Sad day

I'm sad to say that the firing I was waiting to open this morning was not that great, lots of pieces turned out
like poop. Time to have the kiln checked and calibrated. Ayy ay ay!

July 24th is the seventh anniversary when my Mom passed away. My brothers and sisters get together on this day and her brithday every year, we celebrate mass in her memory go to the cemetery afterwards and then go home and have a gathering celebrating her life, her cooking and her love for us. I still miss her a lot, she was the glue of our family and life has not been the same since she died. This year is extra special, my oldest brother and his family will be here, he is in the military and not always can be present. So, my eight siblings and our 30 children altogether along with my Dad will have a blast.
Here is a picture of my Mom, my daughter and me.

Working Working

I have spent the last two days working in my studio. I have all these ideas that are hard to contain in my mind. So, rather than writing them all I decided to make a few of each of those ideas. Working on rings, beads, some abstract pieces and pendants. Many are just molded and given texture with my hands with the help of little dryness in the clay already. Some stamping, written mesages, and also making new molds with founbd objects from my yard (and the neighbor's). I am getting into carving a few pieces, I have some way to go in this department. I have a glaze fire that ended this morning but it's still not ready to open, specially with the hot weather here in California. I will have to wait until tomorrow morning.

Talking about hot weather, working in clay at this time is a race against time. If I get distracted clay dries too fast and things crack, that happened to two molds I made yesterday. So continuous covering of the trays and the everynow and then spray bottle action helps. But, no complaint about it, living here is just heaven....

Saturday I was gone for half an hour little after 9 pm to pick up my daughter from our local fair, went there picked her up, came back to a TP'd house. I have a beautiful big Jacaranda tree in my front yard, they covered it in paper like crazy! they even had the time to wrap my light post all around. Those kids... I have to say Christina felt somewhat happy about it, like she meant something to someone. We got the most of it right away because the sprinklers were ready to go on within minutes. We were lucky not to have all this wash down toilet paper on the grass.

I have a couple pictures here of a firing last week, this was fired to cone 5.
Some pieces were refires and for the second time they did not turn out the way I wanted. So to the pile of discards.