Gratitude? Really?

Is it possible to be grateful for something I don't have?

Patience. Not my most highly rated virtue. Which is maybe why the Universe is blessing me with so many opportunities to learn it.

Our mason came up and told us that he don't think cement can be poured before mid-February this year.

The thermometer has not gone much above freezing in weeks. The snow outside is a solid. The humidity high. Warming the house is our primary task. Warming the studio follows suit.

I am waiting for art supplies from Germany, because I cannot find them in Italy. There is a hang up with the shipping. Without those supplies I cannot advance - either in making art for the on line shop or for the new room.

I busy myself with the things I can do. I can make new cards to go out with my shop orders. From gold leaf. That swirly one in the second photo is a d. I think that might be my new logo. What do you think?

The oven is on and the tiles are firing. I should be able to open the oven on Monday morning. Patience.... opening the oven too soon is always a mistake. Always.

There are so many things I want to do. The list is impossibly long. But to start, it needs to be a few degrees warmer. I need my supplies. The ground needs to thaw. I need to thaw. Then the energy will flow on its own. I know this. But I seem to need to learn it. Again and again.

Thank you, Universe, you have proven your point. I will close my eyes and wait for the moment to come to me.

A Message from Maryam

Maryam's photo of a host at the Cabul Cafe. Yes, as in Kabul, Afghanastan.

I think you all know how I feel about Maryam from Marrakesh! She is an inspiration for so many people. Here recent trip to Afghanistan, documented on her blog, give us a glance at a world behind the violence that we hear about. Additionally, her notes and photos about Kashmir, Yemen and so many other exotic lands have broadened my perspective and reminded me, as Maryam so poignantly says, that we are the lucky ones. And that's to say nothing about her design talents and the stories and saga of the hotel she and her husband are opening, Peacock Pavillions. Such inspiration, this girl!

I am copying the following paragraph from Maryam's latest blog entry. Please go and vote for her. It would mean something to her personally to win this award, and for all she has given to so many, she deserves it.

And she's right! So does Apartment Therapy! So please vote for AT as well!

PS Have you voted? My Marrakech is a finalist in the 2010 Weblog Awards in the category Best African Weblog. I would be deeply grateful for your vote, as well as any tweets, and mentions on FB or blogs. If this blog has helped you travel to to corners of the world or brought you moments of loveliness, please take a minute or two to provide your support. Just click here , scroll to the right to the Best African Weblog category, place your vote. Thank you!:-) And the fab Apartment Therapy is also nominated under Best Art Craft Design Blog. So please consider for AT, too!

Stick To Your Ribs: Sausage and Lentils

La Cucina Povera has gained popularity, as it always does, during hard times. While this dish is not technically poor because it does contain meat, it is a very cost efficient way to feed a high protein meal to a group of people. But far more important, they will be fully content afterwards. The best part of Italy's poverty cuisine is that it makes the best of very simple ingredients, combining them in a way that brings out the most flavor.

Ingredients for four people:

8 medium sized Italian sausages

Two cups dried lentils, boiled and set aside (takes about 20-25 minutes)

Olive Oil

1 small can chopped tomatoes

half cup white wine

1 chopped onion

2 cloves garlic, smashed

1 small chile pepper or peperoncino, chopped

salt and pepper

Lightly grease a large, deep skillet with olive oil. Sautee the sausage until they are brown on all sides. Remove them from the pan. In the same pan (with the drippings in there), saute the garlic (smashed) and the onion. When the onions are transparent, add the white wine. Let the wine reduce and add the tomatoes and the chopped peperoncino. Let the ingredients simmer together for five minutes on a low heat and add the sausages back in. Add the lentils and let the entire dish cook for another 20-25 minutes.

I served with parsley potatoes, which worked well.

Buon Appetito!

Gratitude....Monday? My Design Blog Friends and a Studio To Escape To...

Teeny tiles, a half inch across. they will be ruby red....

latex resist....

glazed in black (well, they will be black when they are fired)...

remove the resist...

and get them ready for the kiln...

red tiles...

....and orange ones.

