest part, by the way. It has a price tag of $48.)

Boy, the learning curve is steep at the beginning of a new process.
Let me say that again. BOY, THE LEARNING CURVE IS STEEP AT THE BEGINNING OF A NEW PROCESS.

Pardon my "Aaaaaaargh!"

Photos of a Good & Interesting Time

By late afternoon today, I had exhausted my last run of library books and read a bunch of newspapers. Browsing for something else to read, I went leafing through the children's books on our den shelves, and pulled out one of those great little Usborne nature books, this one a lift-the-flap book called Animal Homes. (I love these.)

Imagine my surprise when I opened the book and discovered I'd stashed two photos in it long ago, from my days as pottery counselor at that camp I mentioned recently! I used to keep a "Wall of Fame" in the Pot Shop, which was a bulletin board I plastered with photos of kids and counselors at the start of each season. I know the two photos I found in the book were from the Wall of Fame, because of the still-slightly-tacky spots on their backs from the old tape.

I look at the images and think, I was a pretty good pottery counselor. I worked hard, and I loved it.

This one was sometime around 1998ish. Wish I could have shown the two kids standing with me in this first photo. They were cute, noisy little guys. I don't know what became of them, but as far as I know, confidentiality rules still apply to showing their faces. I tried leaving them in but just fading out their features, but the symbolism of doing that to the face of children who once had cancer was too weird.





And from my last year there, 2001:

Looks like I was helping someone make a mug. We made them out of slabs, which we shaped by wrapping them around glaze jars that were covered in newspaper. These were crude but effective. Some of them probably exist as pencil jars in the States, Israel, Australia and Russia to this day.



I heard this week from a relative who is working at the camp this summer that the Pot Shop was moved to where the old Wood Shop used to be. I was always jealous of Woody's space and used to kid him about it. He had a spacious double room, while we had one narrow room that had to hold kids, supplies and also the kiln.

It was a good and interesting time in my pottery life.

Nerdly Birdly Pottery Thoughts

Lots of time to observe, here in Maine. Sketching plans for rectangular vases with rock-textured and water-textured surfaces. Planning patterns on bowls like the dotted black and white of the common loons on the lake, with two small red dots like their red eyes. Colors on all kinds of pots, as found in the irridescent neckfeathers of hummingbird, deep yellow of the oriole and rust, buff and soft yellow of the crested flycatcher I see through binoculars from the porch. Thinking of splotching variegated browns and whites, as on the juvenile eagles over the Kennebec River. So much to do when I get back in the studio. So much birdly and earthly nerdiness to translate into pots.

Withstanding the Fire

In the spring of 1994 I had a most interesting offer. A friend asked me to consider putting together and running a pottery room at a camp for kids with cancer and blood disorders. She had been hired as head counselor and wanted to fill out the program possibilities. It seemed like a change from all the "alone time" in the studio, and I wanted to scope it out, so I drove the two hours with her to camp one day.

My friend showed me a building like a long bungalow. The sign over the first of the four doors on the porch read: “Pot Shop.” We opened the door to a room full of old trash, dead flies, and buried among them, two cheap and listing pottery wheels, and a crumbling old kiln. I knew right then that it could become a neat and functional little pottery workshop, with lots of elbow grease and some fixes for the equipment. I said Yes, and got right on it, drawing up lists, sketching ideas, making practice projects. Finally, as the season was just about underway, I ordered the supplies, and two staffers came to help me dig the room out from under.

I would be there for the next eight summers. We would eventually have two wheels, a slab roller, and a beautiful new kiln. Till then, we made do with dowel rolling pins from Wood Shop, tables and benches from here and there, and lots of effort.

That first summer, I was also working with kids for the first time. Green as an unripe apple, without an assistant, I enlisted my 13-year old daughter to be my sounding-board and helper. I did not ask to get paid, as I was not sure I would do a good job. I figured it would be charity, and if I couldn't make a go of it, no one could say I wasn't worth my salt. I had a hard time acclimating to the emotional fallout I felt dealing with sick kids, but quickly found out there were some really shiny silver linings to this gig. For one thing, I thoroughly enjoyed the interaction with the kids and their very dedicated counselors. As it turned out, I also really loved showing the kids how to work with with my favorite art medium, and to my surprise and joy, they responded with enthusiasm. It was awesome.

(Working with Melissa at the wheel. She was great to work with and laugh with. Last heard, she had a family of her own.)


