I have some news on the Roundabout resin and china production!

The English bone china mold-making has been moved up to early August, so that means I will get the first bone china bisques later in August!! Very excited about that! I can’t wait to glaze it to all kinds of great colors. I will not be taking any custom-color orders on these initial pieces; I’ll be choosing the colors and offering them for sale. The bone chinas are limited to the production of one mold only; that will be 20-25 pieces. There will also be earthenware chinas coming from both me and Joanie Berkwitz probably sometime next year. Those will be able to be customized: look for the Hairy Roundie Earthies!

And I have learned that 10 more Roundabout resins are due to be shipped next week. I think most of these will be reserved for my UK “special delivery” program. But if any are left I will post them for sale here. Email me if you want a Roundabout resin and I will start a little wait list on this batch.

If you live in the UK and didn’t hear about this: I am offering a special one-time-only sale of Roundabout resins where they will be postage AND customs PAID. This is in honor of his British “heritage”. 🙂 I am going to send all the orders in one box to a friend in England, who will them post them out to the owners through Royal Mail. That way I can pay for the customs duty on the one big box. I am about to send an email to everyone on my list who already contacted me about the UK Sale. (It’s now time to pay! 🙂 )

If you want to reserve one of the UK-bound resins, you must contact me by Monday 1st August. The cost is $150.00 each and payment will be due (via PayPal only) by Friday 5th August.

Email Karen

This is a new bone china Boreas Percheron that I just completed yesterday. He is NOT one of the closed edition of 10 original finish (OF) pieces in MATTE solid black; this one is a custom finish. He is glossy and has a white star. He is kind of a “mistake” because I was trying to glaze a solid black Boreas with white markings—in matte—but I didn’t get my matting agent additive mix right in the new overglazes and he glossed up when fired. (That’s the short explanation.) Because I painted the overglaze color right onto a bisque, he is less glossy than a normal gloss glazed piece, but glossier than a satin finish.

I took him to a small show this morning and he now has NAN cards in cmg china breed and workmanship. (Though he was the only entrant in the “black” class… and this color is no workmanship challenge… and in fact I failed “workmanship” because it didn’t fire the way I wanted… so the poor boy hardly earned it!)

I was glazing this one for my own collection and didn’t get what I wanted, therefore I am offering him for sale. This is the LAST Boreas in bone china that I will ever offer for sale, because I only have one more and that will be MINE! (And I will practice my matte-finish glazing on a reject piece next time.) 🙂

He is $450 postage paid. Send me an email via the link below if you are interested.

Email Karen

I just made up a one-page British Show Cob info sheet, to use when taking your Roundabout resin or china to model horse shows. It has 4 photos I took myself at the Royal Windsor Horse Show “cob day” (among ones I used as my sculpture references) plus a description of the show cob from the British Show Horse Assn.

I know there are only 13 Roundabout resins out in the world so far… but if you’d like one of these info sheets to print out, the Google Docs link is below.

NOTE, the file is LARGE (25mb!). The photos are all high resolution so that it will print out nicely.

LINK TO PDF.

It seems that my work life these days can be summed up in two words: “slow” and “patience”. Even though I finished the Roundabout cob sculpture back in April, it feels like it doesn’t exist for me because now the production of this work is in other peoples’ hands. I am trying to be content in waiting-mode for my “new” sculpture to arrive—and to get them into your hands. I have no new word of when more resins are coming, and I don’t want to pester Barry over at BearCast LLC so I have not been asking. I did talk to Donna Chaney over at Alchemy Ceramics in the UK, and now the Roundie bone china molds are scheduled to be made in August. Which means we will get the first ones in mid-September. Patience…

You would think that with nothing new to glaze in the chinas department, I could still be productive with my old molds and custom glazes and the fun of customizing the older sculptures. You would think. Instead, I keep having epic FAILS. Like this most recent Halfling Boreas, which I broke at the bisque stage:

This leg popped off right at the join when I was sanding down the legs. I thought at the bisque stage a piece would be “safe” from my mishaps. Not! I tried doing a repair using clear gloss glaze and firing that, but it didn’t work.I may try again next time I have a glaze fire to run.

I am still breaking off limbs when cleaning greenware. It makes me so afraid of these fragile pieces that I’m not loving the process any more. I think I am trying to run when I haven’t learned to crawl, and should stop spending so much time resculpting these pieces because it is so heartbreaking and a huge waste of time to break something after doing all that custom work. I have had some successes with very simple customizations like new manes and tails. I should probably stick with that for now. Like this one:

This “Heart of Darkness” bisque now has a simple loose mane and forelock (instead of braided), and he’s ready to glaze.

This month I switched over my overglaze colors to a new brand of lead-free glazes. After making up new batches of airbrushable glazes, I tried them out last week and I think they will be fine. Different base colors mean I will have to get used to mixing them to the horse colors I want, but that is not difficult. These glazes also fire cooler than the ones I used to use, so firing time will be a little shorter.

The other word to live by for me this summer is “slow”. Because I really don’t feel like working that hard. Paul is in retirement and so, apparently, am I. I am SO glad I got the sculpture done last winter because I am not motivated to do ANYthing. My life has become so deliciously slow and mellow and lazy. Tennis. Summer hiking at the condo in the mountains. Walks with the Boyz. Reading by the pool at the tennis club. Therefore I ask that you, dear reader, might go by that other key word I mentioned, “patience”. Because I have officially stopped making promises of completed work until further notice.