You don’t need a car to get to The Ceramic Shop! if you live in Philadelphia, you can take the train into downtown Norristown, or the Norristown High Speed Line and walk a few blocks to get there. I’ve made the trip both ways in the past. Unless you’re buying heavy bags of clay, or have a group of studio buddies offer you a ride, this is the best way to go.

But there are some things you miss using public transportation. You miss traffic jams on the Schuylkill Expressway for one thing. Crawling along in traffic gives you the opportunity to learn interesting facts about your studio mates’ lives which you can’t repeat on your blog in the interest of decorum. And you get to hear a lot of bad jokes, you get to discuss politics, and you learn interesting trivia (both pottery and non-pottery related.)

And then you arrive at your destination, you pile out of the car, and you watch as your studio mates, all adults, run up and down the aisles like they are in a toy store. Ok, an exaggeration. Maybe.

Because the Ceramic Shop is a paradise for potters.

They have anything a fledgling or experienced potter could possibly want: tools, clays, glazes and, if you don’t see a glaze you like, they carry the materials you need to mix your own. They can even help you design custom decals.

You can buy small sample bags of clay If you want to try one out before committing to 50 lbs of it.

If you do buy a large amount of clay, you can pull your car right up to the warehouse behind to the store and load it right into your trunk.

If you want to try colored clay, you can buy premixed bags.

I prefer to mix my own colored clay. I bought a few new Mason Stain colors on our field trip.

I’ve been making more clay figurines and have had a hard time getting consistent even colors on them. Maybe because they’re too small for me to apply the glazes and underglazes as evenly as I’d like. Making the critters from colored clay gives me more color consistency. The figurines here are white earthenware with a clear gloss glaze.

And speaking of the Fleisher Open Studio Potters, a few of us will share a table at the Made at Fleisher show on June 6. We’ll join other Flleisher members selling everything from jewelry to prints to handmade books and more. The vendors of El Mercado Cultural will take over the parking lot with their handmade items. Join us if you can.

This is not a baking blog, but it is a blog about creativity. I’ve posted before on my forays into bread baking, including the wonderful recipe for whole wheat bread I found on the Five Heart Home site.

The great thing about this recipe is that it doesn’t need a long rising period. You mix the dough, knead it a bit, shape your loaves, put them right into the pan, and when they rise to the height you like, you bake them. You’re not going to get the complex flavors and crumb that you get from slow-rise breads and sourdoughs, but the trade off is that it’s the fastest yeast dough recipe you are likely to find.

And when you start to look at a recipe as a guideline, you never know where you’ll end up.

A few years ago I decided to start milling my own whole wheat flour from wheat berries. I’ve been buying my wheat from Amazon which works for me since I don’t have a car. I started out milling the flour with a hand-operated grain mill like this one. But milling flour by hand is arduous work and not for the faint of heart . (And I already built my character as far as it will go by attending twelve years of Catholic school. ) So I upgraded to a Wonder Mill grain mill. I forget where I bought mine, but here is a link. They’re not cheap, but they are well worth it if you mill flour on a regular basis.

If you’re wondering how to use one of these things, here’s how it’s done. The grain mill comes in two parts that you connect with a rigid hose. Pour the grain into the hopper and turn the sucker on. I use the bread setting.

It mills enough flour for four hearty loaves in under a minute. And it’s loud but you don’t run it very long so it doesn’t matter unless you decide to mill flour in the wee hours of the morning which I don’t recommend.

I’ve been making whole wheat bread for several years now when I decided to make it more complicated by adding seeds and grains to the mix to punch it up a bit. But these changes have taken a great bread recipe to a new level.

I must confess that I don’t follow recipes to the letter very often. I experiment a lot and I experiment with baking which I have heard you’re not supposed to do. When I was a kid and got busy in the kitchen, my Mother would follow me around wringing her hands, shrieking “You’re going to have a baking failure!” To her credit, she never stopped me, and I never had a serious baking failure.

