My husband’s profession of horticulture blends well with my passion for capturing vignettes of form, light and reflection. My Samsung Captivate android phone has a 5 mp camera app with a macro setting that gives depth-of-field effects that I think are superior to what I could get with my outdated Minolta digital camera. And the …
This is one of my favorite effects. For years, I wondered how to use the delicate form of the lace leaf maple leaves I watched falling in our side yard. Finally, it occurred to me to use them as stencils. I press the fresh leaves into the green, still-wet pot, and then spray colored slip over the …
This effect is created throwing a cylinder, then painting on a colored slip to which sodium silicate has been added. The pot is then widened from the inside. The sodium silicate makes the colored slip act like a shell, which cracks as it is expanded.
The leaf used for this piece was from a gunnera (aka “dinosaur food”), a plant which seems like it would be more at home in an Amazon rain forest than in the Pacific Northwest. Turned upside down over a sand pile, my husband and I heaped cement over it, and let it cure over several …