Artistic Jealousy

So as I was sitting listening to (great) music, surfing the webs, and generally being bored enough to do some cleaning. I was really wishing I could do something artistic –my ideas ran from making pottery, printing tee shirts, video blogging, and printing books (one day soon). I was remembering a link our good friend Andy posted to his wonderful wife’s new photography project. The idea is that she will post a picture once each day for the next year. I am secretly jealous because I wish I could take pictures like her (because she is really an amazing artist/photographer) and thinking I could do something like that, right? But then realized I should probably just let the people who are good at it do it (instead of me doing it badly –similar to my wishing I could play the guitar… “Wish in one hand and pooh in the other and see which one gets full faster” my dad says). So I will promote her website (via this link here ---> Leah’s Cool Website) instead. Check it out, leave comments, and order a print or three.

Going. Going. Sold.

We sold our first (and second) piece of pottery on Etsy today, just about 4 hours ago. We were both so surprised and got really worked up. We then realized that we under priced on shipping and now have to pay half of it out of pocket. It’s not a big deal but we quickly went back through the rest of our Etsy products and changed the shipping on them. Some of them went up quite a bit because we could not fit them into those flat rate boxes, and shipping something as light as 4 pounds through the USPS cost about 36 dollars (we were both amazed at this, we thought it wouldn’t be much more than the flat rate boxes which can hold up to 20 pounds for about 10 dollars). Anyway, I’m headed to the post office first thing in the morning to send the pottery to Tennessee were they will live out the rest of their lives in blissful usefulness (hopefully). We will now have some more money so we can get to posting the rest of the hundreds of pieces of pottery we have in our office (thankfully most of it is on the smaller side so it doesn’t take up a lot of space, if it was the stuff I made for my MFA show we would be living in the garage while our house was stuffed with large spinning pottery).

Garden Party

We finally started work on our garden. We built it out of old railroad ties (only $5 apiece). As you can see we layered them two high, because the area we built it on was full of gravel and we needed enough space for soil. So next is to get dirt and plants. We will be getting manure from a friend, compost from the city (both for free), and top soil (from a store I guess). It only cost us $46 for the railroad ties, and shouldn't cost more than that for the soil. So only about $100 investment for fresh veggies. Next step is to learn how to preserve it all for the winter months.


This next photo is where we will be planting zucchini, squash, cucumbers, and melons. We will plant them next to the fence so that they climb up instead of out. We are also planning to grow sunflowers down father where the fence is higher.


On the pottery front, we’re selling our motorcycles so that we can really get our studio up and running the way we wanted. We figured that if we were really serious about doing it we wouldn’t let anything hold us back (i.e. Money), so we posted our bikes on Craigslist today. So hopefully we will sell them and can start buying pottery equipment (like a pottery wheel and clay).

Will Pot for Food

Finally, we put some pottery up on our Etsy Shop.

Beanie for Your Thoughts

It’s been awhile since the last post. Having non art related jobs will do that to a couple of artists. Anyway Keturah has made me a beanie out of fishermen’s wool (this wool still has the natural oil in it, so it is water resistant). She also knitted a nine pointed star into the top. Here are a couple of photos, you can also see the beard I have been working on (it seems to be the only semi artistic thing I have been able to do). We also have plans to get an electric potters wheel so I can start making work again in my spare time.

Grave Treadle Wheel

I just wanted to give an update on the treadle wheel adventure we have been on. As you know we moved house (from Texas to Oklahoma). Because of this I had to disassemble the treadle wheel so that we could move it (it was rather bulky). A few days ago I decided to reassemble the wheel, and after an hour of confusion and silent curses (the wheel was not cooperating with me) I had the wheel reassembled. I now have the pleasure of reporting that the wheel is dead. Once it was put back together I realized that the fly wheel was no longer level, and no matter what I did I could not get it to level out. So we have decided to look for a kick wheel to buy for the time being. We plan on re-purposing the wood from the wheel to make another table. So if anyone sees a kick wheel (or a treadle wheel) for sale let us know.
Also my wife has finished (a long time ago, just haven’t mentioned it yet) the Greatest Name she was working on. So here’s a picture of it. It now hangs over the front door of her sister’s house.

Moved House

We have successfully moved from Texas to Oklahoma. No more apartments for us, we now can grow our own garden (pictures of that project soon to come), and have a studio space and office space in our own home. I am converting our one car garage into my pottery studio (pictures of that soon to come as well), and we are making one of our spare bedrooms into an office/studio for my wife. We also have unpacked all of our pottery and will be photographing it soon so that we can start putting them up on our Etsy account. We are currently looking for jobs to support our art habit until our art starts to support us. Now that we have settled in I hope to post more often, so keep your eyes out for our new posts. Here are some topics that I will be talking about in the near future: garage studio, vegetable/herb garden, treadle wheel (hopefully finishing it), kiln firing, and hopefully my wife will have some things she wants to talk about as well. I almost forgot we have made some new business cards, here they are; let us know what you think.