But I must confess that when I experimented with this whole wheat bread recipe, I could hear her shrieking from beyond the grave and the voice didn’t go away until the bread came out of the oven. Here’s what I did.

I started out with the The Very BEST Whole Wheat Bread recipe which you can find here. But I made some changes to the recipe:

I added one teaspoon of Diastatic Dry Malt Powder to every three cups of flour. (I’d never used this additive before and decided to give it a try.)

And I added grains and seeds to the base recipe

Before I mixed the dough, I made some cracked wheat and rye in my blender.

Then I combined it with about 1/4 to 1/2 cup each of millet, kasha, toasted wheat germ, shelled sunflower seeds, black sesame seeds, pepitas and rolled oats. That’s what I had on hand. You could probably use whatever you have in your pantry.

I poured some warm water over the grains for them to soak up while I prepared the dough.

I snagged a Kitchen Aid mixer on Craig’s list a few years ago. It makes kneading the dough so easy.

Adding the grain mixture to the dough.

This turned out to be a very wet dough because of the wetness of the grain mixture. I added just enough flour to make it workable, and then turned it out into a 14-inch stainless steel bowl to finish the kneading. Most of the kneading gets done in the mixer.

I make a double recipe, but I mix each recipe one at a time and combine both of them in a large bowl for the final knead. The mixer bowl is simply not big enough. I make one batch of the grain and seed mixture and add half to each recipe.

I have a tiny kitchen which is why you see the bowl sitting on a chair. There’s a double recipe in there-four big loaves. This was the point where I heard my mother’s baking failure warning ringing loud and clear in my ears. But I soldiered on and wrestled the dough to a manageable state.

Then it was just a matter of getting it into the loaf pans.

The best thing about The Very BEST Whole Wheat Bread recipe is that it directs you to heat your oven, turn it off, and then put in your loaves to rise. When the bread rises as high as you want your baked loaves to be, you bake them for the prescribed time and then take them out.

The loaves in the oven before baking.

So how was the bread? I probably would not be a contender for The Great British Bake Off. A few years ago, my husband invited an acquaintance to our home for Thanksgiving dinner. She’d been a hot shot sous chef in another life. She took one look at my homemade bread and remarked “interesting crumb.” I knew it wasn’t a compliment.

But I think this bread turned out great! It’s not heavy the way whole wheat bread often is. I didn’t use a lot of white flour in it. I think the dry malt powder must have lightened the dough somehow. I’m going to keep making it until I get tired of it and am ready to try something else.

My recommendation? Don’t be afraid to play with your food.

José Maceda and Aki Onda  Sound Installation

The late José Maceda composed a musical score and created separate recordings of musicians and singers performing the works on gongs and Filipino musical instruments. He then worked with radio stations across Manilla to play the recordings simultaneously. It must have been something to hear!

At the Whitney, the recordings were playing on boom boxes.  It’s strange how this technology seems so old fashioned now. They didn’t play the music very loud. I suppose it was difficult to present an installation like this in a museum. I wish they’d had it in a separate room so people could  hear Maceda’s music.

This work is described as “fifty-five suspended creatures with bodies sewn together from taxidermied bird wings and discarded children’s toys salvaged from thrift stores. The resulting sculptures hang from nooses in reference to the history of racial violence inthe United States.”

This installation didn’t do anything for me. It was difficult to see the nooses. The creatures presented as whimsical. Maybe it was too precious. I don’t think that artists should have to spoon feed their viewers, but I think a little more concrete narrative wouldn’t have hurt.

Contrast this work with John Akonfrah’s video installation, The Hour of the Dog. When I saw at this at the Baltimore Museum of Art, it hit me in the gut.  If you want to see this  provocative work, you will have to go to Houston. 

The Whitney’s explanation of this work is as follows: “The Intention: Chao designed this ‘artless rectangle’ to satirize and choreograph how viewers typically interact with and move through traditional museums. 

