Tapirs and anteaters in their new loving homes!

Lately a few customers have posted their photos of my tapirs and anteaters on Twitter. I would love to share them here!

Gavin feeds vegetarian ants to Anton! :D
Gavin Berriman: http://twitter.com/gavinberriman
http://www.gavinberriman.com/

Look who's arrived from @MidoriTakaki ...it's only Anton the Anteater! Thanks Midori...he's a handsome little chap.

Helen has both aneater and Small tapir baby now! 

Hele Savage:  http://twitter.com/belle_savage

'And... how gorgeous are my @MidoriTakaki baby tapir and anteater? :-) :-) :-)' 

Lydia has large mum and tiny baby! 

http://twitter.com/blackdoglydia

blackdogandgingercat.co.uk

Hehehehehe! Excited giggles - I've got one too, and a mummy #tapirlove 

Jean also has Large mum and a tiny baby! 

Jean Edwards: http://twitter.com/JeanEd70

http://jeandrawingaday.wordpress.com/ 

A tapir and her baby have arrived, thanks to Midori Takaki!

Karin's panda stroking small baby tapir!
Karin: https://twitter.com/andtheHare
http://www.celestineandthehare.com 

We love our new baby #tapir @MidoriTakaki thank you!! Film to follow

And here is her sweet film! Enjoy! 

Tapirs and Anteaters have left the building

What a relief! The firing went well. Thank you so much for those who have crossed fingers for me and lovely people whose presents are in the kiln! I was mumbling 'Please Santa, help me to give them lovely Christmas!' Thank you, Santa!

Tapir mum and babies

'Mummy, I'm hungry!' 

'What are going to do today, Mummy?' ' Something fun!' 

'Listen, we are going to swim in the river today!'

Anteaters are gathering. They are going to do a meeting! 

This crevice looks a good place to explore... There might be ants in it! :D 

We are going to new lovely homes. But don't forget that we are honourable Great anteaters! 

The pale anteater is my mascot. I made him from a different clay. I will need my mascot tapir, too.

I have posted six packets today, and will do two more tomorrow.  When I took the packets to post office, the lady there turned back and picked up a white thing and gave it to me. It was a Christmas card from the staff! How lovely! As I go there so often, they have got to know me well. 

Life is filled with nice surprises! 

A little polar bear on the rock

Tapirs and Anteaters wondered if firing is too hot for them!

Last night, I loaded the kiln. It took a long time for me to paint white marking on Tapir babies. I tell you it was difficult to make them look natural!

Tapir babies had their first firing and anteaters had their second.

'I heard that we will be cooked!'
'Really?'
'Will it be hot, I wonder.'

This morning, I started the kiln. My kiln is in the cold garage, The last few firings took longer than usual. The kiln had struggles to reach 1200C and beyond.

'Tapir waiting list 2015 the first half' is closed now.  If you are interested in the tapirs for 2015 summer onward, please let me know I will add you on a list.

Tomorrow I will be able to open the kiln and see the result. Fingers crossed! : )

Little ones are great joy

It was another busy week for me. The bell in my shop has kept ringing. I have gone to Post Office every day. It has been too cold to walk, as max. temperature has been 3- 5C, so I have driven. One day a tyre punctured in front of Post office! The air came out with shhhhhhh sound and It became as flat as a pancake! Oh no! When I gathered myself and walked in Post office, their system had just gone down! It came back after about 30 minutes. I was able to post all my works. I left the car there, walked back and contacted Mike at office. He had to walk down to 'do something; about it. He did. :D

Yesterday I had to go to the Embassy in London. I didn't feel very well, and it was so cold. I didn't want to go. But once the business was done there, I decided to go to see Egon Schiele exhibition at Courtauld gallery and to do some Christmas shopping. It was a good day after all. I will tell you about the visit later.

So it was an eventful week, but I have managed to make good progress on my little ones. Here is Mademoiselle Wren. I was going to make a simple mask, but she had a different idea.

Mademoiselle Wren

 Wednesday, I started bisque-firing. Some of them are Christmas orders and others are for the Easter!

Lower shelf

Top shelf. 

Next day, they came out safely from the kiln! This time, there are tapir, piglets, lemur, polar bear as well as the usual suspects!

