Inspiration – Where is it?
Honey locust seed pods
After walking my daughter to the school bus stop in the morning, my dogs and I have resumed our daily walks in Washington Park which is just a couple of blocks from our home. It’s an amazing park and quite popular with humans and dogs alike. The honey locust trees have a fruit that looks like a huge seed pod (apparently edible) that are just starting to ripen – though a few have already fallen to the ground, most likely the work of industrious squirrels. I picked a couple of pods up the other day and brought them home because I just love the shape. By autumn, the pods will have grown longer and often twist and curl making the most pleasing shapes.
Cosmos with bee gathering pollen
Meanwhile, the cosmos in my yard are bursting with a riot of color that has attracted almost every single bee in the neighborhood. I have cosmos all over the yard and believe it or not, they all self seeded from a single plant from last year’s garden. They’re so prolific and almost impossible to kill – I wonder why they’re not on the noxious weed list. Good thing I like them. This year, I even moved seedlings with no harmful effects and even dog pee can’t kill or maim these flowers.
Sweet 100 Cherry Tomatoes
The bees are great for my little garden patch! Not many of my cherry tomatoes have made their way into a salad or recipe, because I often stop and pop all the ripe ones I find in my mouth like candy whenever I pass by. I have larger tomatoes growing too, along with basil, lemon thyme, chives, cilantro and other herbs. This is the first year in a long time that I’ve grown any edible plants.
Now that my daughter has started school again, I thought I would be much more productive in the studio. I haven’t been because I’m catching up with busy work related to some of my PTA volunteer duties such as updating the auction website and all the related forms etc. The auction is being moved to November from February this school year and now that the date is only 2 full months + a few days away, we have some serious catch up work to do to make this happen. Last year we raised $45,000 after expenses and hope to match or exceed last year’s totals. It’s a huge job. I wasn’t going to do anything with the auction this year since I spent 2 years as marketing and pr chair, but guess what? I’m back in the thick of it.
Ya know that feeling when you have something you want to do (in my case it’s getting back to the studio), but you don’t quite have time to get to it? It’s sort of frustrating. Now that I have most of the work done for the auction for the time being, I’m hoping to move on next week.
I guess I have to content myself with those things that I do find inspiring for the time being cause it sure isn’t in the studio right now.
~Cynthia
Back to the pottery studio, teaching dilemma and Jack Johnson
- Messy Studio
- Jump to: Back to the pottery studio
- Jump to: Balance teaching and making own work
- Jump to: Jack Johnson concert at Red Rocks August 17, 2008
Yesterday was my daughter’s first day of school here in Denver and while it’s welcome, it is also a bit sad. Gone are our lazy days of doing whatever we wanted and hanging out together, but in its place is a more structured schedule and I’m finding that I actually need a little bit in order to be more productive in the studio.
I haven’t spent much time there since late June/early July when I switched gears from making my own work to getting my lesson plans and samples together in order to teach my kids art camps this summer.
Yesterday, I ventured into the studio for the first time in awhile (despite my best efforts to get in there earlier last week) and the photo above is what greeted me – a big big mess. I basically dumped everything in there after each art camp ended and didn’t do much else. Piles are on top of piles so I started straightening up yesterday in an effort to be productive again. I even loaded a bisque kiln with work left over from June.
- Kiln serving as shelf space
One of my kilns was in use – as a shelf for a big box of Styrofoam peanuts and bubble wrap. Doh…. I must have been looking for something in a hurry and never put them back in their proper storage area.
Hand built mugs with cracked handles
Here’s something else I found: the relief printed hand built mugs (above) with cracked handles. I have a theory of why the handles cracked – because none of my other mugs made this way have had cracking problems. I made these mugs and then put them under plastic to dry slowly. Meanwhile, in July, my energy was directed towards teaching and I forgot about them for several weeks. Here in Denver this summer, we had temps between 90° – 100° for almost 4 weeks straight with very low humidity and no rainfall, so when I finally remembered to peek under the plastic to check the mugs I found a crack in every single one of the handles. All I can say is, “Don’t do crack.” It’ll kill you and it’s not very attractive.