I am not sure what this means.  There should be some kind of interaction between artwork and viewers.   But Chao seems to be assigning all the responsibility onto the viewer while letting the artist off the hook. 

Or is she?  Maybe that’s part of the message. But work seemed too gimmicky to me. I recalled the novels of  Michel Houellebecq whose satirical commentary on the modern art world is second to none. His work, however, is not for the faint of heart.  Be warned.

I love these three sculptures by Nani Chacon. They captured the feeling you get when you’re driving across the desert in the American Southwest. Vast spaces, power lines, and a mesa in the distance. But they remind you of who the first inhabitants of those deserts were, subtly but deliberately. I think these were my favorites from the biennial. They looked beautiful against the skies of New York City.

Market East in Philadelphia has had its ups and downs ever since I moved here. Currently, its experiencing a down. This has been caused, I have heard, by the decline in brick and mortar retail sales and the pandemic. So many empty storefronts.

But there’s an organization in Philadelphia that’s working to improve the problem of empty storefronts by bringing creative entrepreneurs and building owners together. It’s called Meantime, and I had never them before this weekend. Read more about this organization here.

Two Persons Coffee with a primary location in the Bok Building now has a satellite location on Market Street

Almost Famous sells clothing, art and vintage items.

For a complete list of the pop-up shops, press here.

Next, I decided to check out the Art Star Craft Bazaar at Cherry Street Pier.

Sculpture outside of Cherry Street Pier

Ben Franklin Bridge

I’ve heard that craft fair business is down this year, but you wouldn’t know it from looking at the Art Star Craft Bazaar. The place was packed with happy shoppers.

My next stop was Rittenhouse Square where two events were happening: The Rittenhouse Square Fine Craft Festival and the Center City Open Streets

The Rittenhouse fine craft fair is held twice a year. The next one is in October.

The artisan’s booths stretched around the perimeter of the square. The fair was packed with people looking at the wares and enjoying the fine spring weather.

The inside of the Square was a peaceful oasis, full of people relaxing and hanging out, seemingly oblivious to the activity occurring outside

The other event was Open Streets. The Center City District of Philadelphia has been experimenting with car free streets for awhile. This year, they’re sponsoring car free Sundays from April 5 through May 17 in the area around Rittenhouse Square.

There were a lot of families with young children enjoying the car-free atmosphere. And it’s nice to be able to eat out of doors without breathing in car exhaust. I love outdoor dining, but not in Center City Philadelphia. I’ll save myself for Paris and Amsterdam.

I didn’t ask him to write a poem for me. If I had to pick a topic, I might have suggested how nice it was to be able to cross the street without fear of being run over by someone driving like a lunatic.

I think this guy has the right idea.

Yellow dog, above, is the biggest of the bunch at about 3.5 inches long. I gave him a ball to hold because I wasn’t sure how to sculpt paws. Hell, I wasn’t sure about how to sculpt a recumbent dog at all until I thought of using a picture of the Egyptian deity Anubis as inspiration.

My second pup was much smaller than my first. And my clay was soft so his head wouldn’t stay up. So he ended up in a “sniffing the ground” pose which is very appropriate for a dog.

Fashioning a critter from earthenware clay is more challenging than polymer because the clay dries out. But the upside is that it’s easier to smooth dings and defects from the clay.

I’ll admit that as a beginner, I sometimes start making one kind of critter and something else entirely emerges — as if the clay has a mind of its own. So much for working with intention! I expect that will come as my skills improve.

Glazing critters this small can be challenging. I am working with low-fire clay and the cone 06 glaze I use can be hard to apply because every streak shows up after firing. I’ve found that using a bit of colored clay and underglaze works well because I can then finish with clear gloss for the glaze fire. That’s what I did for the little guy below.

I love this yarn! I’ve given away all my yarn except for one ball of multi-colored silk yarn that I frogged from a hat I bought at a thrift shop. I’m using it to make tassels.

