I'll never be your pizza burning.

I've been making brooches with ceramic textures.

Here are some templates for the backs of the brooches.

Next I have to saw those shapes out of copper for the backings.

I love how they look before they're put together. All those lines poking out will be prongs to hold the ceramic pieces in place. They'll be bent up and over the clay. But I can't help loving how they are right now. They're awkward and pokey and look like a bunch of weird amoeba with cilia.

I've also been making a lot more bracelets,

with more variety in sizes and glazes.

Here they are before firing.

They're going in the kiln tomorrow.

And, of course, no project is complete without "help" from the cat.

This is what happens when she decides to get a little too hands on. Or tail on.

Jess should rename her "Cruella Deville" or "Stacey London".

All I've got is mud on my knees.

I'm making jewelry out of dirt.

Ceramic bracelets, with glazes that make me happy it's spring...

Why I'm in love with Richmond...

The James River

It's possibly the dirtiest "clean" river I've ever seen.

And it's so beautiful.

I'm really enjoying these panoramic photos.

It's such a good way to capture how gorgeous it is.

You can click on them to see the larger versions.

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If you think the panoramics are cool,

you should check out these stereographic projections.

This one's my favorite:

I hit the rowdy road, and many kinds I met there.

SPRING MEANS:

panoramic photographs at Belle Isle

My roots go down, down to the earth.

Two Sundays ago, I planted some seeds. 

Here are my green bean plants now. In two weeks.

Some of the biggest ones are already a foot or more tall.

Does that seems incredibly fast to anyone else?

They're magic beans.

Maybe I'll end up with stalks that grow through the ceiling.

Now I need to build a trellis for them to climb onto.

Falling over your rocky spine.

Beginning a series of ceramic jewelry...

Two cats in the yard.

I've been thinking a lot about the ways in which the structures we live in influence our lives. This past semester was all about creating a body of work - sort of a senior project - and so I made pieces inspired by my memories of houses I lived in as a child.

I started off fabricating small boxes out of metal. Each one is based on a house from my childhood. They're also inspired by the spice boxes used for havdalah, which are traditionally shaped like houses, castles, or windmills. Instead of putting in the usual spices (cloves and cinnamon), I mixed various smells together so each house box smells like my memory of the house it's based on.

Each of these is about 2 1/2 inches tall.

I spent a lot of time playing around with surface treatment

(etching, solder inlay, enamel paint, chasing, oxidation)

and mechanisms (hinges, tension fittings, clasps, and some

sort of sliding technique that has no name that I know of).

Here are the four of them displayed for my final critique.