Decisions, Decisions...

 Ta Da!...here are four pictures of the same icon box....one of them will be how I do the photos for my Etsy shop...anyone out there have an opinion?....FYI, this is Saint Giles, patron saint of those who fear the night.

Then There Was All This Ice

The snow was pretty...but then there was all this ice.  I'm really, really glad I don't live in North Dakota!  I do love my neighborhood though...people sledding on the golf course  (ignoring all the posted no sledding signs) on the oddest things....cookie sheets, street signs, laundry baskets, skate boards with no wheels, surf boards....kayaks...someone even built a big bonfire...right in front of the golf shop!  But right now there's still just too much ice....

Even with so many days off it was hard to get much done in the shed.  Just getting there was a challenge...I did make two more icon boxes and some more Hamsa hands.  I started a goddess but she met with an unfortunate accident  involving the floor and ultimately the trash bin...pity.

Real Saints Wear Plaid....Sometimes

These are Saint Lawrence (patron saint of cooks) and Saint Valentine (patron saint of the unlucky in love) icon boxes...the small blop next to St Valentine is a heart bead that will be hanging from him somewhere...or not...I guess it will all depend if I can locate the bead in the ashes when I raku it! You can't really tell in the picture but Saint Valentine is wearing plaid...no particular reason...it just seemed the thing to do.  After these have been raku fired I'll add beads and springy wires and charms. I have a photographer friend coming tomorrow to take photos of some of the finished icon boxes for my Etsy shop...I'll post some of those pictures here also...they really are quite nice when they're finished.
There's a festival coming up in May that I've entered and I'm planning on mainly taking icon boxes and hamsa hands...I really do need to get busy!

Hamsa Hands and a Dog Backpack

This is Rufus, my kind of large white shepherd.  He usually goes to the shed with me but it seems lately I've been taking stuff back and forth and needing to use my car more....Rufus has issues jumping into the back of the car....anyway, I think I'm going to get one of those dog backpack things and let him carry my supplies and we'll walk to the shed....just a thought.

 Mother Earth is all tidied up and drying under a mass of plastic. I used up the rest of the clay I had slabbed for her on Hamsa hands.  I made five yesterday morning and then stopped by after work and cleaned the edges up and added the eyes...I'm hoping to stop at the shed again tonight after work and finish the clean up on them.  I don't know when it will be warm enough to raku fire but I'm totally out of Hamsas...which is never a good position to be in.

Geographic Liberties

My apologies to any countries I have negated in my attempt to make the earth stay together and have places to rest in Mother Earth's hands.
That being said...I really like the way she's turning out.  She might be finished....I'll know better tomorrow...it helps if I can come back later and then decide if I want to do any tweaking.  At the moment though I think she's well tweaked.....I'm pleased!

Happy New Year

                 Happy New Year from the shed!


I spent today working on Mother Earth...she'll be holding the earth with the oceans cut out so you can put an incense cone in the middle of the earth (at least that's the plan so far)....anyway, it's been a while since I've worked with anything but porcelain and at one point today things were going so badly I decided to remove mother's head (which I liked), dispose of the wonky body and start over with a new body tomorrow...but, I started adding branches for hair and she became more appealing...wonk and all...so, I think I'll keep going with her.

The top picture is Mother Earth's too heavy head being held up with a sponge awaiting her fate (I think she looks a bit worried).
The other two pictures are prehands and mid hair (branches)... I'll probably add more hair tomorrow and some branches around her base and maybe some birds..... and cut the oceans out from the earth...which I made on a very wee balloon that I almost passed out from trying to blow up.
She looks a little bit like my grandma Fox when she was young.  The nose perhaps.