Dear Ol’ Buge…

Well, on Friday Mom and Grandmommy and I went to the school to attend the kingergarten graduation extravaganza. The kingergarten and 1st grade classes got up on stage altogether and sang some songs and recited a poem. Here’s the gang…

Here’s an attempted zoom, I can’t hold the camera still enough to keep from getting a blurry shot…

When the kids first came out on the stage, the cameras, phones and iPads came out en masse to record the event. I took a couple pics and most of the parents got out of their seats and rushed up the aisles, crowded the stage while the kids seemed a bit thunderstruck by all the attention when they hadn’t actually done anything yet. Paparazzi…

This went on for a long time and looked (from my vantage point) exactly the same as scenes on television of paparazzi crowding red carpets and yelling out the names of celebs they want to glance in their direction. I started to wonder if the kingergarteners were gonna have an autograph session following the performance. Surely all this seeming adulation won’t have a lasting affect. Personally, I was a bit nervous because I just wanted the thing to go off without Sofia getting stage fright and breaking down. The reason I worry about this is because that’s what would have happened if it was me and did happen to me when I was in school. In many ways, I’ve never gotten over it and still do really badly with large groups and public speaking. Fortunately, the bug concentrated on her friend standing next to her and seemed relatively comfortable so the event went off without a hitch. The songs were silly (one was about having beans in your ears) and although the kids were attempting to recite the poem in unison, there was enough discordance to make it so that I could decipher nary a word of it. Here’s a post-extravaganza shot with friends…

I was happy and relieved afterward and as I walked home I remembered a similar event of my own youth. This might be a little lengthy so if you have a problem with long posts, stop here. First off, I attended a small rural K-12 school in one building in a small town in central NY. My senior class consisted of 24 kids, and almost all had been there the entire 13 years. It wasn’t until I was in college in KY that I became aware that kids had 300 and 400 in their senior classes. But such was our school and oddly enough, there were teachers who became fixtures of the institution and taught there for what seems like longer than is possible in one lifetime. One such teacher was Miss Kaut. Miss Kaut was a tall, stout, German lady who taught 8th grade. One remarkable thing about her was that she not only taught me and all my siblings (4 younger than me) and both my parents 20 years earlier, but she actually taught my aunts who were older than my father by a few years and they weren’t the first kids she had taught. Anyway, Miss Kaut had a reputation as a badass and a hurdle or roadblock that every student had to get past to graduate. We called her Buge (pronounced byooj) which was short for byooger which was a bastardization of the word booger. The origin came from the fact that she used to hock up what are known in the south as “hockers” (we called them clams when I was growing up) and magically form them into little pearl-sized beads on her tongue and then snatch them like pebbles with little kleenex that she carried with her everywhere. She was a hardass and in my first day of 8th grade homeroom she laid down the law by throwing a blackboard eraser a good 15 feet, smacking a kid (Pat O’Connor, I think) upside the head making a cloud of chalk dust rise from his newly disheveled coif. He had been whispering to a friend while Miss Kaut was talking. Anyway, every 8th grade class in the history of the school had an “operetta” at the end of the year. Miss Kaut wrote these and really all they were were a series of songs strung together with bits of dialog betwixt that didn’t really have much of a story. Of course Miss Kaut had started these in the 1930s or maybe even earlier and she had popular songs from then that she rotated but none were contemporary songs. Ours had “I’m looking over a four leafed clover” and “It’s a small world”… you get the idea. Miss Kaut’s one concession to the times (in my case 1972) was that everyone in the class could write down 3 songs they would want for the operetta’s finale. Supposedly, the song with the most requests would be the last song in the operetta. Now believe it or not, I was consumed with mischief at this age and about 5 friends and I (this would be 25% of the total class) got together and agreed to put the same 3 songs on our lists. They were “War Pigs”, “Paranoid” and “Iron Man”… all from the Black Sabbath album popular at the time. In our naivete, we thought that we had successfully rigged the system and that the finale of our operetta would be one of these three songs. It ended up that our lists were ignored and the song ended up being the apropos “we may never pass this way again” by Seals and Crofts. We were not happy. Anyway, I came to have fond memories of all the trouble we caused Miss Kaut for the remaining years there. Now, fast forward to when I was about 33 years old. My dad died and we had one of those awful catholic wakes. The casket was in the front of the room and a line formed to the left of it starting with my Mom, then my siblings in no particular order and I was the last in line. Each of us had our partners behind us and in my case that was my ex wife. There were lots of people and at one point Miss Kaut came in. She was probably in her late 80s or early 90s by this point and as I stood there, I thought that she must have taught almost everyone in the rooom. As she came down the line I watched as she expressed condolences to each of my siblings attempting to place each of their names… which must have been difficult considering the number of students that passed through her 8th grade class through the years. When she got to me, she grabbed my hand, looked into my eyes and thought. She was having trouble recalling my name. As she peered into my eyes, trying to summon a memory of me, I saw a flicker of recognition come across her face, she lit up and gave me what I consider one of greatest compliments I’ve ever received. She said, much to my ex’s dismay… aaah, you… you’re the devil. I was grieving but it did warm me a bit to realize that I had indeed stood out and was remembered by her in a manner that I would have liked to be remembered. She died some time after that and I was saddened to hear of it because as much as we “hated” her in school, she really did have a profound and mostly good influence on all of us. I’m sure others would disagree. That’s all I got today.

