Sculpture 99% finished. Traps, 2025, Ceramic and mixed media.

Summer is dwindling for our household as we teachers turn to embrace a new year. May this shift be gentle, positive, and refreshingly professional for all.

A student glazed the bottom of their work, left no note to use a stilt in the kiln. It was a lucky, lucky break - pun intended - that it came free of the kiln shelf.

Timely Local news in our sanctuary city has been vital to staying safe and knowing where and how to help our neighbors. Daniel has been running and funding The Santanero on his own for a few years from his wages as he works his way through college! Read his work, help him grow. www.santanero.org

Frigging gorgeous

Aerial view 2 of 3, slow.

Top view, one of three.

It’s working. Dry fit on a ceramic sculpture.

Getting closer to finished.

Tuesday was a very active day locally for LARPing kidnappers in our neighborhood. The bastards timed their visits with the bus schedules as people were arriving home from work.

Well done! Congratulations on completing all your hard work!

Keeping on. Tired. It’s hard to rest in Santa Ana lately.

The glaze firing went well overall, some cleanup to do. Continuing on with the sculpture, a little tired. We’ve had too much going on in Santa Ana since the raids started, and it hasn’t stopped since the 9th? So none of us have gotten much sleep around here.

Continuing the sculpture in progress: I got to make a bottle rack type tool for the next part, but fired in the kiln too soon and too quickly. Yes, it exploded to smithereens! 🤞 for a successful slow fire today so I can wrap this series up and share it.

And that’s another benefit: our dog can join us on this protest should we need him. Why aren’t people bringing their (well behaved and trained) dogs? Crowds? Maybe we need a pooch patrol presence? Lots of Californians have dog costumes for every occasion. 🤷🏻‍♀️ We’ll be present, visible, and available.

Every traffic accident, ambulance visit, police car stop, fire truck visit, flat tire in the road, we all are outside helping or observing. Every single time. We have great neighbors. There are language gaps in our communication that apps help us bridge. We wave when we see each other walking the 🐕

Auto traffic flows through our street, and ALL our signs will be highly visible. I may need to put up a slow down sign too: when we painted our house, it caused accidents because the difference was such a distraction. Mostly, I believe this will be impactful because we have vecinos who SHOW UP. 4/🧵

We live on an arterial feeder street. The protests on the march pass peacefully on our sidewalk. We are near a major street where the protests end up, and we are close enough to the downtown area where protests have ended up. We are in contact with people who can spread news rapidly and widely… 3/🧵

Internet, our phones, and most of all, our happy, joyful palm colored faces in our beautiful brown neighborhood, talking to everyone who passes by, sharing smiles and support, showing our kids another way to be present and available should something go wrong. This works for us because… 2/🧵

It doesn’t feel right to us to leave the immediate community to protest because of what’s been happening this week. So, we are throwing a FRONT PORCH PROTEST and will decorate our porch with our signs, our CALIFORNIA flag, chairs, table, a cooler full of water and refreshments, music, devices 1/🧵

Parts of the in progress sculpture: Camus fly trap leaves. The round ends will support the traps.

Fine. Here’s me drawing from Inktober a year or two ago.

Gah!! My heart!!

I had a jumping spider visitor in my studio this weekend, so so little! I got it scooped up on to my hand to help it get back outside. When it got back down on the ground it just turned around and looked at me like in that pic. 🥰

It’s adorable 🥹

Three lousy millimeters and but a few inches of space to move are what stand between a broken pug mill, and one that will function for another forty years. Leverage, not strength.

Decades!

Thank you. Still in progress for the whole thing, but wanted to keep it engaging, almost cartoonish.

And that’s the love/hate thing I have with 3D printing: when it works well, I can do stuff clay can’t do as easily - but it’s never faster than working with clay.