I took a clay whistle making workshop over the weekend and made a couple of whistles.   There are only 2 parts to the whistle, a hollow ball with a hole and a hollow tube.  You have to attach the two just right in order to get a peep out of it.  After the tube and ball are attached, you can decorate it anyway you like.  I still need to clean up these two (the one on the left is going to be a turtle) but you can see that the body of the turtle is the hollow ball and it’s attached to the hollow tube you blow through.

So what happens when a crafter learns the guitar?  The crafter makes her own guitar picks out of a grocery store card of course!  These were pretty fun and easy to make but I’m trying not to go all nuts and make dozens.  Better to use some of that energy to practice the blues scale … cuz I gots me some crafty blues.

Here’s my latest addiction — candied ginger!  I bought some from the store but found out that it’s really easy to make them at home.   You basically just cook sliced ginger in water and sugar on low heat for an hour and a half and dry the slices on a flat surface and toss them with sugar.  Besides the ginger slices, I also got this gingery sugar syrup.  I don’t know what I’m going to do with the syrup yet but I chopped up some of that candied ginger and put it in the chocolate chip pumpkin bread I made.  Sweet and Spicy, a very nice combination I must say.

Woohoo, I finally finished these socks last night using this pattern!!

It is FRIGID in Boston so it’s a perfect time to stay home and eat bake cookies.  Here are the last remaining whole wheat ginger snaps I made using this recipe (I halved the recipe, cut down the sugar, and added finely chopped crystallized ginger).  They are oh so good and who am I kidding, making the cookies smaller doesn’t mean I eat any less…but at least they’re whole wheat!

Cats know how to hold a pose.

HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE!!!

And yes, I have some soap dishes set aside to sell online. 

Anyway, I thought it would be fun to see what goes on during the show and sale preparation.  Most of the potters get a shelf like this to display their wares.  This is what mine looked like before.

And here’s what it looks like after 3  hours.  I didn’t have a lot of pieces so my shelf was pretty simple.  Check out the festive greens on top of my shelf.  I got them from a neighbor’s trash!!

Did you know you can get a fried turkey from some Chinese restaurants?  Yup, that’s what we had for Thanksgiving.  The dark thing right above the turkey slight to the left is actually a lily pad wrapped duck filled with a sticky rice stuffing.  Now that was yummy!

And what’s Thanksgiving without a little Thanksgiving traffic?  This is a shot of the Tappan Zee Bridge. 

These are some birds that I started making with porcelain over the weekend.  They’re still work in progress but I wanted to document them and see how they would look in a grouping.

I think they also kind of look like sweet potatoes … maybe I’ll give them more wing definition.

Beet juice dish water … what a pretty color!