Mug Shot

Aaron has made his first mug (handle courtesy of Paula productions). The outside is actually a darker blue than the inside and the edges (rim and handle egdes) turned a nice brown in the kiln.


Paula's best (but not biggest) bowl to-date. The glaze turned out really nicely, and the rim at the top is dark blue. The tough part about the bowls is making sure they're symmetrical at the rim and at the bottom too.

Garden Planted

The garden has been planted and if you look closely at the pictures you will be able to see the beginning of what will be many delicious meals for both us and the rabbits in the garden. In a future post I will photoshop the pics to give you exact locations of vegetables, but for now, just a listing of the goodies we hope to harvest:

Plot A: "big boy" tomatoes, "beefsteak" tomatoes, basil, parsley, butternut squash, yellow squash, zucchinni, cucumber, red cherry tomatoes, orange "sun sweet" cherry tomatoes and marigolds to ward of bugs. The piece of fencing is the old gate to plot A and will be used for bean plant support in the future.

Plot B: cayenne peppers, cubanele peppers, white corn, pumpkins, peas, turnips, spinach, radish, marigolds and hopefully soybeans (the only unplanted crop as of yet). P.S. That is a LEGAL immigrant working the fields.

Pottery Expo

We have managed to keep up the pottery while spending a lot of time getting the garden running. Here are 2 new pieces from our collection. Paula made a new mug that matches her old mug shown here. She is the master handlemaker and anything I make that needs a handle gets gently nudged in her direction.


My latest creation is a decent sized bowl. I tried dipping the rim in a separate color than the bottom and inside of the bowl. The glaze drippped down from the rim and made a weird streaking phenomena. Kudos for making the inside of the bowl smooth, a first for me!

Spring Cleaning

The garden plots have been cleaned, tilled and fertilized with mulch and organic fertilizer. We would have started planting last weekend, but the weather did not cooperate. This weekend we will hit the dirt first thing saturday morning.


Plot B looks a little smaller, but that is because we didn't weed block the entire area. There was quite a bit of straw in the garden leftover from the previous owner, so we used that to cover the left quarter of the garden. This will be Paula's Pumpkin Patch.

Garden Baseline

For the past 2 years we have rented a 15'x15' garden plot in an organic community garden in Waltham, MA. This year, we opted for a 2nd garden plot giving us about 30'x30'. The original plan had our 2nd garden directly next to our original garden, this was ideal. However, when we arrived on the first day a new member of the garden had already cleared our 2nd garden spot and begun to plant stuff. The powers that be let him keep that plot (which should have been ours) and gave us a 2nd garden catty-corner to our original garden. Oh well - I guess the early bird gets the worm.

This is our original garden plot (above) with old weed block on it and a pile of mulch.


This is our 2nd plot. You can see our original garden in the top left corner of the image.

These are "before" images of our gardens before we started to clean them and prep for the season.

Warning

I don't want to upset our loyal pottery followers, but I must warn you that we do not plan on taking pottery classes during the summer months. The reasoning: we don't want to spend summer nights in a basement when we could be outside nurturing our garden. To keep you amused and to prevent the Pottery blog from going dormant, we have decided to gradually replace pottery updates with garden updates. While this post represents the first garden post, the pottery posts will continue through mid-June. Thank you for your time, we hope you enjoy.

Paula's swirl bowl

Slightly off-center, but a definite improvement over Paula's last attempt. It's hard to see from the photo, but there's a swirl stamped into the center of the bowl which glazed over well. Paula appears to have diverged from the dark glazes in her earlier pieces to softer, lighter shades. She's been focusing on throwing new pieces so you'll have to wait a little longer to see some of her new creations...

Daily Dish

Hope we aren't bowling you over with 2 new posts in one week. What do you think about the multi-color bowl? I actually like the bluish color, which is a red covered by a white, and will use it on a future piece.

Gone Bowl'ing

Now the pottery machine is churning out goodies left and right. That is literal because everything we make leans to the left or right and is not properly centered. We are still learning. This is Aaron's best bowl and largest creation to date.

The glaze came out very well except for a few imperfections where it flaked off in transit to the kiln. Not bad, getting better.

Closing Arguments

Sorry for the gap between posts. Our first class (semester) has ended and now we are waiting for the 2nd session to begin. Here is a cool cup to keep you amused. I really like the glaze job; the inside of the cup is a dark brown and the outside is much lighter. We are getting better at throwing larger items. I don't want to spoil the surprise, but there are 2 large bowls in the kiln that should be blog worthy in 2 weeks ;)