This week I finally finished the glazing that I’ve been working on for 2-3 weeks now. The mugs are a wedding present for 2 dear friends of mine, and that wedding is in just a few weeks from now. I am so nervous about how the glazing will turn out, but also so excited. The one with Cassini and Saturn (not pictured) is my most ambitious carving yet, and it’s looked fantastic at every step so far, so let’s hope that the glazing highlights it well 🤞

The mug pictured here is the pair to Cassini and Saturn mug, and this one is focused more on color. One nearly-wed is very into space, and the other has a trademark color of bright neon green. So, inside these penciled out shapes I used an underglaze in their trademark color, and have attempted to layer black and translucent and blue to make it look like the green parts are clouds in space (the Pillars of Creation type of clouds were on my mind while painting this) with comets/asteroids shooting around. I am very nervous about how this one will turn out because I have never done a glazing like this before. I really really hope it’s not disappointing. I am hopeful that it’ll look as cool as I have attempted, but only time will tell.

In other news this week, spring is here! I went on many walks enjoying the sunshine and flowers, which was really crucial because I struggled heavily with depression this week. I think I’m through that bout of depression now and that’s a real blessing so that I can properly enjoy my last few weeks here in Hamburg.

On my many walks it wasn’t just the flowers and sun that caught my eye, but also elements of geometry and the contrast between organic and inorganic shapes + the contrast between natural and human shapes. The round waxy green leaves of the succulent paired with the horizontally layered breaks in the slate, the almost spongey look of the winter leaves of a hedge paired with the rectangles of the stone bricks - but not uniform rectangles, these are hewn stone and no two are identical.

Flowers <3. I was very inspired by the crabapple blossoms and the mix of unopened flowers being perfect white dots of various sizes contrasted with the beautiful delicate flowers at various stages of being open. I think I’m going to use this idea for a ceramic piece eventually. A few open flowers, but many many unopened buds mixed around.

I also really appreciated the color contrast in Planten un Blomen during my walk there. There was a hillsided just covered in daffodils, and there were many many blue flowers mixed in. They were so gorgeous together.

I took advantage of the weather to work on my garden, which was an absolute joy. I mixed the compost (which I try to do thoroughly 1x per year) and it was so interesting to see what last year’s dirt looked like, what the compost from the winter had gotten up to, and just what all was happening in this pile of dirt and compost. I saw tons of roly-polies and quite a few fat health centipedes! I was quite happy to see that the flower bracts that I had collected of the street last year were still plentiful in there, so I don’t need to find more “brown”s to balance out all the “green”s from the compost from the winter.

Raspberry chocolate cake remains an absolute favorite of mine

Like I mentioned early, the geometry of the city caught my eye this week. This picture is of the bumps next to the edge of the train platform, which are there to aide blind people in knowing where it’s not safe to walk. I really liked the look of the shadows of the bumps being almost, but not quite, in line with the geometry of their lay-out.

That’s all for this week. Hopefully next time I write I will have pretty pictures of things straight out of the kiln!

Erin Wilaby
they/them