The NorthWesternBelle

Hey, y'all. I'm here to write about pottery today! If you've been following along, you know that I've got a thing for sculpting coral reefs out of clay. I'm honestly pretty obsessed for someone who has never seen a reef up close before. But if you could see my instagram feed these days you'd notice I've been looking at three things lately: Witcher memes (bc c'mon. How hot is Geralt?), coral reef structures and wild mushrooms. The coral reef collection goes back the furthest, because I have been obsessed for a while. See my first set of sea life mugs: It all started in November 2016 with the Star Fish Mug Obsessive texturing. November-December 2016: The finishing process Aaaand totally finished in January 2017 Pretty sure my sister got this one. Possibly my MIL. I got started on the second one while the Starfish Mug was being fired. I know for a fact this one went to my MIL, because she loves Sea Horses Please excuse...

Hey, y'all. It's been a minute. The first quarter of 2019 was rough, but here we are on the other side of tax day and we're still trucking on. We'll keep at it. I've been having a lot of fun in the Mud Bakery. So much so that I forget that content is part of my job, too. My video production cycle waned over the last few months, but I'm back at it to capitalize on the Game of Thrones Season 8 premiere last Sunday, and the next five frantic weeks until the season ends. Then (let's be honest), the slow down-curve of interest until the prequel series gets serious. Whenever that may be. Admittedly, I was late to the GOT bandwagon. I didn't start watching the HBO series until Season 7 was airing, and I didn't read the first book until last month. So, still a noob, but no one is more zealous than a convert, right? Right. And I am solidly in the late convert camp when it comes to A Song of Ice & Fire and zealous as hell. Last week, the week lea...

This post has been a long time coming, considering this project was accepted in November and finished in December 2017. Better late than never, right? Right. (Edit 3/16/18: I did make a couple of videos about this project! Check them out here: Part 1 & Part 2 .) Spoiler! They're awesome. So, pretty much as soon as I lost my job at the end of October, my mother in law commissioned 30 mugs - 10 cat themed and 20 dog themed - to be Christmas gifts for her pet sitting clients. I'd never taken on such a large project, but I had the time to do it, so I was excited! And also seriously nervous about getting that many mugs through the entire process with enough time to ship them to NM before Christmas. To-be cat mugs. Dog mugs. The dog mugs were thrown to be 4" tall and 4" wide. The handles were all hand-pulled. Right about midway through production of all the cups, the studio hired me as a part-time office assistant. I went from spending two and a ...