Like birds on a hippo!

Today we continued to work on cleaning and preparing tiles for bisque firing. I find the repetition and attention to detail meditative. It made me think of how some birds perch on hippos backs and then eat the insects they find there, essentially providing nature's very own cleansing skin service for the hippos.

When the tiles are dry enough, the clay "boogers" - little globs on top of the surface displaced during the carving process - have to be removed.

The excess clay scrapes right off.

We also pulled our first batch of test tiles from the kiln with 1/2 of our color palette!