Jenyfer Matthews

I’m even posting a day early!

I’m still working on unpacking boxes and so far so good for the most part. It’s amazing how much trash you can manage to stash away in the corners and closets of your home just in case. Having just spent several thousand dollars to ship empty appliance boxes, plastic grocery bags, rag clothes, and expired medications ask me how I know.

I have been working my way through things, box by box. Some things I need to unwrap just to see if they made it okay and am just as quickly putting them back in their boxes for now. Most things made it just fine, however the couple of things I have found that broke so far were very wrenching. One was a large ceramic plate that goes with a beautiful Vietnamese tea set that I bought in the Russian Market in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. The other casualty was the large pottery lizard I made myself in Cairo. Why on earth they thought it would be okay to stand it on end on its tail – the most vulnerable part of the entire piece – is a mystery to me. Ironically, another large plate that matched the dishes which were part of our furnished apartment made it just fine, though in fact it ought to have stayed behind. Oh well.

I’ve also had two sick children home this week. When my son told me he didn’t feel well on Monday morning, I was skeptical. He’d been just fine all weekend when it came to birthday parties and a sleepover so it seemed a little convenient that he’d be sick just in time for school. As it turned out, he wasn’t faking. After he had a fever for the second day running and his throat became so sore he found it painful to speak, I took them both to the doctor. The doctor suspects strep throat. I’m hoping that I can nip it in the bud in my daughter’s case, but it looks as if they will be home for the remainder of the week.

While I was at the store waiting for their prescriptions to be filled, I took a spin around and found some raspberries on the discount rack. I love raspberries. I decided to buy these to make a raspberry sauce. Since we still have a few carrot cup-cakes in the freezer from my birthday last week (with frosting in the fridge) I was thinking of sticking the raspberry sauce in the freezer and keeping it for Valentine’s Day when I could make a shortcake to go with it. Having taken a look in my stuffed-to-the-gills freezer I think I’ve gotten way far ahead of myself! Perhaps I should just make some waffles instead.

Anything to get away from boxes for a while…

I started taking pottery classes with another tennis mom a little more than a year ago (with time off for summer and other assorted holidays) in exchange for a couple of quilts. I glazed the items that I’d produced thus far and she fired them while I was away in the US.

You know what they say about the best laid plans. I am not very experienced in making pottery, but I do know that try as you might, things don’t always come out as you might expect them to. There might be an air bubble in the clay that causes a pot to crack in the kiln or the glazes might mix in unexpected ways or the kiln might heat unevenly. There are also times when something really wonderful happens that you might like to reproduce and you’ll never know just how repeat it.

I picked up my things this week and it was a mixed bag. Some things were as I thought they would be…and some thing were not.

(click image to enlarge)

This was one of the first items I did (shows, doesn’t it??) A pinch pot (made by pinching the clay) was supposed to be glossy green on top, black underneath. Hmmm… Good thing I wasn’t terribly concerned with how this one came out!

It’s prettier underneath – where the glaze stuck, that is!

I made this little pot on the wheel and when it got a bit wonky at the top after we transferred it to the table to dry, I whacked the sides to square it up. The glaze is a dull pewter (which shows fingerprints terribly!) and the inside was glazed black. It looks better inside than out!

I did this jug on the wheel too. Again, a bit wonky on top so rather than cut it off, I formed it into a lip and added a handle. Voila. More dull pewter with black inside. Again, prettier inside than out!

I made this mask based on a picture I took of a ceramic mask my friend has. I don’t mind the color of this one, but a crack developed across the front (near what would be her hairline) and the glaze blistered on her nose. However, I kind of like this one because it looks like something I might have excavated myself.

This is a slab bowl – pretty quick and easy to construct. Just roll out a piece of clay, cut it to shape, drape it over another object and let it dry.

I had what I thought was a great idea – I crushed up a green wine bottle and sprinkled it on a couple of pieces, hoping to get a high gloss glass coating. As you see, once again the green glaze failed, the black underneath vanished, and I have a bowl that looks as if it has a blob of green wax stuck to it.

It looks much better from the side!

A big lesson I took away from this experience is to always do a test tile when working with unfamiliar glazes / materials. However, since this wasn’t my kiln it wasn’t really up to me.

This lizard is hand built and I futzed around with it for weeks to get it right. So can you imagine my disappointment that the glass didn’t melt properly? I may try to “fix” this one with some ceramic paints that I can bake on in my own oven.

This is by far my favorite pot of the bunch and is the only one that pretty much came out as I planned it to. This one is also hand built, a coil pot. I had intended to mount a small antler or a piece of drift wood in the hole in the lid. The antler I have is the right size, but doesn’t the mount pieces don’t quite fit flush and the drift wood I have is a wee bit too small. I’ll be back in the land of antlers and driftwood soon enough so either I guess I’ll wait and see what I find.

