Traditions... and holiday acts of kindness.

As the holiday season approaches, I find myself thinking about some of my family's traditions.. trips to go picking apples in Mexico, NY in the fall... Mom's special Halloween pumpkin cookies... and especially spreading holiday cheer to those around us.

Every year for Christmas, after opening presents with my parents and brother, we would pack up and drive to Western NY to see all of our family. One thing we always made sure to pack for the trip was the jar of candy canes and everyone we came across on that trip we would give one to and wish them a Merry Christmas. The lady in the tollbooth on the interstate, the man working the gas station, our waitress at lunch... anyone working the holiday while others were home with family and friends. You wouldn't believe the effect that the simple act of taking the time to acknowledge someone, give them a little something and with them some good will has. Many people will stop, give you a smile, thank you, tell you about their holiday plans... and their whole demeanor changes.

In the past years when I have traveled for the holidays (usually flying) I would pack the side pockets of my backpack with all kinds of candy canes and continue with the family tradition. The ladies at the ticket counter (who said it was the 1st thing they had eaten all day because they were so busy), the guys scanning luggage who stopped to smile and wish me the same, the people at security, the ticket counter, all stopped and thanked me and their demeanor completely changed. Some asked for an extra couple to give to their friends & coworkers working with them and in some cases they remembered me later on.

Remember that huge fiasco some years back with the luggage getting piled up at airports and flights being canceled over and over during Christmas? I was stuck right in the middle of it. I arrived at the airport here at 6am expecting to be through Laguardia and at the airport in Buffalo by late morning. I lost count of how many of my flights got canceled that day, sometimes within minutes of being re-booked they would take my tickets back (because that flight canceled too) and put me on yet another one. I had to pick my baggage up repeatedly and haul it all over with me and I was moved back and forth between flights & airlines. On the umpteenth flight I was put on they finally accepted my bags and I went to go through the HUGE line at security for my 3rd time that day. As I approached the end of a very long line, 2 airport security people I had given candy canes to and wished a Merry Christmas many hours previous on my 1st trip through security actually remembered me. The girl stopped me and thanked me yet again, asked for my boarding pass and told me to follow her. She took me to an alternate line and told them to stamp my pass. I didn't realize what it meant until I was moved into a much shorter line for military people and the like and they grinned and processed me through. She accompanied me, thanking me again for brightening their day and explaining that since I was so nice to think of them and as I had made it through security twice already that day, she didnt see a reason for me to stand in that long line again.

Because I work for a place that never closes I don't have the chance to travel for the holidays alot so I do what I can to spread the holiday cheer right where I am. After my semi-annual cookie baking marathon I make up smaller bags and take them with me when I am around town. The UPS guy at staples actually giggled and then hid his cookies under the counter so his boss wouldn't walk off with them. The guy at the UPS store who is rarely friendly actually stopped and cracked a smile. After giving me a 'what is wrong with you' look, the cop sitting in the strip mall parking lot actually grinned and said I made his day. There are so many people that you come across, drive by, or who are right there every day that we don't see... and especially during the holidays when everyone is overworked, stressed out and just fed up, its the perfect time to do something about it.

Take me for instance this weekend. I took my dogs out to walk around the flea market at the fairground (no, we didn't buy any fleas)... and it was cold! Not like up home cold, but still,,, 40 windy and rainy.. miserable weather to say the least. After I had enough I took the girls home, passing my some of the many Christmas tree lots in town to get us back into the warmth of the house and out of this crappy weather that was jsut getting worse as it got colder and started to rain harder.

After I got home, it hit me.. having just heard on the news earlier that day how all these people are struggling to make a living selling Christmas trees with the economy so bad... this is their one shot for the year and they have alot riding on it. Here I am racing home to get some warmth and I see them out there sitting huddled under tents... sleeping in pop-up campers and using port-a-johns in this weather, just to make a living... I needed to do something.