I have plenty of raw materials. These beads are made of colored porcelain and fired at cone 6. They’re pretty sturdy and should wear well.

I also put together a couple of bookmarks using long ceramic beads and glass beads from my stash. I like the look of these, but they are a bit on the heavy side. The findings were probably made for glass beads, but glass is heavy too. Polymer clay beads would be ideal for bookmarks like these.

These components would look nice on the end of a key chain. I don’t think they are interesting enough to stand on their own as pendants.

Two key chains with metal spacer beads

I like this colorful key chain with the yarn tassel. I string the beads on sturdy Mastex cord.

I’m also experimenting with painting simple designs on some of the ceramic beads with Pebeo 150 Porcelaine paint. The beads are drying on a baking rack designed for polymer and they will go into my oven to set the paint. I’m not sure how well these designs will hold up on a key chain because it gets a lot of wear.

I’ve recently gotten back into seed beading after being away from it for a few years. Beading was really popular about 20 years ago and I hear it’s making a comeback. That’s the way it is in the craft world. People go crazy with a certain craft ( remember rubber stamping and scrap booking?) it goes away for a while and then comes back with a vengeance.

Except for me, beading never really went out of style. I just put it on the back burner for awhile. And then I found a group of women near me who get together to bead once a month and that’s all it took.

I’ve always been into making beaded beads, hollow beads, and geometric patterns. I started a podcast bead on a long plane ride and am working on a zigzag bracelet.

I’ve also started making 30 bead beaded balls. You might know this as the Plato bead or the beaded dodecahedron. I made a few of these beads some years ago from the pattern in Valerie Hector’s wonderful book, The Art of Beadwork: Historic Inspiration, Contemporary Design , and decided to revisit them.

The biggest problem with learning beading techniques from a book, especially the 30 bead ball, is that it’s extremely difficult to translate a 3D pattern project to a 2D pattern. Except nowadays, we have videos which makes learning so much easier. So I went straight to the Internet where I found Beading Globally, Valerie Hector’s YouTube channel.

I watched Hector’s video several times as I struggled to learn the pattern and then I nailed it! And turned out a handful of beaded balls. And then guess what happened?

I lost my beading mojo! That’s right. I lost my beading mojo. I totally lost the ability to complete a bead. It was back to square one for me.

I had to reinvent the wheel. I watched videos from different makers, read articles, and then started again. I am happy to say I got my mojo back.

This got me to thinking about how we learn off-loom beading stitches generally. One of the hardest things about learning beading (and knitting and crochet also) is the ability to recognize that you’ve made a mistake soon after you make it so that correcting it does not become a major production.

Another problem is that it takes a few steps of bead work before the project begins to take shape. When you’re starting out, beading is partly an act of faith until you become comfortable with the technique and know what to expect at each stage.

And it’s not as easy to write a beading tutorial as it looks. Ask me how I know. People learn differently. Certain people take to a tutorial and others look atthe same set of instructions and see Chinese Algebra.

Magazine and book editors might rewrite instructions in a way that’s not clear. A photo layout where the picture ends up next to the wrong set of instructions can be confusing.

So, how did I finally learn how to successfully make a beaded ball time after time? By learning a few things about the process that I share here. This post is not intended to be a complete tutorial on how to made a beaded ball. Good instructions already exist and there is no reason for me to reinvent the wheel.

I wrote this post to add some useful tips that  I learned in the process of getting back my beading mojo. I recommend that you watch the videos, try the technique, and then refer to this post if you get stuck.

Two videos I recommend are Valerie Hector’s tutorial on YouTube and Katerina Kostinsky’s animation, also on YouTube. If you prefer printed directions and diagrams, you can find them here

The Process

A thirty bead dodecahedron is a beaded ball made up of beaded rings. Each ring is composed of 5 beads (pentagon). The dodecahedron is made on one strand of thread (I use monofilament) using a single needle technique similar to right angle weave.