Justin Beaver Is No Crappy Face…

Long time readers may remember this post where I recounted my early success in convincing the bug when she was about 2 1/2 years old that the d1sney princesses were all named crappy face. Well the glory days are apparently over as she came home from school talking about Just1n B1eber the other day. I don’t think she’s seen him anywhere yet but has heard him at the roller skating party. I interceded in this conversation and insisted that her and her friends were mispronouncing it and his name is really Justin Beaver. A flicker of doubt ran across her face but she easily dismissed this and the jig was up. I had to pull out big guns and tried to convince her that young Mr. Beaver has a cousin named Justin Racoon. Her deep seated skepticism didn’t allow her to even bite for a second. I gave it the old college try but I guess it’s time for me to up my game. In other news, Sofia has settled on a color for the stumphouse. I don’t usually like to go on about the weather but we are drowning in rain… it’s hard to believe how much and bike riding has become more difficult to work in. So has painting the stumphouse, by time we get it painted, she will have lost interest. Here’s the bug putting on a coat…

Maybe we’ll wrap it up this weekend if it’s not raining… yeah right. Just thought I’d throw in another pic of the bug playing dressup…

Seems the last post generated a few comments. I resisted the urge to reply and would only like to point out that I tried to make a sharp distinction between normal use or even frequent use and outright obsession. Just one thing on that note, I recently read an article saying that the iPad we now responsible for a plummet in extramarital affairs because iPad owners are not only not interested in the opposite sex, they are unaware they even exist… also they are unaware that other living things even exist. The bisque came out fine…

Sorry for the blurry picture. I decided that I was going to go back and make a definitive inventory of glaze test tiles for all the glaze I have mixed up over the years sitting idle in my basement. Some of these are so old that I wasn’t even using porcelain and many other things have changed since then and I can’t really remember what all of them looked like. I’ve been surprised at how tedious and time consuming it is, especially if the glaze has no water left and has to be reconstituted first. It should be interesting. Here’s the beginning of my test tiles…

Here’s the reconstituted, remixed and re-sieved glazes stacked up so far…

Epic, Epically, Epic, Epic, Epically, Epic, Epic, Epic FAIL…

I’ll get around to the title later but first, here’ Sofia’s kindergargen picture which is by no means an epic fail, more like an epic pass to me…

I love everything about this picture. One of the best things about it is that it represents a plan she hatched and executed without Mom or me knowing. I vaguely remember one morning that she came to me dressed like Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz (that was her Halloween costume) and asked, is it ok if I wear this to school? We said fine and off she went not knowing that it was school pictures day. We would have said yes anyway because it truly would have been fine and we were not intending to purchase pictures from the school as I already have 1000s of them on my computer already but she, I guess, wasn’t certain about us granting her permission. So she went, they took the pictures and there you have it. Before I get to my “rant”, here’s some of the greenware I’ve been finishing up to try to get the kiln packed a bit tighter before bisqueing…