I headed out to Wal-mart and loaded up on hand & foot warmers and dug out my envelope of coupons from the latest Citypass book. The coupons are generally for buy a sub, get one free.. things like that.... and if you aren't familiar with the warmers... they are little heat packs that are air activated and you stuff in your boots/gloves to keep your fingers and toes warm for up to 10 or 18 hours.

I hit 7 tree lots over the course of the next couple hours... most of them were guys in their late 20's, early 30's.. wearing carharts and huddled up out of the rain however they could be. Of all the places I hit I only saw 3 people actually there and buying.. the weather wasn't helping at all. The reactions were great.. the guys knew what the warmers were and were so happy, thanking me while the others hollered over wanting to know what I had given them that they were cheering about... some started right off deciding who was going to go get everyone some food... their eyes lit up and they actually smiled. I didn't stick around.. just gave them the pile of things, wished them a happy holiday and left. Many of them stood there smiling and waving while I drove out. The last 2 lots I hit weren't near any coupons I had so I made a stop at burgerking (they just loved me) and bought a pile of burgers and fries. I hit the last 2 lots and passed the food out, along with more packs of warmers. One guy just stood there looking at me, not sure what to say... I smiled, told him to have a good day and hopping in my truck to leave. As I pulled out I saw him in my rear view mirror stuffing fries in his mouth and waving. At the last place, one of the guys was so unsure of the whole thing he stood there with an odd look asking questions... "But why? Who is it from? How come?" he honestly couldn't process why someone would do something like that. I told him it was a crappy day and I appreciate what they are out there doing and wanted to brighten their day. He was still standing there when I left, looking puzzled.

Why am I telling you all of this? Well for a couple reasons.

Like the last guy I came across, people today just aren't accustomed to others being nice to them for no reason, especially around the holidays and there is something inherently wrong with that. Its called a random act of kindness.. and far too few people practice them. I have had huge "free-sales" in my yard (a yard sale, except everything is free.. and it is advertised as such) and have had people tell me they felt wrong just taking things that someone is giving freely. We should be much more open to doing things for people... beacuase we appreciate what they do and the sacrifices they make, because they need it and we have the ability to do something about it... or just because!

The second reason I have told you all of this is to inspire you.. I think more people should have traditions like this and should do random things to help others or simply to make someone's day a little brighter. While you are out running errands, shopping, or doing whatever you do this holiday season (and every day) see what you can do to make a complete stranger's day better... because it feels good... and you never know what your actions will do for someone else... or how they might come back around to you. :)

Kilntastrophe...

Its one of those good news bad news good news bad news situations...

Good news, the mug looks cool.. bad news the bottom is absolutely horrible... good news, I managed to save it... bad news, plenty of blood... good news, the blue turned ugly mustard yellow pieces are blue again... bad news, I completely destroyed one of my dremel heads. Good news, no glaze got on my kiln shelves... bad news, I can't type for crap with these band aids on my fingers!

I ran a couple pieces in my kiln yesterday with one of my favorite glazes from the studio on some pieces that were in the to be tossed box. At the studio, if your pieces sit on the shelves for more than 3 months they become fair game for anyone who wants to take them. I found a couple, one of which belonged to a guy who used to come to the studio but who has since moved away. His name is Bob and he made the coolest sets of wheel-thrown mugs. I got one of the mugs and gave one to another girl to mess with. Granted I have no idea what kind of clay it was made of (which does matter) but I decided to see how one of my favorite glazes worked on this mug since the glaze was just re-mixed a couple days ago. Besides being a little thick I think the temp was just to much for it. I peeked in to see how it was doing early in the firing and it looked like old peeling paint. The glaze pooled at the bottom of the mug and adhered it very strongly to the pieces of unglazed plate that I had it sitting on to protect my kiln shelves.

After an hour of chipping the pieces & glaze off with a big hammer and very small flat-headed screwdriver I ground it down so I didn't gash my hand open any more than I already had. I managed to finish off one of my dremel bits pretty well too.