Lay out 30 3 or 4 mm big-holed beads as follows

Step 1 5 beads ooooo

Step 2 4 beads oooo

Step 3 3 beads ooo

Step 4 3 beads ooo

Step 5 3 beads ooo

Step 6 2 beads oo

That makes twenty and that will be the foundation of your dodecahedron. You will create this part of the structure in 6 steps.

Then you go on to the next stage which is adding the ten remaining beads in 5 more steps and then securing the structure by passing through all the rings as many times as you need to in order to create a stable, hollow ball where the 5 beads rings are rigid and stationary.

Step 7 3 beads ooo

Step 8 2 beads oo

Step 9 2 beads oo

Step 10 2 beads oo

Step 11 1 bead, the final bead that finishes the structure. I don’t have an image of these because I think you get the picture.

Important considerations that helped me.

Thread tension is important but you will not get good at maintaining even tension until you have an understanding of how the structure goes together.

You will gain this understanding after you have practiced and made a few dodecahedrons because the technique will be in your muscle memory. So don’t give up if you don’t get it right away! Keep going.

It is easy to lose the direction of your thread. So always bead in one direction. For me this means that when I am finished adding the beads in a step and I pass my needle through the structure to get it in position for adding the beads in the next step, I always go to the left. (You might be more comfortable going to the right. The direction doesn’t matter. Just be consistent.)

No matter how many beads you are adding in a step, you will always be making a ring of five beads.

In the steps where you add 3 beads to make a 5 bead ring, you will pass through 2 beads to your left to get your needle in the proper position before add them. 3+2=5.

In the steps where you add 2 beads to make a 5 bead ring, you will pass through 3 beads to your left to get your needle in the proper position before you add them. 2+3=5.

The holes of the beads you pass through before adding new beads will always be parallel. If they are not, you know you have made a mistake.

The only exceptions to this are the first, and the last steps where you add 5, and 1 bead respectively. But you are still making rings of 5 beads in each of these steps.
 

Adding the last bead (the red bead at the top). The last step is to go back through all the beads and weave through them until you have a firm structure.

I used thread for these pictures because it’s easier to see than the 10 lb monofilament I normally use to make the beads. You can use a thicker monofilament if your holes are big enough. I also to use like 10 Tulip beading needles. I squeeze the end of the monofilament with a pair of pliers to flatten it and it slips right through the eye of the needle.

Some monofilament is so thick you don’t need a needle. The benefit to using monofilament is that it is less noticeable than thread. This is an important consideration because you will be weaving through the beads several times to reinforce the structure.

I like to make the bead and do my reinforcing at the end. Valerie Hector recommends you reinforce as you go along with additional reinforcing at the end. After you get your beading mojo, you can do what works for you.

Don’t lose your beading mojo!

But I don’t want to focus on the negatives. There are many reasons I like living here. For one thing, it’s a a walkable city. And there are many interesting things to see as you walk around. Aside from the historic sites and street art, Philadelphia’s trees explode with flowers every spring.

That’s how you know when Spring has finally come to Philadelphia. All you have to do is walk around.

I know that some people who attended the Cherry Blossom Festival in Fairmount Park were a bit disappointed because the weather wasn’t too cooperative this year. Fortunately, all you had to do was wait a couple of weeks to see trees flowering all over the place.

The past weekend was a perfect time to take a walk and enjoy nature’s show. Not a cloud in the sky and everything in full bloom.

Not all the flowering trees you’ll find on Philadelphia streets are Cherry Blossoms. Sure, we have plenty of those, but you’ll also spot pear blossoms, crabapple trees, dogwoods and Eastern redbuds lining the narrow side streets and filling neighborhood parks.

If you are in Philadelphia, you still have a little time to get yourself outside and experience some of nature’s glory for yourself. If you can’t get to one of the parks, you can probably find plenty of beauty near your own street. There’s always something to see if you look for it.

If you would like a little more information on Philadelphia’s flowering trees, read my older posts here.

