I am thinking about making one piece of pottery a day for the month of July. I say thinking because I love to break my own “rules”. Plus, I only have a small amount of clay left, and the clay store where I get clay has very limited hours for curbside pickup and is a 90-mile drive, but I think I have enough for a piece a day for a while. (If ONLY I had a source where I could dig it myself - if anyone in Virginia has a source I’d be so grateful to learn about it). This is a way to get me to slow down and focus on one piece, instead of how I am used to working in clay, which is to throw as many pieces as possible in one sitting. I love this idea of making one piece really well rather than making a lot of pieces pretty well. It feels more creative and so far, two days in, I am excited about the pieces I have made and the pieces to come.

3 things I am loving…

This is (and has been for 30 years) my favorite Bob Dylan album, listening to it tonight. Self Portrait and Desire are my next favorites, then Planet Waves and Blonde on Blonde.

The work of Joan Eardley. She was an artist from Sussex that died too young of breast cancer. I find her work so somber and beautiful. She was known for painting street children.

Carolina Ground is my new favorite place to shop online. My son, the family baker, dreams about having a pantry with buckets of freshly ground flours. We have two buckets, one 25 lb bucket of whole wheat flour, and the other 10lbs of all-purpose, which feels rather luxurious. There’s just something comforting about knowing we have flour in the house when it was so hard (almost impossible) to find at the beginning of the pandemic. I fear it will be hard to find again if things get worse and I want to keep his bread-baking obsession going. Of course, my dream is to have a bucket full of the “flower of the ocean” salt they sell, it’s dainty as salt can be.