Amie visited my pottery class a couple of weeks ago, just for 10 minutes while DH picked up pizza down the road. We were glazing but I fired up a wheel for her and stuck on a blob of clay and centered it, adding lots of water. Then she put her little hands on the …
Category Archives: skills
The Mobility of Skills and Spirit
Someone asked me: What if you would have to move now? This was with reference to the vegetable garden, to which I have devoted many, many hours of hard labor and a whole lot more of research, hopes and dreams. My answer was: It would be no problem. Really? You could leave all of this …
Learning a New Skill: Pottery
It’s raining which is good: the soil needs it. So I’m stuck inside, with some time to catch up on research, and to show off my creations from my first session of wheel-thrown pottery! Here they are, thrown, dried, kilned and glazed: Their beautiful colors (glazes made by my teacher, Lisa Dolliver) are hard to …
Coperthwaite on Children at Home
In A Handmade Life (read a general review here), Bill Coperthwaite promotes a different view of education. If education is more of an apprenticeship than a discipleship, if it allows the innate enthusiasm of children for the unknown to run its natural course, and if it acknowledges the value of nature, then children and, by …
Coperthwaite, A Handmade Life, Review Part 1
Here’s another article I wrote for Suite101.com, the copyright of which passed to me so I can share it with you here. It’s of William S. Coperthwaite’s book A Handmade Life, In Search for Simplicity. It was one of the first books I read after making my turn-around regarding a Simpler Life in a Better …
Continue reading “Coperthwaite, A Handmade Life, Review Part 1”
My First Pot
I got to bring home my first pot, which I threw last week. I had made the bottom too thin and it cracked while drying, so we gave it up as a lost cause and didn’t even trim, let alone fire it. But it was fun to bring it home to show Amie, who said: …
Skills – Competence Project: Pottery
A while ago I pledged to learn the great and ancient art of beekeeping. I contacted several bee schools and was about to enroll. Then I realized that it won’t be possible to have a hive this spring or summer, for the simple reason that there are no flowers nearby. We live in a wooded …
Competence Project: Beekeeping
Sharon – without knowing it, apparently – started The Competence Project: “I challenge each of you to pick some area of your skill set that’s kind of weak and strengthen it. And when you feel like you’ve gotten competent, well, pick a new skill. “ One of my visions for our new place was to …