Semiahmoo

That’s where we went for Thanksgiving weekend.  Here are the best of the photos from Chris and me.  Alex, though he charged his camera battery and remembered to pack it, did not take it out of the hotel room, so we have no photos from him!

They’re out of order.  WordPress has suddenly changed all the settings.  I’ll keep working on it, but top to bottom, we have:

Alex’s vanilla brioche French toast

Our Thanksgiving breakfast

Sunset on the day we arrived (all three of those pics are from Chris’ phone camera)

A seagull

The boys walking

An amusing sign

The moon, early in the morning on Thanksgiving (about 6:45 AM) (all four of those are from my Fujifilm X-T1)

 

The Holiday Spirit

We rearranged the kitchen the other day, and discovered a lot of half-empty booze bottles in the butler’s pantry.  In preparation for the holidays I have invented a new drink.  Here it is.  I’ve decided to call it the “King of France,” because of the St. Germain and the champagne.

Fill a pint glass halfway with ice.

Pour in Malibu Rum until the liquid level is 1″ from the bottom of the glass.

Add an inch of St. Germain liqueur.  (You see I am very precise in my measuring!)

Add lemonade (another 2″ of liquid).

Squirt in a generous squirt of lime juice. (Not Rose’s, just unsweetened ReaLime or whatever type is on hand…even from an actual lime, if you like!)

Top off the glass with champagne and stir.  I’ve managed to work it so that one can of Coppola’s Sofia champagne fits perfectly into the glass after adding all the other stuff.

This was mainly concocted in order to use up the tail end of the rum and the St. Germain.  It has quite a kick, both from all the booze, and from all the straight lime juice!

Happy Holidays.

Also, I feel like I put a similar recipe on this blog a while back.  I will search the archives when I’m done posting this, and see how the two drinks differ (if there is in fact an earlier recipe).

Proper Preparation

These are the slipcast “shotglasses” that I glazed with Stroke & Coat (1 coat) before they were bisque-fired.

I used homemade slip in a shotglass mold from Michael’s.  Unfortunately my slip was too watery.  Each day I’d pour some slip into the mold, and by the next morning, the water had evaporated, leaving me with a weirdly shaped lump in the mold.  So I’d do it again.  Etc.  So this is about ten days’ worth of pouring wet slip into the mold and letting it dry.

When I pulled them out of the molds, it didn’t even occur to me to sand down the edges, or anything like that.  This was really stupid, and resulted in these wonky shapes you see here.  I simply slopped a different color of glaze into the cup part of each, and used the fan brush to lift it out and coat the outside of the cup.  The bottoms were not glazed.

Well, after a slow bisque fire to Cone 6 (which is the bisque temperature for my clay), this is what happened.  Everything looks about as good as could be expected with such slapdash preparations.  Some of the glaze colors shifted since they’re supposed to be fired lower, but I don’t mind.  Again, this was just experimental.

I have nothing in the works at present.  All my projects are done, and I don’t know what to try next.  I have a spoon mold from Michael’s as well…maybe I should try to work out a better proportion of clay to water, and make a better slip for spoonmaking.