Recent content by michaelj

My ginkgo trees fake me out every year, without fail. Your buds look good. Give it time.

I posted that in the wrong thread... Sorry.

That is first and foremost. If you use a low fire terracotta that doesn't fully vitrify, or you under fire your clay, it will absorb water, and with every frost, that water inside the clay will expand and contract, and over time - sometimes a very short amount of time - it will destroy the...

Welcome to crazy! You're off to a better start than I got. You butchered it fairly well for a beginner. Did you style it at the club? If not, bring it with you next time and see how many different opinions you can collect. In the meantime, get a couple more trees, because this one is going to...

Yesterday, I wired up a $4 wholesale nursery juniper I've had for a year or two, and potted her up in a tall kurinuki pot.

That's a very interesting glaze. It has all the visual features of a runny glaze, but the stability to go on all the way to the bottom and not actually run.

I pruned three little Chinese elms that I want to make into shohins in the near future.

In the studio where I do my work, I've seen so many really cool looking forms that would make an awesome looking bonsai pot, but they'd be a massive pain when it comes time to repot. There can be a place for some of them for accents, or for just the right tree, but it's pretty limited.

Stage 1 Entry judging will be conducted by Bill Valavanis, Laurent Darrieux, and Ron Lang. Stage 2 Online competition judging will be conducted by Ron Lang and Sara Rayner. Stage 3 In-Person competition judging panel will be Jonas Dupuich and Roy Minarai.

That sounds fun. I might submit something. I've been working on a form that I really like. I think I'll try making about ten of them and hope that one is good enough to make the field.

I bought an air rifle because there was this pack of three squirrels that kept raiding my garden, knocking trees off their benches and taunting my dogs. After bagging my 36th squirrel, I realized that those three squirrels didn't keep coming back 10 times a day, they just all look like...

I made a slab. I love being able to made slabs with exactly the texture and exactly the shape I want for a forest planting. Way better than looking at a zillion rocks trying to find the perfect rock slab.

It came out of the kiln looking about the way I had hoped.

This pot, which I plan to put a thin, multi-trunk cascading or weeping tree in, is intended to look like an eroding mesa with spring water coming out midway up the face. Top will be greyish silvery gloss; the middle will be Earth tones, and below that, blue with bits of white and some reitz...