I think my problem resulted from not loosening the plastic and/or removing it in a timely fashion and because of the way the handles are constructed they all cracked at the most stressful point on the handle – at the bend. In the very recent past, I’ve loosened the plastic in a matter of days when making these mugs with no cracking issues whatsoever. I’m going to fire them anyway and use them to test some different glaze combinations using the new cone 6 glaze recipes I started testing early this summer. In fact, I still have 2 glaze tests that need to be fired. Maybe I’ll do that right after I finish writing this post – oh wait, I think I need to make some more test tiles. I’ll do that instead. It’s a good to get back into the groove after being gone for awhile.
In the meantime, a wholesale order came in this morning through wholesalecrafts.com which will give me added incentive to get back in the swing of things again.
Balance teaching and making work
I don’t know about other people, but I’m not the kind of person who seamlessly switches between teaching and making my own work. I love teaching and while it’s inspiring, it’s also creatively exhausting since I spend so much time helping other people execute their ideas. Maybe it would be easier if my students were adults, maybe not. Please weigh in here if you teach any art classes and can share your experience or methods you use to balance the two activities.
Now that school has started back up, a lot of parents are beginning to ask me when I’m going to start my after school clay classes this year. I think I’m going to go from teaching 2 days a week down to 1 – but the problem will be that I’ll have a wait list. Last year, I started up a second class since I hated to tell anyone “no”, but I think I have to protect my own work schedule too.
Jack Johnson at Red Rocks August 17, 2008
Finally, my husband and I went to the Jack Johnson concert at Red Rocks Amphitheater on Sunday night with some friends of ours. If you’ve never been to Red Rocks or even heard about it, not only is it a fantastic venue to see live music, it’s a great place to hike and visit on a non event day. Red Rocks is an old WPA project left over from the Depression era that continues to amaze all who visit.
Anyway, back in late spring when we bought our tickets to the concert, we weren’t thinking about the date at all. As the event drew closer, we realized that it fell on a school night – but not just any school night – twas the night before the first day of school for Denver kids. We had a blast, but all 4 of us were hurting pups the next day when the alarm rang. I probably had it the easiest since all I had to do was get my daughter to school on time, but my husband had to go to work, and our 2 friends – one is a high school English teacher his wife had a business trip to San Diego with a 5am pickup. Ouch. Originally, I meant to write this post yesterday, but just couldn’t summon the energy. It gets harder and harder to party like a rock star once you’re over the age of 40.
Quite a sold out crowd at the Jack Johnson concert – people of all ages. The 4 of us decided that his music is like getting a massage. It’s relaxing, sort of like listening to a young James Taylor. By the way, I also like J.T. I recorded just a little bit of video (my photo storage card only has about 2 minutes worth) but I have to compress the file. A few photos follow below:
Click on an image to enlarge
~Cynthia
Basic Ocarina or Clay Whistle
Mouse ocarina made in my clay camp by Kaito
Horse ocarina made in my clay camp by
Click here to listen to what my basic ocarina sounds like
In addition to tending to my website and blog the past week, I’ve been teaching a kid’s clay camp at the Art Student’s League of Denver called, “Making Music with Clay” for 1st and 2nd graders from 9am to 12pm daily. I originally proposed the class for an older age group, but was asked if I’d be willing to give it a go with a younger aged group by the programming director for the league. I was a little nervous about it because I’ve never taught a clay class to anyone younger than second grade, but agreed to try it. If all else failed, I knew we could always make a lot of little pots and sculptures. My lesson plan this week included making rattles, whistles and drums with the freedom to modify as I saw fit.
We made rattles the first day and they were a hit. I think kids love anything that makes sound and got such a kick out of the fact that they made this from a lump of clay. We attempted whistles the 2nd day – which after plenty of research turned out fantastically well. No one was more surprised and delighted than myself to hear all these great whistle sounds coming from all around the room.
Luckily, I had an assistant helping me who is going to be a sophomore at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago who was really into making whistles despite the fact that his concentration is painting. I wonder if I may have converted someone to clay because he told me he was interested in taking a clay class now after helping me. Uh oh – watch out, it’s addicting!