The pot shop was usually noisy with children and crowded with action. Some children made brief projects as they passed through pottery on their way to sports. That was already good. There were so many other things to do at camp. But some children had so much fun that they kept coming back whenever they could. These children got to know me, and I got to know them. A camp session was only 2 1/2 weeks long, partly because many children needed to get back to a less immuno-compromising environment than camp. But even with the brevity of the season, or maybe because of it, these weeks were intense. We got to know one another pretty quickly. Best of all, as I would discover, some of the children came back year after year, and regulars gravitated right back to the pottery room. By Season Two I felt like a pro. This is what I found out: Kids have fun in Pottery, and fun is therapeutic.

(I did get great outside assistants after the first season. Here is one of my two Dannys*. He was a great help, and always great for morale.)(*Other Danny, send me a picture!)

Ten years since I last ran the pot shop at camp, I try to imagine the children I once knew when they had cancer, as currently healthy grownups, with spouses and children perhaps, with jobs and full lives. I know many of them made it through their diseases, and went on to healthy situations.

(Mikey- one of my most fun pals over the years. We had great chats. Heard later that he was doing great.)


What a lot of emotional ups and downs there were.

In my first year or so at camp, I met a boy of 16, (I’ll call him E.) so sick and frail in his wheelchair he could hardly lift his hand. E.’s counselor wheeled him into Pottery separately from his group, so I could give him individual attention. He made a gift for his mother. Then he signed the back, “To Mom,” with his name, and added the names of his brother and sister, which touched me so much that I stepped out onto the porch to blink away damp eyes. I just didn't think he would make it. But E. did not die. The next summer he returned with crutches, not quite so skeletal and pale. The summer after, E. was walking. We had some good talks. The year after that, he told me he had finished his last treatment, and there had been no sign of cancer for a long while. He was well. A couple of years later, I heard that E. had gotten married.

There were wonderful surprises, assuredly. But then there was always some of that other part.

This week I received a sad surprise. It was old news, four years old, in fact, but because I hadn’t heard, it felt painfully fresh. My daughter came across an “In Memory of” page on Facebook in L.’s name, and called me. Not L.!! “I’m going to put down the phone,” I told her. I had to let out a howl of hurt, and needed to wait until I could speak again. L. was my youngest child's age, and they had been friends at camp.

He wasn’t even one of the ones with cancer. He had a manageable blood disorder. But life is unpredictable. L. received a double whammy. He was diagnosed with cancer just a year or so after I last saw him, and died of it two years later, at age 19. I looked at the photos on his Facebook memorial page hoping somehow it wasn't him, but yes, it was L. all right. In one of the photos he was smiling his wicked and sweet smile, half mischievous, half shy, pale as usual, and sitting at a table in study hall with a study partner and a teacher. It was so like the way he’d sat in the Pot Shop with his counselor and me for all of those summers, talking about life, messing about with bits of clay, and having a lot of good laughs between earnest conversations.

So life goes round and round like a potter's wheel. Sometimes the vessels that are made on it are so beautiful. Sometimes they withstand the fire, and once in a while they just do not. I am sending out a wave to "my" campers, a figurative wave to the ones I can only remember now, and the ones who are busy making ongoing lives (you know who you are!). Wherever you are, health and wholeness go with you!

Edmund's Pottery Day, Revisited

Been a while since I checked in. I was under the weather, and out of the studio for almost a month. The studio has a musty, fusty air of neglect and disorder. It has an accumulation of unglazed ware that I swear is GLARING at me, and a chalked list of to-do items that is growing unchecked.


But if I couldn't get down to the heavy business of work, and while I was putting on a few pounds sitting and lying around, spending waaay too much time on computer and TV, and being cranky, I could still organize my thoughts about the website, research shipping, and bust my website builder's chops a lot.

Website work continued. The news: we plan to go live July 18th. Compared to my late, dysfunctional, unlamented website, this one will be a streamlined and spare gallery that works as it is supposed to.


While at my computer over the weeks, leafing through my hefty file of stories for children, I browsed through my old Edmund's Pottery Day illustrations. Several years ago I sent out this picture book manuscript to a few publishing houses, but it was ignored or received rejections for a while, and I put it away to work on other picture book manuscripts. I knew the original story was too teach-y. I knew the illustrations I sent with it were not spontaneous or skilled enough to satisfy me (never mind a publishing house), but they still have some charm. So while I sat around not feeling well, I began putting them up on Facebook, one or two a day, with very little explanation. Here they are, minus text. Click on each picture for a larger version:

Readers from Other Lands

Yesterday brought some interesting stats on my blog. There were 11 hits on the blog yesterday in the few hours after I posted. Eight were from the U.S., one from Spain, one from India and one from Iran. If you are a reader from another country, do you have an interest in clay? Are you curious about the lives of American potters? Unless you just stumbled across the blog because you Googled "mouse" or "Inna" or something else similarly accidental, and if you would like to talk about clay and art, you can e-mail me at mimi@mimistadlerpottery.com. Liven up the basement with dialogue!

