The Monolith

Like the mysterious slab from 2001, a white wall of boxes awaits its destiny in my garage. Nineteen happy Haffie sets will embark to their new homes very soon! Stay tuned on my mailing list for the announcement post.

Barry tells me he has more sets ready to go, so another batch of sets will be available very soon after this one, too! Exciting times!

"I succeeded in simply attending at the birth of all my works." ~ Max Ernst

The Monolith

Fall is in the air!

Tomorrow is the official start of Fall, one of my favorite seasons. My flowers have spent their last, and their pots are being cleaned and put away until next Spring. I'll miss their bright, happy faces, but I do look forward to the brilliant zest of the changing leaves! Between the crisper days and the holiday paraphernalia, my instinctual need for coziness and hot meals has increased...it's time to pull out the crock pot and afghans once again.

Yesterday, I woke up to a special treat: Thunder! All day we had a rip-roaring thunderstorm cracking over our house, with periodic downpours. It was wonderful. I love rainy days like that...everything gets doused and cleaned, and the wet aroma is simply wonderful.

On the work-front, hubby has taken a break from homework to help me with the impending Brownie sale by taping up a wall of boxes for the little tyke.
At least 36 pugnacious little fuzz balls should be zipping out to new homes soon! I'm really excited to see painted Brownies since donkey patterning and coloration can be so different from that of horses. I'm always fascinated to see how painters tackle heavy fur texture, too, since each artist tackles that challenge just a little differently.

Speaking of cozy, I'm cleaning up a Brownie to send down to Joan Berkwitz, so he can be properly baked in earthenware! Yummmm....warm, fresh Brownies, right out of the oven! I'm really excited to see him in shiny goodness -- I think the glaze will catch all the fuzz of his coat so beautifully.

These cooler months offer a more pleasant temperature in the garage where my ceramics studio is located. Now I can get in there and get to work in muddy goodness without being baked myself! There are a lot of projects in the works for Maury and Big Al, so it should be an exciting Winter!
This little guy (above) is Big Al's "kiln god." He's a friendly little guy who watches over each firing, and he's done a pretty good job so far!

Anyhoo, I love Sundays -- there's such a relaxed feeling about it, an inherent coziness to the day. Pair that with Fall-like weather, and well...it's a good day.

"The winds will blow their own freshness into you,
and the storms their energy,
while cares will drop away from you
like the leaves of Autumn." ~ John Muir

Fall is in the air!

Helper Elf at work in July!

It worked! The cart system worked like a charm! Hazzah!

Piles of little boxes went out next day to buyers, and the entire process functioned pretty close to how I'd envisioned it. The only real hitch was that the cart system over-sold the first batch, which is something we'll have to address somehow in the next batches. However, it's a small matter since all it meant was that more people simply got what they wanted anyway, and I had enough stock to fulfill all the extra orders.

That's hubby in the pic (above), my trusty Helper Elf who made all this expedited shipping possible! It was the first time I've had to use two of these big bins to haul items in, and boy...was the Postal staff surprised! They know me down there and are used to me piling on boxes in strange bungie-corded configurations to my hapless, overloaded little luggage cart...then hello!...here I walk in with these two giant bins brimming with little white boxes. The look of relief on their faces when they realized all the boxes were ready to ship was worth a "priceless" moment. I still can't believe we got so much out, so quickly. Phew.

Anyhoo, three days after the sale, we were scheduled to leave on a week long foray to the North West coast for a vacation, so to say that week was a scramble would be quite an understatement. I have reams of stuff to catch up on now that I'm back, too, but more on the vacation in the next post, since I have to sort through about 600 images first. Stay tuned!

"Do what you can, with what you have, where you are." ~Theodore Roosevelt

Helper Elf at work in July!

Ready....Set....

The Great Wall of China. Hadrian's Wall. Wall of Voodoo. Wallabies. Walla Walla, WA. Now to the great list of "Walls" we can add Wall of Vixen and Wall of Imp. One hundred little boxes all ready to go, to deliver their cargo to waiting new owners within minutes of ordering this Tuesday.

This new first come-first served cart system for selling my editions is a radical new step for us here. No more meandering down a reservation list as one would dawdle down a quiet forest path. We're on a freeway now, gunning it to a known destination to be there on time. Paid orders out same day, or next day, for all one hundred little Vixens and Imps---that's the goal! Customers won't have to wait anymore!

Hubby has been a gem helping me box, wrap, fill and tape up all these little white cubes of anticipation, making me giggle with his quips about "efficiency" and "precision" in my shipping process with his spot-on mock German accent, sounding just like Dr. Johann Krauss from Hellboy 2. We're both big fans of these films, and of Guillermo del Toro's other films and skills as a movie maker---lookin' forward to The Hobbit and The Hobbit 2! Anyway, one of the (many) reasons we like the Hellboy movies is the continuing theme regarding the choices we make, and having to rise to, or learn to live with, the consequences of those choices, both good and bad. Well...Abe Sapien certainly doesn't hurt the movies' appeal for me (I would feed him rotten eggs all day long!), plus Hubby and Hellboy are so similar in personality (except for the temper part), sometimes I swear my husband sprouts red skin, a tail and horns in a certain light. "Ummmmm.....nachos," is directly out of my husband's mouth.

This theme is rather apropos for my life right now, both with this new mode of selling my editions, over which I'm both excited and anxious, but also with the new direction our lives have taken: On Wednesday, Hubby left his place of employment of nearly ten years and is going back to school for two years to learn a new skill for a new job. Have we made the right choices here? They feel right, but doubt always creeps in somehow. Nonetheless, those gears are now set into motion and we must live with the consequences of those choices, for better or for worse. Unfolding uncertainty is always full of foreboding, but also exciting and stuffed with promise!

Another choice I have to make isn't so ominous, but pesky all the same: How the heck do I support this "sproingy" Arabian mare sculpture I'll be starting next month?...

Both Parada and Dar did the "Arabian boing" in turnout as often as they could, and I've been wanting to express this kind of equine joy for a very long time. It's a demonstration of animal elation that makes my soul sing. I actually started this piece right after my back surgery, as soon as my surgeon gave me the "hey ho" that I could start work in the studio again, as an expression of my gleeful freedom from grinding, chronic pain. For that reason, aside from artistic ones, it's very important to me to create a base that doesn't weight her down, or "stop" her motion. I want to maintain the airy, weightless feel of that "Arab sproing." While I have some ideas, I'll have to wait and see how they pan out because what might seem ideal in theory often faceplants in practice! Preserving the "feel" of a sculpture, or rather, the elemental essence of a sculpture, is often more difficult than the sculpting process itself. There are so many design compromises made to the media limitations that must be mediated to protect the energy of the piece, the raw vibrancy that first sparks in our mind's eye at the moment of inspiration.

Anyway, I'll be holding my breath on Tuesday to see if all goes well with the new method of selling my editions, and I look forward to the challenges life will present us in our personal lives, and me, in my studio. So if things seem a little discombobulated or scattered these next 2-3 years, trust that I'm trying to find balance with the onslaught of new paths breaking open here!

"It's choice - not chance - that determines your destiny." ~Jean Nidetch

Ready....Set....