pottery, rocks and eggs .... well ... egg anyway ....

so .... i made a beautiful large ceramic bowl in pottery class ... it is textured and interesting and glazed with five different glazes that combine in all kinds of nuanced lovely ways .... and i put it on the coffee table ... in the family room ... as a piece d'art .... yeah right .... and my family loves and appreciates and admires it .... or not .... instead? they put the tv remotes in it .... or magazines ... or pens ... or popsicle sticks that are waiting for a trip to the trash can ... i mean, really! so .... it's easter .... i filled it with eggs .... at least if it is full of something they can't put the detritus of their lives in it, right? ..... so that go me thinking ... what to do after easter?
so .... i needed to think of something to put in the bowl .... so i made rocks ... that sounds dumb .. why make rocks when you have a whole wide world of rocks outside? well ... these rocks have words .....
and at the moment my newly made rocks with words are in a much smaller substitute bowl ....

below you can see joy ... i made a ball of clay ... smashed it flat (all very technical pottery stuff that i learned in my kindergarten days training with play-do) .... and then i pressed the words ... here, for joy, i pushed in the o first ... to center it ... because in my head, of course you need your words centered on your rocks .... even thought they certainly aren't thus in nature, huh? ... then i added the j and the y on each side ....
dream ... below.... did that e first to get it centered ... and really, i'm not a center your art kinda girl ... that's actually why i do handbuilding instead of wheel pottery these days ... but ... i guess i wasn't thinking too hard ... i just centered it .... i wasn't working outside the box .... i was just working on a rock ....
and then ... hope ... i pushed in the o and the p together .... to get them centered ... and i pulled them up ... and ... oh! ... i had done an o and a d ....... so .... i had WET easily redoable clay in my hand ... i could have wadded it up my od rock if i'd been thinking ... but somehow? i wasn't backtracking ..... i was going to think of a four letter centered word with od in the middle ... body .... lode .... toad .. nope, that would be tode .... rode ... geode ... no, too many letters ... but it woulda been cool to right a rock word on a sorta rock..... um ..... pods .... rods .... and i squashed in another d ... and got odd .... and did i mash it then to start over ... nope, not me ... i choose to embrace odd .....
so my odd rock went through the bisque fire, was underglazed black in the letters, clear glazed on top ..... and ready to go in the great big bowl after easter .... in its very own off-center-one-of-these-things-doesn't-belong way

or maybe i'll just have year round easter eggs ...

here's one i made today ....
all eggs in this post are blown ... and packed away carefully from year to year ....

do you ever blow eggs to decorate them?

have you ever had a DIY rock experience?

do you wonder what i have been painting ....and why i haven't taken pictures of them to show you the pictures?

yeah, me too ......