Charlie bit my finger - again !

OK time out for a couple of cuties, saw this on blog of Corey Amato and just had to include it on mine. Love those children!

I hope you can bear one more look!

I hope I haven't bored you all to death with my obsession in working with this piece, but here it is finally. I need to do some small finetuning, but it has indeed materialized more or less as envisioned, a piece that can be used as a vase with three stem tubes to hold water and real flowers and then ceramic inserts with six amaryllis blossoms when there aren't any fresh flowers to show off! I will do my little finetuning, then carry it home for pickup by the foundation folks for the silent auction. I have to tell you I am both relieved and quite happy with the result. I am sort of hoping no one bids on it and I can bring it back home!
I really enjoyed this project.

Now I am almost finished with my first phase of the "Kitty Banks" project. I have six more to assemble, (add tops/bottoms and ears, and need to slab out and construct sixe additional banks to meet my promised quota).
I have spent hours and hours and days and days on these. The first few have popped out of final glaze kiln with a huge batch in the bisque kiln and another huge batch drying and awaiting bisque firing. Each of the banks takes about three hours work, times 50, 150 hours! These also are turning out quite nice and everyone who sees them in the studio comments on how cute they are.

Huge Sigh of Relief

My second "base" made it out of the glaze kiln OK, whew. I took this photo of it as I intended to have the piece used as a vase. Those are little tazetta narcissus plucked from my garden to show it holds water and does look pretty I think. The photo below shows all my amaryllis flowers which need to be assembled into stems that can be inserted into each tube when real flowers are not being used.
I am still waiting for a few little components to pop out of the kilns to complete the assembly. I am pretty sure it will be a beautiful ceramic piece with the flowers inserted. Hopefully, it all will materialize as envisioned. Soon, I hope so I can turn it over to the Foundation as my contribution to their silent auction. I am now spending hours and hours making the kitty banks and am making progress although it is quite exhausting to handbuild them and that is just the first step!
More later.