I'm sure my neighbors just love me for all the noise I was making but one of them started in with a leaf blower so that helped. I'm pretty used to being the weird neighbor anyways... LOL

This is what the Bobmug looks like after all that work, not bad if you don't look at the bottom of it. I stuck a bunch of felted adhesive pads to the bottom of it, it will do for something to take to work and use.

All kinds of stuff...

Well the weather has definitely taken a turn, it was 30 this morning with a "high" in the low to mid 40's. The chill has definitely set it. We actually saw flurries twice last week but nothing enough to stick, here's hoping. According to some sources we're overdue for a big storm this winter... it has been 5 years since we've actually seen any snow. I'm kind of hoping we have another storm like in 2000, one that shuts everything down. Its kind of exciting (for a while) and reminds me of winters up home in NY... and then the fun part.. after a few days it all melts away! :)

I saw this linked to WRAL.com and thought it was pretty funny.

This week I got some of my stuff back from the fused glass class... and I have already worn a couple pair of the earrings. I'll be taking a fused glass class and a fused glass ornament class in a couple weeks so there is more to come. Yay!




I also did Raku for the first time... it was a class at the studio. If you aren't familiar with Raku its kind of messy but really cool. You fire ceramic pieces in a gas fired kiln fast (in 45 minutes or so) to about 1900 degrees and then take them out with tongs and put them into buckets packed with newspaper, cardboard, pine straw and other things like that and cover them after they flame up so the pieces smolder in there for a while. You use special raku glazes and after they have smoldered for a while, take the tongs and move them from the buckets to a water bath to cool them down. After the bath comes the messy part, you take them to the sink with a kitchen scrubby and scrub all the gunk off of them from being in the fires. I had one piece split in the kiln and one broke in half in my hands while scrubbing but everything else survived.

These are some of my pieces from the firing... they are all small textured footy bowls.




This is a mug, also from the raku firing. It was disproportionate so I didn't plan on using it for a mug, so it seemed a good idea to use for raku. Believe it or not that is all one kind of glaze, it jsut came out in different colors from the process.




We have a craft show in 2 weeks so I'm working on some new pieces for that as well.. the kiln is running a high fire load right now actually, trying to fix the ugly mustard yellow pieces back to that beautiful blue that I loved. I don't know if it will work but its worth a try. I low fire for 4+ hours to about 1915 degrees and high fire for 8+ hours to about 2230 degrees. My kiln is programmable so you set it up using the temperature you want to get to in the end in a formula based on hours you want to run and how many degrees you expect it to go up in each hour or "segment" of the firing.

I fired some other pieces earlier this week, some worked, some uh.. had minor issues. This bowl had structural issues underneath from the start so I wasn't really surprised that it broke... I'm going to give it so someone at the studio who does mosaics so she can smash it up for her pieces. The picture of it came out pretty amusing, Skye's devil dog eyes glaring through the bottom like some footage from ghost hunters.

Swap-what???

You probably haven't heard of it but if you are creative or love getting mail... you need to know it. Its called Swapbot and its awesome. I know there has been some press, my mom recently sent me an article from the paper after I had told her about it.

Swapbot is a site for people from all over the world to engage in all types of creative projects and send them to each other. To name just a few, I've seen or been involved with swaps for: postcards, letters, magnets, handmade items, Christmas cards, surprise packages and much more. There are also plenty of things I've not made and have seen or only heard of called inches, whimsey jars, dotee dolls, altered everything you can think of and so much more.

Honestly I can't even remember how I ended up in Swapbot but I am so glad I did, it a great place to meet incredible people and find lots of inspiration. I have made and sent all kinds of things: notebooks, handmade magnets, lots of handmade ceramic/pottery pieces, cards, notes and much more... and in return I have received some awesome things: an incredible cross stitched piece pic here handmade magnets, wine corks, sea glass, shells, note pads, pens, all sorts of neat things from other countries lots of fun surprises. I learned what RAK meant, after I had done one and was thanked for it... and sent a message saying what?? RAK means Random Act of Kindness... which was I had done, sending someone just because I wanted to.. one was a thank you for something and another was a jsut because package... which I love sending... a random surprise package just because I wanted to and thought you needed a lift. I've been involved in flooding people with birthday cards, sending surprises to someone's daughter and jsut brightening someone's day.