I received an email this morning from one of my readers. I missed Gratitude Friday this past week completely. She wondered if it was me just setting some limits. There are some days where gratitude of any kind doesn't come easily. I don't say this lightly. On Friday of last week, my fingers would not hit the keys to say anything good. Or kind. Or even introspective.

And I don't want to fake Gratitude Friday.

The reasons are really not that important. Everyone has things which bring them down, me included. But down is not where I wanted to stay. In an effort to get myself out of the doldrums, I started searching on line for some creative inspiration. As usual, it was not far away -- the design blogs... you need only to go to my creative blog roll to take a look yourself. As usual, they helped, and I was soon able to get myself thinking about how much I need to do so that the rooms would be as lovely as possible in a few short months. Thank you once again, Holly, Julianne, Sparrow, and the rest of you on that list. If I don't always comment, I always do check what you are up to. I count on you for your beautiful flow of ideas and thoughts, and it is so nice that you are always there.

Once I got motivated to do something, I knew what I had to do. It was time for me to escape. Not very far, I am afraid, just to my studio.

I decided to start the tile-glazing project -- a huge task. I have hundreds of tiles to glaze. I did think I was going to make the bathroom tiles for the new guest room , but I have re-thought this. Instead, I am going to make a focal mosaic mirror frame for the bathroom, and have chosen beautiful stone colored bathroom tiles for the wall behind the sink and for the double shower (which is 4 feet by 5 feet and has a built-in bench). I am also making a mosaic table top for an iron table base which I already have.

I will finish up the tile glazing tomorrow and will fire them up. I can start building the mosaic mirror by the end of the week.

Firing out creative energy helps move me forward, and I am of course, endlessly grateful to have a space to go to in which I can work out the things inside of me.

Now the snow is falling, and we are once again cut off from the world, as no one can get up our hill. But it's ok. After a day of work, I am warm by the fire, my husband and dog with me, and I can sense contentment taking over.

The Ceramic Series: Kiln Result Roundup

The Ceramic Series: The Kiln, Sgraffito and Resists (Part One)

Having a large kiln is a blessing and a curse. The blessing is that you can do tons of pieces at once. The curse is of course that the kiln needs to be full in order to make economic sense -- it burns a lot of electricity. So in the second half of November and first half of December I worked to fill orders, make pieces for my on line shop and tiles for our new guest room. I got a full oven of pieces bisque fired before the end of December I still had pieces that had been bisqued but not glazed from the summer - the late season was simply too busy for me to work in the studio. Here are a few of those older pieces, before they got glazed (the parts that are darker will be celedon/turquoise after the glaze firing):

These designs were made by painting a slip, or engobe, on the leather-hard surface of the thrown pieces. The designs were painted on then carefully sculpted with a sgraffito knife, a technique which literally scratches away the clay. The result is that the designs are slightly raised.

In the week since getting back from the States, I have been bouncing between a cold, jetlag, and getting pieces glazed. The oven is filled to the absolute rim and is firing as I write. Another full two loads are waiting to be glazed and fired as well.

You can fire triple the amount of pieces in a bisque firing that you can in a glaze firing, because you can stack the pieces carefully on top of each other with a bisque firing. But glazed pieces cannot touch each other, and while glazing it's important that no glaze remains on the base of the piece. Otherwise it will stick to the oven shelf, ruining the shelf, breaking the piece, and causing painful hand cuts -- I have had a few of them in my time!

As the oven was warming up, I wanted to take advantage of the heat in the room radiated by the kiln and worked on some previously bisque fired pieces. These pieces are plain, not colored or painted in any way.

I used liquid latex to paint a pattern onto the plate. This is called a resist. Resists are areas of the surface which should remain unglazed, uncolored, untouched. I am using paint-on latex here. It dries into a rubbery substance. You then glaze the piece and remove the resists -- the area underneath the resist will be smooth and unglazed, and recessed from the glazed surface.

An alternative to liquid latex is to use wax. Both the latex and the wax have their advantages. The wax stays on and simply burns away in the kiln. The latex gets removed beforehand, which means you can do multiple layers of colors and glazes with the latex. With wax, it's just the one resist and that's it.

I should be using wax for these resists, since I am only doing one single uncolored layer, but I am out of it, so latex it is.

