Christmas Eve

Today the Midwest is experiencing a classic Midwest Christmas with bands of snow sweeping across much of the area. We saw several inches of snow over night, then we'll have a short break before additional snow blows in for a few more inches. Which should be followed by another short break and another snow fall. Everybody is making alternate plans for holidays if they can't make it to their planned destinations. Fortunately, we don't have much traveling to do this holiday. Just a short trip from the out ring burbs of the Twin Cities to the inner ring burbs, which should be pretty painless.

But the covering of snow does keep us home from doing miscellaneous, keep busy things and allows us time to do other at home things. Today will be spent preparing food for tomorrow, last minute wrapping and maybe a little time to reflect on the past year of my pottery business and set goals for next year.

Then kids and friends will be arriving for Christmas Eve dinner which is when all the fun starts.

Merry Christmas everybody.

Happy Holidays

Better late than never

This past weekend I participated in the Annual Goldsmith Reunion at the Mankato Civic Center. It was my first time at this event and I found it to be very enjoyable. The sale ran Friday - Sunday and had pretty steady traffic all three days though none of the days were really busy.

The artists involved were incredibly talented and friendly which combined with the wonderful music, wine and chocolates made this a very enjoyable event.

During a performance, this little boy watched closely through several songs and part way through the performance was asked to join the singer for a couple songs. Too cute!!

On Sunday, fellow Etsy Mud Team member Denise Morris and her daughter were having some fun dancing with water color artist Dick Graves.

Pre-holiday Catch Up

The last few weeks I've spent catching up on custom orders. Some orders were for holiday gifts though many were not. I'm getting pretty close to done with most of my custom orders and that's a pretty good feeling. One of the bigger orders was for 20 dinner plates. So far, 18 have been thrown and trimmed but I'll make another 6 just in case some get damaged or don't work out in some way. Making plates always creates so much trimming clay to recycle. After trimming the 18 plates I had a mountain of trimmings around the wheel.



I strongly dislike recycling clay. I just don't enjoy the process and spending the time on this type of task takes away from the time I can throw new pieces. Fortunately for me, my husband (Kevin, aka my roadie) has a new project for next Spring. He's going to be making a mud bread oven and needs a significant amount of clay to create the domed baking area. Awesome - it saves me from having to spend the time recycling it into throwing clay but it will still be used for a good purpose.


As he's building the oven next Spring, I'll have a few updates on his progress here. Stay tuned.