Magic Reindeer Food!........

Well its not like me to sew things, (far to clean and precise for my hands) but around this time of year I do try to get involved with my children's school and offer some help with making these...............

Magic Reindeer Food!
Little hessian sacks filled with glitter and oats for children to sprinkle on the ground on Christmas Eve for Santa and his reindeer Sleigh. (Ahh I think I want to be a child again.) This is one of our Christmas Eve rituals and they add an extra bit of magic to Christmas.

Mmmm but when you make fifty of them, it does get a bit tedious.
I'm so glad they are all done now!

                                   

Tiny and Porcelain

Well I opened the kiln ages ago ,but have just been swamped with different projects, work at school, initialising my shop set up with Not on the High Street and Reindeer Bags, (don't ask!) alongside juggling childrens clubs,school and no chance of an afternoon playing with clay, I don't think that's going to be possible until the new year. This time of year is manic and I never feel it gets done right. But oh well I'm quite pleased with these finished small pieces I showed you in my last blog.

Storm Cloud Brooch Pin

Storm Cloud Ear Studs

These are listed on Folksy

Art Nouveau Tile Brooch

Owl Brooch Pin.

Storm Cloud Hair Slides

Little Stem Hair Slides

Polka Style Buttons 

Little tiny pieces of Art

Putting the stoneware and terracotta clays aside for the time being and working on some tiny porcelain pieces that I've been considering for a while. I have some silver jewellery fastenings that I'm going to use with these porcelain pieces.

The smaller discs are going to be ear studs and the larger discs will be brooch pins.



A selection of buttons and pendants,some left clear to experiment with later.



Rain cloud brooch pin discs and ear studs.



And not forgetting all the stuff that helped me make them



My new glaze test results after the firing

A few weeks ago I blogged about some new glazes that I had been mixing up and trying out. After a fairly successful firing last week these were retrieved from the kiln.As you can see they are very different from the original colours.

The ones marked with the stars above will are the ones I like and the ones I think suit my work best, so I will buy larger quantities of these glazes.

I used one of the glazes on this soap dish (110 Autumn Tones) Its quite an attractive bluey grey with coppery tones, so it will be added to my glaze collection.

Christmas Decorations in the making....

Preparation for some Tree decorations, I'm changing the decorations this year partly because I have less time to do them and also because I just want to offer a few individual ones and less of a "conveyor belt style" opperation in my workshop. It seems in recent years I have had so many at different stages and then when they all come out of the kiln it takes so long matching and putting into sets. So I'm taking the "less is more" approach so I can concentrate on other work.
Here is what I've come up with so far:


A selection of the Christmas Tree decorations at bone dry stage.



Amongst some of the usual stars and hearts I have made some cubes using my little owl stamp and the tile decorations are stamped with various decorations and are ready for sanding.

These will also hang on the tree, but the thread holes are hidden.

The tiles getting some sanding attention before the bisque firing. These will be threaded with wire throught the two top holes when finished. I'll post more photos when they are fired.