OK, this thing has mulling around in my head for days and, although I don’t really think of my blog as the venue for these types of observations, I also felt like maybe if I typed it all out it would serve as some sort of catharsis. This may be long so if you’re into the short post stop here. I will start with a couple disclaimers. One, although I play a luddite on TV, um I mean blog, in truth the two businesses that I was involved with before I became a potter both were “high tech” businesses. I state this only to clarify that, not only do I have an understanding of technology and its role in society but I have immersed myself in it, have made a living working with it and I really am not against it. I also am on facebook, twitter, etsy and this blog and spend more time than I should considering the finite amount of time one has for ceramics production. But… I don’t have a cel phone or a watch for that matter. Lastly, I’m sure my ceramics friends don’t fall prey to what follows because if they did, they would never have learned how to make anything in the first place. So here goes. Sofia’s Mom and I went to a concert on Monday night. It was a rock concert (which I haven’t been to in many years) but that’s not what I’m on about. We were in the front row of the balcony and we dutifully listened to the warm up band which wasn’t all that great. Between the warmup band and the main show was a period of time for the roadies to break down one band’s equipment and ready the other’s for prime time. To my slight surprise, this wait turned out to be about an hour but actually seemed longer. As soon as the house lights came up after the warm up band, I peered over the edge of the balcony to see little illuminations throughout the theater… literally hundreds of them. We were on the left side of the balcony and each row there had 15 seats. So in my row of 15 and the row behind us of 15 more there were 28 people if you don’t count me and Alicia. Out of the 28 people, 25 of them immediately took out their cel phones and went into the electronic vomit gaze. At first I thought it odd and typical even. I thought OK, they’re texting whatever, “the warmup band sucked”, “I really like the buckskin jacket the guy in my row’s wearing”, “what’s the codger doing with that beautiful younger woman?”, “I bet he has cat-like reflexes”, oh I’m sure they weren’t texting about me because they were totally oblivious to the person next to them, nevermind the dude 4 seats down the row but regardless… all those things would have only taken about a minute to “text” especially using the broken english, misspelling and special characters that texting is known for. But as couples huddled together on their date to the concert and sat next to each other, both with their phones in hand, both completely ignoring the living, breathing human next to them, they did not cease. They stared and flicked their screens and checked this and that and typed with their thumbs for the entire hour. Nary a word was uttered save mine and Mom’s. Now, I understand the value of the cel phone for a business-person. I understand it for an emergency (although I’ve yet to come up with a scenario where being alerted of an emergency would allow the recipient of the distressed call to actually intervene in a significant way… I don’t know, maybe a lost hiker scenario or something). I even understand the convenience of augmenting an actual conversation with an occasional g00gle to find out what the name of that j3nnif3r l0pez movie was but… what in the hell are they doing? for an hour? What could possibly be so captivating? I really want to know, although I imagine that my worst guess is the answer. “My toes are cold… worst day ever!!!” How about, “I can’t believe he’s wearing skinny jeans!!!” Or “this closet doesn’t have enough wooden hangers, so pissed!!!” “This teacher thinks he knows everything!!! what an ass!!!” Imagine as I may, it doesn’t explain the obsession of hundreds of people there that night during that hour… and during the show too. When the main act started, then they switched from texting to taking videos of the show. Experiencing the show through the viewfinder of a cel phone is not experiencing the show. So there it is… this is how I know that I’m getting old. When I was a teen, my Dad would give me a hard time about not wearing white socks. Of course I wouldn’t have worn white socks to school for anything because this meant in some perverse teenage lack of logic that I was a sissy or a nerd or whatever it was… but it wasn’t good. My Dad and I argued about it because he was trying to let me know that it was absurd. Anyway, I distinctly remember thinking… I’m not going to act like an old dude when I get to be old. I’m gonna be cool. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m cool… man! But if I could magically go back in time and have a conversation with my young self and my young Dad, and I told them that the things that would eventually make me old were unforeseeable and those things did not include whether or not someone wore white socks or not. If I told them that most men now used almost as much hairspray and cosmetics that women do and preen as much too, if I told them that the most common cosmetic surgery for men would be calf implants, if I told them that facts had become meaningless in the political, as well as, personal arena, if I told them that the definitions of words were mostly irrelevant, and if I told them that people would be constantly in contact with each other with star trek communicator phones (by the way, Captain Kirk only used the damn thing when he was on the surface of an alien planet and between the sparse communications he actually did things in the made up real world like getting into fistfights with humanoids not really so much different than us) and they wouldn’t be talking on the phones, they would be incessantly typing fragmented, misspelled, nonsensical electronic vomit to each other and this incessant typing of fragmented, misspelled, nonsensical electronic vomit