I took a ceramics class at the Craft Center a long time ago to learn how to throw and was thoroughly discouraged. Years later, a friend who teaches ceramics later gave me a private lesson, which helped a little, but I definitely need lots of practice before I'll be making thin walled symmetrical vessels with any consistency. However, I love the way ceramics interacts with glass, so I've started practicing throwing again, throwing little vessels off the hump and not worrying too much if they're perfect because I then transform them into these little face cups. I'm working on a series with different expressions...I think I started this series in the summer, but I haven't been in Davis enough to finish them.

Here are the first two:
ceramics (Death Valley clay), flameworked glass eyes, suri alpaca locks (Juan Valdez is the alpaca's name)

ceramics, flameworked glass eyes and earrings, yearling mohair locks (courtesy of Otter from Eureka! Mohair Farm in Tollhouse, CA) She was going to have a tongue piercing too, but it made her tongue too delicate so I had to leave out the hole.

I'm enjoying this method of making glass eyes...making them sort of like real eyes with a "retina" of aurora behind clear glass, then an iris of whichever color that leaves an open "pupil." I then coat this with a white "sclera" and finish it off with a clear cornea. The whole thing has more depth than putting a colored iris and black pupil on the surface of the eye. I make it all wonderfully round and then smoosh it into the eye socket which distorts it but it still seems to look ok.

I forgot to take a photo of the hanging trapeze girl I gave to the Craft Center winter auction, but here's another sculpture I did recently:

And Sparrow laid her first egg! Yes it's grey greenish. And small, but yummy.