Believe it or not there are even some guys on Swapbot now, and they are always looking for more to join their ranks. So, if you are just surfing the web aimlessly, maybe you should head on over and check it out, you might just love it :)

Ceramics/Pottery...

So this is my little studio (yea I so need a bigger place) but I love it all the same. I have downsized my dining area a couple times to make more studio space, thankfully I have alot of counter space to work with.

This is my wheel, it was the very 1st piece I got, thanks so much to my gram.



As you can see space is at a premium but I'm looking into some of those adjustable stainless shelves from Lowe's. We had a set years ago and abused them constantly and they took it and survived perfectly.. unfortunately I'm not sure what happened to them. So, that's what I'm planning, it should make for lots more space.



This is my kiln, its nice and small and the best part, it runs on standard household current and doesn't need a 220 stove/dryer outlet to run it. I had wanted a kiln for a long time but for many reasons, (like I rent and don't want to do a major electrical overhaul anyways), I really wanted something small and household. Thanks in large part to a lady named Susan Schumpert who is in sales for Olympic Kilns, I finally got my chance. I had been looking at kilns for some time but they are very expensive and I'm wasn't real trusting of something off craigslist that would cost me hundreds of dollars and may or may not work. After emailing back and forth with Susan for a few months she finally came up with a sale that I jumped at, 20% off of the kiln, 20% off the included shelf kit and free shipping. That may not sound like much but shipping, even on a little kiln is $100 and I only live a few hours from where it was sent. The sale saved me more than $200 and I finally got my kiln!

With some help I set it up and went to plug it in and freaked out because I couldn't! I was expecting the typical (happy face) household outlet but instead got this:



It turned out they had just changed the plug design and hadn't published that fact. It sat for a month while I waited very impatiently for the electrician but my dad saved the day and got everything working when Mom & Dad came down for their 1st Habitat build in Siler City, NC. I've fired many times now, the most recent one has just finished and is cooling you can hear the glass cracking every now and then.

Part of what is in the kiln right now are some re-fires of glass in clay pieces that didn't come out right the 1st time. Some of them looked like this:

Some of the others didn't have enough glass so I added more and melted them again. These pieces confused me at first until I realized what had happened, they are the same pieces! On the left is what they looked like after high firing with blue rutile glaze (which I love!), I then re-fired them at a lower temp to melt the glass, which didn't go so well and couldn't figure out why I had so many mustard yellow pieces. (Just for the record I don't like mustard or yellow) I then realized that because the glaze 'cooks' at about 2230' and I re-fired it to about 1900' to melt the glass, I had actually managed to negate the blue color in the process. The glass didn't come out well so I think it needs some 2230' as well. I am using 3 kinds of glass for these pieces:

-sea glass (which seems to be mostly chunks of old mason jars), a great find from Dorcas (the best thrift store ever).

-stained glass mosaic pieces from Joanne's/Michaels/A.C. Moore

-stained glass "rice"pieces from Michaels... very very small pieces of colored glass

The stained glass (below pic) melts pretty well in the 1900' range but failed to melt well in earlier attempts at lower temps. From what I've read it should melt at about 1600' but not well from what I've seen so far. The sea glass (above pic) seems to need a higher temp to melt so I will be trying it at the 2230' range sometime soon.

This is one of my recent experimental pieces:

The picture doesn't really do it justice but you get the idea. Glass is pretty touchy, you have to heat and cool it slowly or it breaks, but that is the point with what I'm doing. I actually use my clay firing program for the glass, it heats to 1915' degrees, then I turn the kiln off and it cools pretty fast. I will be able to get the pieces out tomorrow probably around late morning/early afternoon. I'm purposely cooling the glass too fast so it develops lots of hairline cracks inside it like you can see in the picture. Actually right now I'm listening to the snap-crackle-pop of the kiln, its not the clay, its all the glass cracking. Clay breaking is quite a bit louder and much more of a sharp noise. I've been told that large clay pieces can sound like a gun shot if they crack while firing in the big kilns at the studio.