would be reciprocated with the like and would feed our collective narcissism hoping against all hope that one of our 5000 “friends” would not only read about our toes being cold but would actually commiserate with a long awaited “so sorry to hear”, confirming and affirming that each other actually exist and are part of a global electronic co-dependence… well, neither my younger self nor my Dad would have believed me. If I could convince them that this was the near future, they would have both forgiven me for how I eventually became old. Similar to the popular sayings of our day like April is the new June etc. we would have agreed that today’s old is the past’s insane. I have quite a few friends that teach college and some that teach high school. They all have stories about the inability of students not only to refrain from this obsessive phone behavior during class but of those same students’ inability to focus on the task of whatever the class is about. This is the kind of thing that starts to be a bit disturbing. The fact is that if you are sitting with someone having coffee and your texting while conversing, you are not giving your full attention to either activity. By extension, this means that these young people are living their entire waking lives not fully paying attention to any one thing ever. My personal belief is that one is not capable of accomplishing any worthwhile skill without having a commitment that would entail, at the very least, paying attention. Lest we think that this is a phase or a US phenomenon, I was having lunch with a friend yesterday who had just returned from Paris, the one in France. Coincidentally, while having lunch (this would be the two of us, sitting at a table in a restaurant, eating food and talking to each other without the aid of electricity… for instance, I would look at him and say something, then he would look at me and say something and so on, and so on), I was about to air some of this phone biz because, like I said, it’s been percolating. Before I could though and after telling me what a magical city Paris is and Louvre and the d’Orsay and the ballet and the cafe life and the food, the food, he says, well, the only thing is that the population density is much greater than NYC and it’s crowded everywhere, on the Metro, in the restaurants, and even on the sidewalks when walking… AND everyone under about 30 years old is walking… at this point he makes the gesture of someone holding a cel phone out in front of them in the electronic vomit stare. Who’d have thunk that this would be the way life on earth would turn out? So we’ve exchanged our deep meaningful relationships with a select manageable few in real time and in real physical proximity with shallow, much less meaningful “friendships” with a not-select unmanageable many in lightning speed and not limited to proximity at all. Call me old if you like but this is not a step forward, well, I’ll take that back, it’s a step forward but it’s not progress by any definable criterion. I was listening to Terry Gross the other day interviewing an author. She began her question, “now that we’re in a post-reading society”. Really? It’s a done deal? We’re already post-reading? Language was the primary driver of our species’ “progress”. Which leads me to the end of my rant and the explanation of the title if you already don’t know. Years ago, FAIL became the online “shorthand” for a failed attempt or magnificent blunder, etc., soon to be followed by epic fail, which clearly was a failed attempt or magnificent blunder but of epic proportion. The online electronic vomiters over-using the epic fail to describe everything they disagreed with led to a watered down perception of this epically cool catchall (much like the word awesome). As is apropos, instead of maybe coming up with another adjective or series of adjectives, the mindless electronic vomiters opted for the completely brainless and unsatisfactory “epically epic fail” which is simply adding an adverb to the adjective… so I thought I’d just take it to its logical conclusion and conflate the overuse of the cel phone with the total lack of creativity in coming up with an alternative to FAIL. In conversations about this subject, others have taken the position that our youth has grown up with this technology and it is a sort of cultural evolution and that I simply cannot understand it in the way they do because I wasn’t raised immersed in it. I was, however, raised immersed in television and we all know how well that turned out. Well, sayonara for now, I will end by stating that it’s really a good thing I don’t text because if I had to text this post on a phone, it would probably take me about a month. By the way, my elbow itches, I dropped an apple peel this morning, I keep yawning, my tea’s getting cold, I cracked the nail on my right ring finger, I love snowballs, my passenger door lock doesn’t work with the electronic locker switch, it’s colder in the kitchen than in the living room, I saw a fly, shoelaces are better than velcro, I wish I had a better pencil sharpener, there was no mail today, my neighbor’s sidewalk has less cracks than mine, just brushed my teeth, the movie hasn’t started yet, I used to want a fish, there were no potato chips when I went shopping today, I hate vaseline, squirrels are cute, my shirt smells funny, I slipped, ice skates are cool, I don’t like raw carrots, those birds are in my tree, the rug by the front door has a spot on it, the shower door is only 28 inches wide, my stapler just ran out of staples, this paper isn’t white enough, basketball is a weird game, there’s a horse in the country, some songs don’t make sense, my brother is tall, kids fight, I’m out of postage stamps, got to the mall ten minutes early, I smell garlic, it rained in my open window, I saw the funniest dog just now, and the mailman put my neighbor’s mail in my mailbox… WORST DAY EVER, Epic, Epically, Epic, Epic, Epically, Epic, Epic, Epic FAIL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Peonies And Greenware…