Exercise for Brain and Website

The website rebuilding resumes. I am re-taking photos so that they will all be properly sized for the site. Meanwhile, Web-a-Deb builds the site again from scratch, using Wordpress this time.

Reno Inna House, Studio Has Mouse; and Seder Plates

Forsythia and daffodils are blooming yellow, and here are those blue starry flowers whose name I don’t know, too. Spring arrived before Passover, which is great, because all the prep work is lightened (I almost said leavened) by the growing awareness of leaves and blossoms around me renewing themselves with young energy.

Remember I asked What is It? It is a Seder plate, of course. I ended up not making the little bowls that go with it- yet. After Passover (ironically) I will have time to do that. Meanwhile, a few of these Seder plates are drying in the studio this week. Too late for this year’s Passover, they are good items to have on hand all year for the random customer looking for “something else.”

Considering that I am still evolving a Seder plate design (it’s YEARS in the evolution!), the shank bone, parsley, egg, lettuce leaf and horseradish root look okay, but that bowl of charoset…not.

I kind of like the double rim. I am reserving overall judgment on these plates till they have been glaze-fired.

All but Passover prep and kitchen renovation are put aside for now.

As for the process known as kitchen ‘reno’, first comes the ‘demo’ of everything but the cabinets, then installation of the ‘lino’. Counters and appliances (that get no abbreviation- except the ‘fridge’) are in, and eventually we will get the friendly old farmhouse wallpaper (with its stripes of red, yellow and blue fruit) removed, and paint applied.

This has consumed lots of mental energy. If not for the occasional walk in the great outdoors, I might’ve missed the daffodils in the back yard, which I culled and planted years ago from my friend Thea’s daylily bed. Thea is gone, but the daffs keep opening their bright sturdy ruffles every April, reminding me as always of Thea’s feistiness.

There were signs of a mouse- named, in the absence of a vote, Melvis- in the studio, but luckily for the little rodent, now it seems that Melvis has left the building. With the renovation going on, and doors open, it must have scampered right in, how-do-ya-do, and its one foray into the food pantry (“ooh, Swiss Fudge cookie! Squeak squeak happy happy!”) got me calling the exterminator in a blink. No house friendship with mice, no matter how cute they are in the woods. If they have been reading kids’ books and getting ideas- “Come inside, Mr. Bird,” said a mouse. “I’ll show you what there is in a people house,”- they’d best forget ‘em.

Eleven days to the first Passover Seder. Digging out from under the (not quite complete) reno. Buying groceries, planning the menu, cleaning everywhere, hoping to have a kitchen to cook in soon.

It's 10 PM. Do You Know Where our Winner Is?

Winner of the drawing for two mugs is none other than.....Drum roll.....
Naomiliba!

Naomiliba, the mugs will be winging their way to you tomorrow. Congratulations! Hope you enjoy them!
All of you who subscribed, thank you so very much for reading and for feedback.
There will be another drawing for some other neat thing down the line. All blog followers will be eligible.
And in other news- Stay tuned for the arrival of my new, redone, overhauled, functional, tuches-kickin' pottery website! It is evolving even as I write this, and will be emerging from quarantine all healed and robust in only a few more weeks.

What is it?

Before you answer this riddle, here's a reminder: If you haven't signed up to follow or subscribe to my blog, now's a good time. You will be instantly entered into the drawing for 2 very nice and completely free mugs. Thursday, March 31st, is your last day to get into the drawing! I delve into the lottery hat Friday morning.
Now for the "What is it?" or, better yet, "What will it be?" photo:

Hint: It's about halfway there.

Skipper and Scooter Get Markers

Sitting on the back deck one sunny hour earlier this week, my husband and I realized our neighbor and friend, M., was digging in her flowerbed nearby.
“Planting?” I asked her. M. planting is a sure sign of spring.
“No- I’m burying my bird,” she told us.
“Oh! I’m sorry!”
“He died a few months ago,” she said. The little bird had been in the garage freezer till the snow melted and the ground was soft enough to dig. She pointed out where her other bird had been buried a few years ago. There was a brick over that spot. M. was thinking of putting a brick over this one, too.
M. is creative in both her personal and professional life. I suggested she make a grave marker for each of the birds in my studio. Last evening, she came by and did so. It didn’t take very long, maybe forty minutes from start through cleanup.
She was able to roll out a 1/2” thick piece of clay quick as can be, using my slab roller. M. cut them into shape and cleaned up the edges. She put to use bird and flower stamps, and other stamps I have made over the years from clay and plaster.

Skipper and Scooter, remembered!