Summer plates

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Long, late, evenings outside in other people’s gardens, shared platters of salads and fresh berries, watching the last sunlight trail on the flat water,  cool mountain hikes as that favorite birdcall echoes in the gathering dusk, kids on the grass until the stars come out.  I was thinking about how to safekeep these beautiful summer moments and how to keep them fresh,  so, when I looked over these shots I took of my new work, I realised – this being the seventh summer I’ve enjoyed on Orcas – I may have already stored them in the plates I just made.

Handbuilt porcelain dish, 18" long
Handbuilt porcelain dish, 18″ long
Handbuilt dish in cassius clay.  19" long.  Food safe.
Handbuilt dish in cassius clay. 19″ long. Food safe.

Sweet turtles

These turtle dishes put a smile on my face, and I hope it brings a smile to you too.  Maybe it is the colour in bloom all around me that’s inspired me to explore tones that are not in my usual glaze selections.  Fun to be out on a limb and hanging on for a bit.  Enjoy the sunshine everyone!

Sweet turtle tapas dishes in a clear glaze over carribean blue and rubbed salmon coloured stain.
Sweet turtle tapas dishes in a clear glaze over carribean blue and rubbed salmon coloured stain.

Rim detail

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Oval dish

Ready for first firing
Ready for first firing

Adrift on a dish

Driftwood plates

A dish for sushi anyone? Oysters? Chocolate? Chocolate truffles.  This set of three started off as an idea for one large, long platter, made by laying and pressing together  flattened coils of toasted clay with flattened coils of white.  I wanted to test the need to blend the two clays.

Driftwood on Eastsound beach
Driftwood on Eastsound beach

The surface texture was meant to conjour up an image of sun-bleached driftwood washed asore and stacked high on the sand bank.  The holes add a textural element suggesting porousity and inherent decay, or as if it were being eaten from the inside by some insect.   By serendipity, someone knocked the shelf where it sat after bisque firing – and there must have been a fault line because of the minimal blending – but it fell into three separate parts of one long dish and two smaller ones.  I sanded it out, applied oxide over the surface, burnished it off and glazed it one colour. Fired. Voila!