Things have been rolling along here. I put in almost 100 miles this week on the bike and I’m about over the hump on the early season pain from winter fuzz and atrophy. It’s all about the peonies right now. The ones I had plus the ones I dug up from when my neighbor was going to till them under and that have finally got their roots set down good have come out in spades. Here’s a perfect specimen…

Sofia made vases full for peonies for mom for mother’s day and after those and a couple other bouquets, she still went around and counted over 50 blossoms just in our small front yard. Usually it rains when they’re fully blooming and the weight of the water bends them earthward but as of yesterday, they were still up off the ground. Of course the weather’s changed back and it’s cool and rainy today and for days to come…

While I was taking garden pics, I got this one of the bottle brush buckeye, merely on it’s 3rd year…

In the studio, my test tiles that I made out at the mount with their extruder dried so I put underglaze stripes on them for testing…

So last monday, I was all set to start another new round of work and was getting pretty psyched when it occurred to me that if I included all the test tiles that I had probably another whole load of greenware and the idea of completely free shelves with no old greenware lying around appealed to me. I decided to at least bisque it all. Unfortunately most of it was not decorated at all so I went to making little squares…

Here’s a large shallower bowl with the squares…

I took a couple of pictures of the inside and they kinda reminded me of the Piazza Del Campo in Siena, the gentle sloping half-funnel shaped public space that always ranks high on lists of the best architectural spaces in the world. Maybe I can use that description on etsy?… Piazza del Campo inspired bowl…

I’m also trying to duplicate an effect that I used on a glass in the previous kiln load except a bit different execution. Of course these are only part-way into the process…

Lastly, I was playing around with some of my terra sig and started building up a low relief of texture. I guess I’ll have to see how this holds up after a firing but either way, it was fun doing it…

Seems Like It’s All About Poop…

So the bug and I were driving down to Vietnam Kitchen and I decided to put a little Van Morrison on while we were driving. There’s a song called “Reminds Me Of You” that’s on the “Back On Top” CD and in the chorus Van repeats the lines… “everything I do, reminds me of you”. Sofia’s in the back seat and she says, that’s silly. I say what’s silly? She says, he said everything I do, reminds me of you. I said, what’s silly about that? The bug says, well… does that mean that when he poops, it reminds him of that person? Instead of groaning, I decided to take another tack and said, well, the verse wouldn’t rhyme if Van sang… “everything I do except pooping, reminds me of you”. She immediately said, it’s not just everything except poop, what about pee? Before I could respond she added, what about throwup? And what about blasting? At that I conceded and admitted that she was correct and, literally speaking, the lyric is silly. I’d email Van the man, but from the interviews I’ve seen, I’m not sure he would care to hear the criticism. So I woke this morning to Sofia running around the house like crazy because we managed to get some work done on her stumphouse yesterday and she was going to go out and eat her pancakes in her house. My first post about the stumphouse was on April 4th and since I’m only able to work on it on the weekends, it took till May 8th to have a second day at it. The reasons for this are the usual… special days and holidays but mostly rain rain rain. In fact it’s supposed to rain for the next 3 days too and it feels like I’ll never get back on the bicycle. Anyway, here’s the bug eating breakfast…

So the stumphouse has merely been a plywood box, covered with a tarp and sinking into the mud that was once our back yard. I was a bit despondent as I removed the tarp to find it had settled all catterwhompus on it’s 2×4 blocks. I built the roof separate because it was already getting heavy. My neighbor Jamie came over to hoist it up on the stump but it was too heavy for the two of us to lift. We discussed getting more friends to help but I was disillusioned at the prospect of arranging 4 different people to be at my house at the same time. So… we decided that the only option left was the “Easter Island” method. For the uninitiated, this is the method of leaning and tumping and using blocks of wood to gain a mechanical advantage. We finally got it on the stump and later we hoisted the roof up on two step ladders…