Here are a few of the recent successes, you can see the difference between the milky colored glass and the clear glass with a color in it.



Well tomorrow we will find out if there was success in the re-firing, if not it will be re-re-re-fired again or donated into the to be smashed collection. I've found a few people at the studio who do mosaics in various forms who love handmade ceramic pieces to add uniqueness to their pieces and have already given away a box of pieces I hated. They prefer them whole so they can smash the pieces themselves (what fun is that for me??) but I went along with it. Its actually a pretty cool journey... pieces I made and tried a few times to fix or make work, and just absolutely hated will now be smashed and will find new life in the creations of another artist.

Babbling...

I've never been much of one for the whole blog concept but hey.. why not? I take a ton of pictures and its a good place to put them to use :)

So about me.. I'm a network engineer (read computer geek) and have been for 10 years now. I have 2 dogs and a cat who I love to death.



Zoe is 9+ years old and kind of like that roommate that you have who lives there and exists but that's about it. She will come in and announce herself or just scream if she wants something but other than that her highness prefers to lay on the daybed with her huge stuffed dog or sleep on her fuzzy blanket and pillow and watch the world go by out on the street. Her favorite person in the world is my dad and she will even brave the dogs to come downstairs and see him when they are visiting.

Shelby and Skye are my big furballs.



Shelby is 6, she is half rot and the rest lab/sheppard. Skye is 3 and we believe she is half cattle dog (ACD) and the rest lab and pit. They are both rescues, Shelby was born in an abandoned house with her 7 sisters and rescued by the neighbors who run a horse farm north of Raleigh. I got her on Father's day at an adoption fair at Petsmart.



Skye was seen wandering in the country and was picked up by animal control. The day I got her she looked like a yeti and was covered in ticks, it took me 3 hours sitting on the deck to remove them all. She was also heartworm positive. Many vet visits later she is now going on 2 years heartworm free and looks quite a bit different after getting shaved down.



This is the 2 of them waiting impatiently for the 'big truck'. They can hear the diesel engine of Dad's truck coming and freak out when it gets close.



When I'm not at work I love to do pottery. I took a ceramics class in college and have been in love with it since. I finally got back into it last year. Now I have a wheel and a small kiln of my own and am looking to get a slab roller soon. I haven't named it, even though it is bugging my friends and is considered bad karma but nothing has really come to mind so I'm just letting it ride.

My work is different, and varies depending on where the clay takes me. I like coming home from work and just playing.. alot of times I don't even know what I've made until I'm done. One thing I've definitely learned, you can't make the clay always do what you want, sometimes it just doesn't want to. Often times its more interesting to just go with the clay and see where it takes you. I am a very tactile person and love texture. When people look at my pieces and want to touch them sometimes they apologize, and I tell them not to. Thats what I do to! I makes things that you look at and think wow, I want to see how that feels becuase it looks cool... belive me I do it all the time :)

Here are a couple of my current favorites (they change often).



This was one of my early pieces but still remains a favorite, probably even more so right now because I entered it in a competition. It took 4th place at the 2008 North Carolina State Fair. I had only a week's notice before entries were due so I didn't have time to prepare something else but I am very happy with it. I intend on entering a piece in ceramics again next year and am thinking about entering my grandmother's chocolate cookies too.



This one just came out of the kiln this week... I call it my Splat Plate because of its shape. All of the marks in it were made with stamps that I carved.

I have also been experimenting with what I call "CTCs" short for Ceramic Trading Cards, a spin-off on the concept of ATCs. I've got a couple series of them out so far on my flickr account.



My newest things is seeing how I can over-fire glass in my ceramics pieces to make it crack and bring out the piece more. There aren't pics yet but there will be soon. I'm also going to be in another fused glass class next week, pics will follow of course :) I love taking Paula's classes its a nice short couple hours to make whatever you want and not worry about the details of having to fire it :)