My initial goal was to just make a simple whistle sound with no additional holes, however, my helper decided to add some to the whistle he made following the instructions that I had printed out in preparation for the class. He was like the pied piper and had all the kids following him.
The key to getting it to whistle is proper placement of the hole in the body which needs to align with the flare of the form directly next to the extended mouth piece
I ended up ditching the drum project and we made some wind chimes instead the third day of class, then after asking the class what they wanted to make the 4th day, everyone agreed that they wanted to make ocarinas, which is a flute like wind instrument often made from clay.
Normally an ocarina is oval shaped and has anywhere from 4 to 12 finger openings and an extended mouth piece. Ours only have 3 finger openings, but now I’d love to play around and make some with proper hole placement. I punched the holes in the bodies sort of willy nilly – but you’ll have to forgive my faux pas because this is the first time I’ve ever made any whistles with finger holes.
Previously I’ve made whistles with kids and have had limited success creating a whistle sound. This time, I sort of flipped back and forth to the different instructions offered by 3 different people and I made every single one of them whistle. Here’s the down side of working with kids this young – while they constructed the bodies and mouth pieces themselves, I had to do the work to make their pieces whistle. The upside is that after working on 15 of them, I know how to do it now with minimal effort or adjustment.
Here are the sites that I used that I thought had the best information about ocarinas and how to make them:
- Ocarina Room by Kenji Ogawa from Japan
- How to Make a Clay Whistle by Dwight U. Bartholomew
- Make a Clay Whistle by Chris Henley
The ones I made with my class are sort of a hybrid of the 3 different artist’s linked to above. It was sort of fun the day we made these – we had all sorts of kids wandering into my class to find the source of the whistle sounds. I even had some older kids tell me that their class was boring and they wanted to be in mine. Of course I enjoyed this immensely since this is the first time I’ve taught week long art camps at the ASLD and Anderson Ranch and had been feeling a little insecure.
Well, that’s it for now and yes, that’s my voice if you clicked on the Listen link at the top of this post. I found this really cool free download to record music and sound from a microphone. You’ll have to excuse my ums and ahs (I tried practicing, but they came out anyway) and the whining of one of my dogs in the background – she really doesn’t like any kind of whistle apparently.
Have a great weekend,
~Cynthia
BTW, it helps to have a strong tolerance for noise and chaos when working with small children especially when they get excited!
OCD about my website and blog after restoring – Success
Not art related – but maybe someone might be helped if they’re experiencing something similar.
Reward after fixes and headache
This past weekend was supposed to be a weekend full of making art uninterrupted for as long as I wanted because both my daughter and husband were out of town. Instead, I spent all weekend fixing my website and WordPress blog after I accidentally deleted it. Luckily, I was able to restore my wordpress blog from a back up database using phpMyAdmin in the Cpanel of my server, but after uploading it, I was faced with 100′s of missing images, funky characters littering my old posts and a theme that wasn’t working anymore. Arghhh.
While I was relieved to have recovered all my posts, I have been obsessed (maybe even possessed) the past 7 days with finding a fix for my missing images and the odd characters like  and †showing up in my older wordpress blog posts (all posts that were written before upgrading to 2.6). The thought of editing every single one of my 422 posts was making me nauseous and sent me on a quest to repair everything.
Here’s sort of what went wrong. I created a new database for my blog and decided to start from scratch and did a new install of WordPress on my server. I then proceeded to add my theme and plugins folder to the new install using the ftp function to my server. At this point, it’s still a fresh install since there is no content. I researched and researched on how to restore a database from a backup and it worked great with the exception of missing images and the funky characters.
Problem #1 – I uploaded and activated the Automatic Upgrade Plugin after my fresh install – which was perhaps foolish to do before restoring my database. I was feeling confident and thought this was a terrific idea at the time since I wanted to take care of all my to-dos right from the get go. I went from WordPress 2.5.1 to 2.6 – though I had already upgraded from previous versions of WordPress.
