Glass and porcelain love

Just added these little clear glass and porcelain ear studs to my Noths shop.

They come with sterling silver posts and scroll backs and come packaged this way.

http://www.notonthehighstreet.com/littlebrickhouseceramics/product/melted-glass-and-porcelain-ear-studs

Chaos, mud, and my church

I am working more now and trying to juggle the school position with working from home, with the added pressure of work being done to my home. (I am currently sharing my workspace with the builders, its full of packaging and builders tools.

My kiln has become a shelf for drills, spanners, hammers you name it and its not really working out, well as far as working in my workshop, so Im back in my "nook" that I made last winter to escape the cold and still get my hands in clay. (see here for that post)

On the upside our lives are changing, our living space will finally be large enough to accommodate our growing family. Currently surrounded by mud, but here is our new space. Im calling it "my Church"

I wish I could say that this will be my new workshop, but sadly no,
 it will be the main living area of my home though. 

Yuk!, this is really a horrible space now, it has become overrun with boxes and bubble wrap, which Im wading through day by day.
Hopefully I will sell loads and it will all be gone by Christmas.

Small areas of my workbench I have some soap stands drying.
I kind of have to see whether these will last with all the foot traffic through here!

Make shift shelves in the corner.
My main shelves are full of tools and other things so Ive had to dry my work out everywhere and anywhere.
Roll on spring!!

Water colour underglazes and thinking about new packaging.....

 These I am quite excited about using. Usually my glazes are made from my own mixtures from raw ingredients or they are bought ones, alternatively I tend to use oxides to decorate my work, however, I have discovered these. little watercolour underglaze tablets in a paint box. I was a bit sceptical about this as it seems such a tiny amount of glaze for the cost and its not how I usually decorate my work. They are semi-moist and should give the impression of watercolour on the clay then you have to coat them with a clear on-glaze and fire them. I am going to use them mainly on my smaller porcelain pieces of work due to their tiny size.

On scouring the internet for new packaging I stumbled across a shop on Etsy selling these parcel stickers. I tend to use alot of Espo supply boxes from school which I recycle to ship out my own ceramics. It makes sense to recycle these strong boxes which have only been used once to send paper and art supplies to the school then they tend to get broken up and destroyed unless I get to them first. The inner parts of my packaging like bubble wrap and tissue paper obviously have to be bought new but just to re-use a bit helps with recycling and keep down shipping costs to my customers.

These are the parcel stickers which now get used on my parcels
"We recycle shipping materials!"
Wish I had thought of it myself

These little Glassine bags are to be used as favour bags to hold little ceramic hearts for a  new stockist. I will post details about this when they are made.

Not too sure how I am going to use this. It was one of those internet buys that arrives and it isnt quite what you expected. For some reason I thought it had an adhesive backing so that I could use it to stick down tissue paper and seal the above bags.
Not quite. It is just a real of brown paper ribbon, not too many uses for it really. That will teach me to read descriptions properly!!

Go make soap! ....

Back in March 2011 I made a few batches of cold pressed soap and put a few of my favourite recipes on the blog, after the soap had set I sliced it into rectangles and stored it away in my airing cupboard for it to cure, its been a few months now and its colour is paler and the soap has gone hard ready to use. This soap has loads of tiny bubbles when its used and the scent is very mild. I've decided that some will be given away as small gifts this Christmas so I set about packaging it with some lovely printed papers, this is how I did it....



A selection of patterned papers to wrap around the soap.




The papers were cut into rectangles approx 25cm x 10cm and folded around each soap and secured with paper string.





Here is the cured soap I made back in March 2011. The recipe for calendula & orange soap is here, and the recipe for Goats milk a & Almond butter is here.



After the soap is wrapped I attatched a label with the soap name and ingredients onto the string

The labels were designed in a word document and printed onto regular white card.



Finished soap!