rebeccmeister | Status: Packing Stage 2

I started in on some kitchen items yesterday. Tonight I think I'll work on more of the fiddly small ceramics and such.

While in Arizona,

scrottie really wanted to obtain a bulk order of organic black beans from Crooked Sky Farms. Several months and eleventy-billion text messages later and we're finally beaned. Emma approves.

30 pounds of locally-grown, organic black beans

For

randomdreams: here's the kind of salsa that S loves, which I suspect has to be recreated fresh to attain the same flavor. I'm thinking maybe I could just try making up my own recipe, with oodles and oodles of peppers. S was semi-maniacally talking about buying a huge amount of it and then canning it.

We had our last ceramics class last night. Once again I'm sad to be leaving that behind again, but grateful to have had the chance to stick my hands in clay for a while. I've made notes about a couple of potential ceramics places in Albany; we shall see.

They'd done another glaze firing, so I got to bring home several pieces. However, the majority of my pieces from this session were still sitting on the glaze cart, waiting to be glaze-fired. Thankfully the good people who are running the studio were willing to expedite my remaining 7 or 8 pieces so I don't have to lean on other people to pick them up, pack them, and ship them to me.

This bowl came out fabulously:

Mom: don't look at what's under the cut if you want gifts to remain a surprise.

I've been wanting to tell this story for a while. I've been trying to ask people if they'd like me to make anything specific for them. My mom said, "How about some mushrooms, for my garden?"

They started out simply enough. One of the other students suggested I try and throw some, so I did. Then I thought, hmm, maybe I should try and get more interesting. So I hand-built a large morel mushroom.

Some time shortly after that, I was working on re-hydrating a bunch of clay by flattening it out, pressing my thumbs into it, spraying it with water, and then mooshing it around. One of the other students in the class happened to walk past, gave my pile of clay a quizzical sideways glance, and said, "I can't quite figure out what kind of mushroom that is."

After I'd finished laughing, it occurred to me to tell him and the other students about "dog vomit fungus," which is something I'll let you image-search for yourself.

I decided against giving my mom a ceramic dog vomit fungus sculpture, even though it would be hilarious. And I'm very pleased with how the other mushrooms all turned out. Hopefully my mom will enjoy them, too.