I made good progress on them today. I will continue tomorrow. Ironically I tweeted a week ago that I would not work on weekends any longer this year. How little I knew! What is a weekend?

 But, I hope you have a good weekend! : )

Does anybody like glazing?

I woke up with more good news. The imp has arrived in Norway. That was quick. The lovely Ellen said it took her 5 minutes to unpack him! I make sure that every piece is well wrapped. : )

Now he lives in Ellen's office with Hippocrates. 

******************

I have spent Tuesday and Wednesday glazing. It is sad to see how few pieces you can glaze in two days! No wonder there aren't many millionaires among glazing ceramic artists! :D Well, except for Grayson Perry, of course.

Dipping rabbits in a glaze bucket was quick. Then cleaning and tidying up pinholes, eyes, the rims and so on will take literally hours. This is Tuesday's work.

Waiting for glaze-firing

Then yesterday, these tiny fiddly things took me a day. The most time consuming ones to glaze are the little chickens! I should be charging a fortune for them, but, of course, I can't! Ladies and gentlemen, if the little ones are priced higher than large ones in my shop, there are good reasons.

This little fellow is also on the shelf, if you look carefully. I have used underglazes. The difficulty of underglazes is if I mix colours by myself, I don't know exactly what colours they would be until they are fired. I have seen shocking results before! it was so shocking that Mike banned me from using one particular colour ever! (... blue) I hope he will be a lovely brownish grey.   

Anteater is being fired right now.

The garden is full of blue flowers.

Balloon flowers

Agapanthus with a cat mess protection net! 

 The studio dog convinced me that she is the descendant of Ammonites! 

My Facebook ceramic page and anteaters in ceramic and fur

I have good news! I finally launched my ceramic page, MidoriTakaki.Sculpture on Facebook. It is a bit like I don't know how to swim yet, but lots of waves are coming. All I could do is to jump when they come, so I will float. So if you find me doing silly things there, please be patient. I'm learning very slowly how to navigate there.

 The reason why I started Facebook page is that I wanted something between Twitter and blog. I like Twitter because it is easy to use, and I can tweet several times a day. I also appreciated feedback from people. It's vital. Besides, thanks to Retweet, The post can be spread like a wild fire, which is nice. But the 140 letter limit is often too short to tell stories. One photo per post limits to posts going into depth.

I like the blog because I can tell you why I made certain works; it is very important to me. But due to time constraint, I can only blog about twice a week. And audiences are somewhat limited as they have to find here.

On FB, I have learned that I can post with multiple photos, without letter restriction, and it is quicker to post than the blog. So I am hoping that my FB page will bridge between twitter and the blog. Do come to my page and say hi to me, if you are on FB. I would be delighted to meet you there! I added my FB badge on the right hand column. 

For the last couple of days, I have been glued to the desk, and haven't done anything much in Studio. All figures including these boys came out fine after bisque-firing. I will start glazing them tomorrow.

Three boys have geometric patterns on their garments.

These two have floral patterns.

I am aiming at coarse Thai silk like fabric

This little fellow was also bisque-fired. He is an anteater. I took him out from the kiln Monday morning, and Mike and I visited the zoo to see real ones in the afternoon. It was crowded. Did you know that they are quite playful? We didn't. When we got there they were trying to settle for afternoon nap. I guess a larger one is the mother and smaller one is her offspring. The small one decided not to go to bed. He kept poking mother with the long nose and big toes. Mother woke up and a kind of said 'Stop that, now! I am sleepy!' in her gesture and then put her very large tail over her head like a blanket! We had watched them until the child also became sleepy. What a treat! People were overjoyed to find them, too. They were stars!

Bisque-fired

Don't sleep yet! Let's play!

No, you go away. I am sleepy! ( see the leg of the left anteater)

Another great animals to watch were the lemurs in the walk-in enclosure. They licked nectar from apple trees just above our heads. Their dog like face doesn't show much expression. They strange eyes don't show anything but focus. They are strange primates.

They were just above our heads.

After about three hours, we came home. I became too tired to stay awake. I went to bed to have a nap, but ended up sleeping for about three hours until eight at night. A good nap is one of pleasures of life, but too long a nap hinders a good nights sleep. That was the consequence!