My design was directed by my not wanting to buy any more wood and allowing air to come into the box which would have been like a prison hotbox if it was entirely closed up. The result, in my opinion, is a kind of sail that will catch the 50+ mph winds we’ve been having and send the whole stumphouse down the alley. Here’s some more pieces up on etsy (first click goes to etsy, others enlarge)…

Confirmation…

Today is Oaks Day, which was originally the day ostensibly set aside for locals at Churchill Downs… the local Derby if you will. So Sofia’s out of school like all of Jefferson County. I like having her home but I remember when I was growing up in central NY and getting a day off from school would require just shy of a natural disaster. I remember many a day getting over a foot of snow and huddling around the tv in the morning waiting to hear, only to be disappointed that school was not canceled. Of course there were other things too like we walked to school every day in blizzards and we only ate dirt and sand for several years, etc. So I woke up to the bug’s schoolwork on the kitchen table…

I’d like to call particular attention to the first sentence in the first pic. Admittedly, it’s something I aspire to but it’s always nice to get some confirmation and hell, if I was funny to no one but her, it would still make me feel like I succeeded. Of course, upon further inspection, apparently not only am I funny but pigs are too so that kinda takes a bit away from the proclamation. Also I’m glad that Sofia thinking me funny was first on her list but then there’s humming, hopping and feeding the dog… to me it’s like one of those aptitude tests where they ask, which statement does not belong. Oh well, I’ll take what I can get… me and the pigs are a hoot. If you enlarge the first pic you will also see a stamp of approval by the teacher (I assume) which interjects “wow”. I could never presume to know what’s in the mind of kingergarten teacher but I think that the “wow” seems awfully close to the statement about funny dad and not so much the hopping, humming, etc. We’ll never know. Here’s the bug and the demon dog (who by the way has turned out to be the sweetest dog), difficult to get them to pose…

Been posting pieces to etsy. But first, this one sold during the mother’s day sale last weekend…

Here’s some recent etsy postings (first click goes to etsy, the others enlarge)…

Testing, Testing, Is This Thing On?…

As I mentioned in the last post, this past weekend was the Mother’s day sale up at Mount St. Francis monastery where my friend Steven Cheek works. I managed to go up a couple days early and Steven was gracious enough to allow me use of their extruder. I’ve been wanting to do some glaze testing and I absolutely abhor throwing those little L-shaped test tiles. The extruder has a nice square tube die and makes these which are drying now…

The sale’s opening was on Friday evening and the sale ran on saturday and sunday. The opening was fun but Sofia and Mom weren’t able to attend. Saturday was the first day in some time that it didn’t rain and the weather was perfect. The turnout for the sale was not perfect and there wasn’t much traffic. It started raining again on Sunday (and hasn’t stopped yet) and we were all a bit down but the traffic picked up substantially and we had quite a few customers come through. Of course, I had the bug all weekend and she made friends with everyone and wanted to help manage the transactions. That morning, Mom woke to rain and a driver’s side windshield wiper that didn’t work so she took “my” car to work and left me hers. I had left my camera in that car and when I mentioned to Sofia that my camera was in my car still, she said… I’ll take my camera, which is what she refers to my old camera as. I didn’t think much of it at the time but she assumed the role of intrepid reporter and went around the room taking pictures of her favorite pots. Many were blurry but some were really good so I’ll include them here (Sofia took all of the following), here’s Steven Cheek’s pots…

Here’s some pieces by Amelia Stamps from Lexington…

Here’s yours truly…

Next is Mr. Sebastian Moh…

Here’s a pic of Patrick (the shot of his table was amongst the blurry) who Sofia flirted with all day…

Here’s another one that was on her camera that was taken weeks before. It’s our fearless journalist getting her hair combed by her dad…

So that’s it for the bug’s pics. She was very helpful and funny and friendly all weekend and a good sport considering that dad making her stay in a room for 5+ hours both days. At one point she saw some people perusing my pots and she walked across the room and went up to them and said, I really like my Dad’s pots. The little salesperson. Here’s a shot I took of one of my planters with a fern I put in it…

Here’s some pieces I posted on Etsy today (first click goes to etsy, others enlarge)…