I saw an exhibit at the Baltimore Art Museum recently called American Sublime. The exhibit consisted of 38 of Amy Sherald’s works from 2007 to the present including her widely publicized portraits of Michelle Obama and Breonna Taylor. American Sublime had been sold out, extended, and sold out again so I was glad I could get tickets.

But it became obvious to me when I saw Sherald’s work in person that the show wasn’t sold out because it was the hot ticket or contained some portraits of famous people.

The exhibit’s popularity wasn’t just the result of art appreciation. There was a palpable emotional charge in the room as people moved through the gallery — people were genuinely moved. I was too.

In the weeks that have passed since I saw the exhibit, I have been trying to make sense about why it affected me so strongly. My conclusion is that while Sherald’s work combines technical expertise and artistic mastery, its biggest strength lies in its powerful story telling.

If you’ve ever made a serious attempt at portraiture, you know that drawing or painting a good portrait entails more than capturing a convincing likeness. You can execute a technically accurate image of a person that looks like a cadaver. Stiff and lifeless.

Have you ever wondered what makes a memorable portrait different from one that merely captures physical appearance?

Good portraits tell a story. Maybe it’s a story about the subject. The best example I can think of this is Michelangelo’s Pietà. Even though it’s not technically a portrait, the work generates some pretty powerful emotion even if you are not aware of the story behind it. If you are versed in the culture that produced the work, the effect is even stronger.

I think the portraits of John Singer Sargent are similar even though they don’t provoke quite as much of an emotional response in me.

There are other types of art that use a likeness of a person as a vehicle to tell a story, but It’s not necessarily the subject’s story. Think Liberty Leading the People by Delacroix or the paintings of Goya. The art is technically and aesthetically rendered, but it’s the story behind these works leaves the biggest impression.

Why are stories important?

Stories important because humans are story telling creatures. We tell stories to pass on information, to record history and to entertain ourselves. The story telling proclivity is embedded into our DNA. Our neurobiology.

The builders of medieval cathedrals of Europe understood this even though the word neurobiology had not yet been invented.

When we see a work of art that tells a story that we recognize or identify with, we don’t have to process the art intellectually. We don’t have to say isn’t that a nice painting of a young woman in a blue dress or a young man staring out at us with inquisitive eyes. If we open ourselves, and the painting is well done, a dialog opens between the viewer and the artwork.

We don’t have to intellectualize or pretend we are in an art history class and count the triangles. Maybe that comes later with a more in-depth analysis. The feeling comes first.

When I saw this painting, I was reminded of a line in Anouilh’s Antigone, “For the first time in her life, little Antigone is going to be able to be herself.” What story does this painting tell you?

And this painting looks like someone you know.

Sometimes you need help from the artist to understand the story.

And sometimes you feel like the story is exploding off the canvas.

Sometimes what seems like a beautifully painted portrait takes on a heartbreaking meaning because of current events or historical context.

American Sublime included a video of Sherald explaining her artistic practice and relating how she went about creating the portrait of Breonna Taylor. You can watch that video here.

Even though I focus on emotion and story telling in this post, I haven’t ignored reading up on Sherald’s personal philosophy and artistic technique. The Art Story site handles these topics better than I can and I recommend you go to their website here.

American Sublime has left Baltimore and opens at the High Art Museum in Atlanta on May 15. You can purchase tickets here.

Agha’s work is not confined by traditional materials or expectations. She uses  mediums historically associated with women’s craft—paper, fabric, thread, and beads— for some of her work but she pushes her designs further by employing laser-cut steel and strategically placed lighting to create installations of light and pattern that transform spaces and envelop the viewer in a world of reflected patterns and shadows.

The result is that the viewer is immersed in a space filled with ethereal images that are at once unified and conflicting.  Images the viewer is invited to contemplate. Images that Agha uses as metaphor for the relationships between genders, cultures and civilizations.

Here are some pictures from a recent exhibit at the Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, PA.

To learn more about Anila Quayyum Agha, go to her web page, here.