So there it is, my first and last pottery exhibition. I won’t let it put me off pottery forever, but I’ll probably stick to quilting and writing for a while…

I am happy to report that the only thing injured in the process of reducing the port bottle down to pretty green glass dust were several plastic bags and my rolling pin. Even several layers of thick plastic bags are not enough to protect a wooden rolling pin from shards of glass. (The top edge of my hammer was much more effective) On one hand, I don’t use the rolling pin that much. On the other hand, I guess I’ll have to get a new one since it’s newly gauged surface won’t work as well on dough (darn it!) – unless scar-faced gingerbread men are acceptable!

I just hope that in the end, my pottery projects come out as I envision.

On another topic, housing is provided with my husband’s job and a while back we requested to be moved to a larger apartment. I’ve loved the one we are currently in for the nearly four years we lived here, however we’ve outgrown the space and the children really need their own rooms. The housing department called us on Thursday to say they had a place for us and could we move on Tuesday? My initial reaction was um…no! I’ve gotten pretty good at moving, but I’m not THAT good! The movers I called yesterday for a quote on moving our large furniture items gave me such a good quote on moving everything that I decided in the interest of my stress levels and the remaining disks in my back to let them! They also suggested they could move us on Tuesday and since they are also responsible for the packing, Tuesday it is! Fortunately, our new place is only a few blocks away so things don’t have to be packed quite as carefully as they would if we were moving countries, but it’s still a big job.

Bigger still will be the job of cleaning / sorting / unpacking on the other end!

I also wanted to report that I did try a new recipe over the weekend (February – check!) I made shrimp chowder, using a fish chowder recipe from my Jane Brody cookbook. The only things I changed were I substituted shrimp for fish, I omitted the white wine, and I added a can of corn. It was amusing how much the frozen “cooking shrimp” I bought shrunk in the process though – in the end they were so small they could have been sea monkeys! The chowder was a hit – very tasty – and I’ll definitely be making it again.

I suspect the rest of this week we’ll be eating sandwiches and pizza however!

So another interest of mine is in making pottery. I first took pottery lessons about 12 years ago and fell in love with the process. Unfortunately, it’s not such an easy hobby to take-along and so I haven’t been able work with clay since we moved abroad – until last spring when I discovered that one of the other tennis moms not only had her own equipment but also offered lessons.

So here I am, months later, getting ready to glaze my first crop of pots, and I had the great idea to add a bit of texture and shine by using bits of broken glass – specifically, the green glass of a Cockburn’s port bottle. It is a good idea and I do believe that the end result will look fabulous. The problem? Actually breaking the glass.

Because it’s not enough to just break the bottle – most of it has to be reduced to powder. I did a google search to figure out how best to accomplish this and found one site that suggested that heating glass to red hot and then plunging it in cold water would do the trick – the glass would shatter cleanly and then it was just a matter of pounding it to dust with a mortar and pestle. Easy peasy.

Forgive me, but I have my reservations. I am fully aware of how easily some glass will break when it is exposed to rapid changes in temperature, having once had a glass pitcher explode all over my kitchen while I was in the process of making iced tea. I am, however, somewhat reluctant to repeat such an experiment without safety glasses and perhaps a lead apron. Also, I think I would prefer to use non-cooking pots and instruments for the grinding process to minimize any food contamination and subsequent deaths in the pursuit of my artistic vision.

I haven’t totally formulated my plan but I’m thinking pretty low tech, perhaps involving multiple layers of plastic bags and a hammer. We’ll see what we get (besides multiple lacerations).

While I’m zooming around trying to get everything organized for my trip to Italy tomorrow, I thought I’d share some pictures with you. I’ve been meaning to get these posted for a while, but you know how it goes.

I’ve mentioned that I did a lot of shopping when I was home over the summer – but not all of it was in malls. Some of my favorite places to shop are thrift stores – or as my daughter affectionately calls them “rubbish stores”.

Not all thrift stores are created equally but if you’re patient you can often come up with some really neat things. I still have a few items of designer name clothing that I picked up for pennies at a bag day several years ago. Thinking of my luggage allowance, I was fairly discriminating this time, but I just couldn’t pass up these gems.

I love African art and I couldn’t believe my luck when I spotted these beauties sitting on a shelf amongst a clutter of coffee mugs and knick knacks. They were a steal at $12 – well worth any added weight in my baggage!

When I saw the mug below, I was instantly reminded of being a small child at my grandmother’s house. She had an entire set of dishes in a very similar glaze. I don’t want or need an entire set, so this lone mug was a wonderfully nostalgic find and only $0.35 – and they threw in a free pie spatula.

I’m off to Italy tomorrow but don’t worry – Margaret Carter will be here with an excerpt of her Cerridwen Press book Prince of the Hollow Hills, a magical sounding paranormal romance. I’ll be back bright and early next week, with pictures and news from glorious southern Italy!