IMALlama

Years ago, nearly a decade ago in fact, my wife enrolled in a pottery class at our local community college. We planted a shrub while she was enrolled, dug up some clay in the process, and her professor let her make something with it and fire it. To everyone's surprise, it went smoothly.

Enter kids, increasing work responsibilities, etc. A decade passes. Along the way we discovered our yard is 2-3" of top soil followed by nearly 100% gray clay. There's no marbeling, basically no sediment, nothing. Just slightly sandy/gritty gray clay.

I recently buried a gutter downspout and added a French drain in our yard, so I trenched my way through a ton of clay. I set some aside, since our oldest kid is now messaging with clay at our community center.

Here's the quick rundown of how I processed it:

1. Manually remove the topsoil layer
2. Toss clay into a 5 gallon bucket
3. Cover in water, let sit a day or so
4. Mix with a grout/thinset/cement mixing paddle attached to a drill to break up the chunks
5. Sive for coarse material, like roots. I used some burlap as a screen and poured between buckets
6. After you've screened the clay, remove the excess water. You can just let the bucket(s) sit and wait for evaporation to do its thing, you can wait a day or two for some water to separate and pour it off, you can use some fabric you don't care about much as a cheesecloth, etc
7. Once the clay is the appropriate consistency, make something!

I made was a ceramic fish following the instructions of our oldest, who had just made something similar at the community center. The one pictured was meant to be the ugly sacrificial test piece before the "nice" one got fired, but our youngest broke the nice one into pieces, so I guess the ugly one is the nice one now.

I left the fish under our porch for a few weeks to dry out. After that, I put them into our fire pit, lit a small fire to warm them up somewhat gradually, and then built the fire up over a half hour or so.

Burningaton:

Post burn:

Pros:

• Massive quantities of flowers for about 3 months
• Bees love the blooms
• The plant doesn't need any care to thrive
• We've transplanted a few of the seedlings. They're true to their parent in terms of color, but the parents seems like a double bloom and the children seem like single bloom
• If you want a hedge, this seems like a good option

Cons:

• Seeds! So many seeds. Each of its hundreds (thousands?) of flowers will produce 10+ seeds. They all don't germinate, but it's a numbers game. If you want to avoid pulling volunteers up you're best off pulling the seed pods off the plant before they open on their own

I pulled ~2 gallons of seed pods off a week prior to this picture. My wife dumped them in the compost, so no epic 5+ gallon photo 😭

OM-1 with Oly 25 f1.2 pro @ f/2.8

I remain on the fence about this camera, but it can take some pleasing photos if you get it to focus where you want it.

Not that big, but it would still be interesting. I pulled some honey locust from our firewood pile a few years back and incorporated it into a desk. It has a fairly boring grain pattern, but I like the color a lot.

If you look at the very bottom of the screen shot you can see that the home, search, etc buttons are cut off.

Happy to provide more info to help. I'm on a stock pixel 3a.

I am (slowly) working on mounting ACM panels to my Voron 2.4 to try to get my chamber temps up to reduce/eliminate warping on big ASA prints. I only needed 12 of these parts, so I chose to print them sequentially.

Want to know how slow my progress has been? Well, this photo proceeded this post and I made that post weeks ago... I'll crack open the cable chain and get this ball rolling again soon. Or maybe I'll ditch the chains and go to a USB toolhead. But that will require me to print some parts, so I guess I have to fix this. And if I'm doing that it's going to probably be 'good enough' for quite some time... 🙃

There's nothing major in the print queue, but I do want to make sure the printer is ready to go when something does turn up.

Seeds for those interested. They're called trombettas and they're a climbing summer squash with everything you would expect there - nice, mild flavor, etc. They only have seeds in their 'head'. If you pick them young enough the seeds won't be formed so you can eat the entire thing. If you wait a bit longer, you can very easily scoop the seeds out and slice or stuff the head. Head to tail, these things can easily get over two feet. They can also be a bit curvy.

I've found them to be very hardy over the years. They climb really well without encouragement. The vines in the photo are easily 9 feet long.

I like to think this is the mom of Patches.

A9ii + Tamron 150-500 + decent crop

I can see the wire break in the cable chain :'(

A9II + Tamron 150-500 @ 500mm + heavy crop

A9II + Tamron 150-500 @ 500 + heavy crop

Getting very up close and personal revealed all kinds of fine detail I was personally unaware of. For example, look at that texture/pattern around the bird's eye.