Problem #2 – It shouldn’t really have been a big deal, but a lot of my posts were from previous versions of WordPress. I found out that there was likely a character set mismatch with previous versions and the new 2.6. Older versions of WordPress used latin1 character set and the latin1_swedish_ci collation (which refers to western languages) and newer versions use UTF-8 which is a universal unicode that helps blogs be accessible across the globe regardless of language spoken. Sure enough, I looked at my database in phpMyAdmin and I had both a latin1 and utf8 in there. I followed all the steps in the convert your database to utf8 found here and crossed my fingers before hitting “go” on my computer. And, while utf8 is supposed to translate latin1, my old blog posts were still showing the funky character sets after converting the database.
Problem #3 – I should probably tell you that at this point, I had wisely backed up everything once again and saved it to my computer just in case. I think that part of my problem was that before backing up my database correctly the first time around, I only had a backup thanks to my host who provides weekly backups. Thank God I had that though and I won’t make that mistake again! A proper backup involves deleting your blog’s cache before executing which is where I think I may have run into all my problems since I was relying on my host’s backup info. Incidentally, I have deleted the old cache file since discovering all this.
In the meantime, I was getting frustrated and was definitely not working in the studio. I decided to switch gears and to figure out what went wrong with my photos. When I checked my “media library” in my Worpdress dashboard, my images showed the correct file names, but when I clicked on the image, I was informed that they were “not found”. I went back and double checked my database and could clearly see the images when I looked inside the table called “wp-content” (which stores the core of all your post data) under the field called “post_mime_type”. Here’s where I found problem #4 - my old images were stored as http://coloradoartstudio.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/picture.jpg since my old install was under a subdirectory of my domain and I uploaded my new install under my domain http://coloradoartstudio.com/wp-content/uploads/picture.jpg with no subdirectory. My media library was reading the text, but not the actual image.
The fix – I found a cool plugin called Search and Replace that I uploaded to my wordpress files using ftp and which enabled me to search my wordpress database for the old upload folder and replace it with the new one. Success! My images were all back, except for the month of August that were written before I restored – so I only have to manually update about 5 posts. I can do that. If I had the know how to mess with MySql commands, I could have done it there. But, the plugin which you access from your blog dashboard makes it easy for non technical people like myself. Huge sigh of relief.
Now, if your head hurts after reading this, then you get an idea of what I was going through.
After that success (which happened last night btw), I was on to something and didn’t want to let it go. I was getting closer and closer to finding the fix for the funky character on old posts issue now. A part of me was saying, just let it go. Who cares since it’s still readable. But, I do care how my blog looks. I ended up going to bed last night after midnight with no success.
I think the phrase, “sleep on it” has merit. I woke up around 6 am this morning so that I could have a little coffee before going to teach my 9am class at the Art Student’s League and time to check emails etc. Now, I normally reserve this time for writing blog posts, visiting blogs, responding to emails etc., but of course this morning, my mind was still on the stupid character set problem even after converting my database to utf8. I also tried another fix which involved deleting a couple of lines in my-config.php file – this did remove the funky characters in the old posts, but gave my new posts the same problem. So, I was back to the search.
Problem #5 – Further sleuthing, led me to this post on the wordpress support forum and then this post and this one which led me to believe that it was the double space after a . that was causing a  to follow every period followed by another sentence, hence the coding mismatch. I found out that double spaces after a full stop (or a .) is considered old school and reserved for actual typewriters technology and not for the web. Guess what? I learned how to type in 1982 on an old IBM Selectric and was taught to double space – old habits die hard.
After banging my head on my computer a few times, I decided to try the Search and Replace Plugin that I had used the night before to restore my images. So so simple. I entered  on the “replace” line inside the plugin and replaced it with nothing – not a unicode for a space, just left it blank and voilá. The issue is solved. There are still a few posts with other weird characters, but they’re not as pervasive as the  following a period and now I know how to fix them.
So, now what? I can concentrate on restoring the images for my pre 2.6 posts for the month of August and I can start creating a custom page template for my static pages.
In all my manic, I also installed Xampp after reading this tutorial on how to install wordpress on my computer so that I can mess around (play) with my blog without fear of destroying my live blog.
So, I’m signing off for the night and hopefully, I’ll stop obsessing and get back to normal.
~Cynthia
Now, I gotta hope that after I click on “publish” that everything looks normal….