Both the plate and the rice bowl will be glazed soft white -- so they will be white on white when they are finished -- white glaze with a white unglazed design.

I now need to mix the glaze and glaze the pieces. The resists will get peeled off and the piece goes into the kiln for firing.

Here is a more detailed example of a ceramic resist. I made this little fish soap dish a while back. I am glazing it with my standard glaze with 2% cobalt carbonate added to it. The cobalt carbonate should give the glaze a soft blue color.

But before I glazed the piece I wanted to make sure that the rim of the fish soapdish would not get glazed, and remain white and raw, so I coated it with the liquid latex.

I then glazed the piece and peeled off the latex:

You can see that the surface where the soap would sit is glazed (not fired yet of course) and the edge is raw.

I will be back when I open the oven in a couple of days with a round up.

Gratitude Friday

Lying awake this week, still struggling with jetlag, I turned on the TV, to CNN. An initial report about an earthquake in Haiti had just come in. I haven't the words for what followed. I think anyone looking at that initial report had an idea of what would come, hoping for the best, but expecting something else.

People ask why God has forsaken Haiti. God has not forsaken Haiti. We have. Human beings. We have created the situation in this world which allows a Haiti like this to exist in the first place. And if we don't change how we think and how we act, things for countries like Haiti will only get worse, if it's even remotely possible.

This crisis brings out the best and worst in people. Donations have poured in from around the globe, from people who have problems feeding their own families. The international community has sprung into action. The logistical nightmare of getting the help in will eventually get resolved, but not before many, many more people are scooped up into backhoes and dumped into mass graves. But a tragedy has moved the world, once more, into action.

Then you have humans (I use that word loosely) like Pat Robertson, who announced that Haiti made a deal with the devil, and that is why these bad things keep happening there. Would someone please tell this to the woman in the picture so she has some explanation for her misery? Reverend Robertson, it is time for you to go away. You should be ashamed.

What in this horrific situation is there to be grateful for, you ask? I ask myself the same thing. Maybe that once again, we are reminded of our own fragility. That this will make us, in some way, more careful with each other. Less likely to obsess about our own failings and worries. More willing to extend ourselves in times of need. Maybe this will make more of us more socially active, more aware. Less likely to assume the worst about each other. More likely to give each other the benefit of the doubt.

More empathetic.

Not that it would have been worth the endless suffering of Haiti, but it would be something that could arise from the rubble.

Piemonte Winter

I think that the fog falling between layers of mountains is particularly bewitching in the winter.

While I am sure this happens elsewhere, it tends to happen often here, where the humidity in winter is very high. It is this nebbia, this marvelous fog, that the Nebbiolo grape is named for -- the grape of which Barolo and Barbaresco are comprised. While having foggy winters seem almost contradictory to having cold winters, they go hand and hand in Piemonte, and we have learned that layers - ribbed t shirts and long socks included - are what it takes to get through the dampness. Being correctly dressed helps make enjoying this kind of beauty much easier.

Piemonte, named so because it sits at the foot of the Alps - piedi + montagne - has an atmosphere distinct in Italy. Lago Maggiore, one of the most majestic lakes in Europe, is circled by snow covered Alps. Flatlands betray fields and fields of risotto - together with Lombardia, Piemonte is responsible for the majority of Italy's premier rice production. A few miles down the road, and the terrain changes again, to soft hills and endless vineyards, until you climb, climb, climb again to the Maritime Alps, which separate Piemonte from the Ligurian coastline.

All the while, as the terrain changes and unfolds, so do the homes and the rusticos, from stone and slate to brick and terra cotta to the pastel painted facades and trompe l'oeil windows and shutters that seem so lifelike.

It's a beautiful place in all seasons, Piemonte. But for now, it's time to take in the stillness of the winter.

Jessica and Rob's Wedding

I've just returned home. My niece Jessica married her college love Rob in a beautiful ceremony at the German Society in Philadelphia.

Photos by www.alisonconklin.com

Jessica crafted most of the beautiful decorations, including this cake top, which features glasses for the boy bird and a little veil like the one she wore.

A blessed event.