Eye of the Day Mother’s Day Gift Guide 2015

It’s that time of year where we honor and celebrate our mothers–Moms, foster Moms, and Mom figures.

Show how thankful you are for the moms in your life with something special from Eye of the Day. Our gift guide has something unique for all different tastes and budgets.

1. Fermob 1900 Bench
Perfect for those long heart-to-heart chats with Mom. This classic bench by French manufacturers Fermob is great for any generation of the family.

2. Mexican Church Candles
These are our most popular items in the Gift Shop. These creamy candles are made with layers of paraffin and cotton wicks. Great addition for the home.

3. Note Cards with Paintings by Karin Shelton
Made by local Santa Barbara artist Karin Shelton, these note cards showcase lovely plants or landscapes from the area. A unique Mother’s Day card for your favorite lady.

4. Succulents
These lovely plants have made such a comeback the last few years. They’re water wise, easy to care for, and just as beautiful as flowers. Help Mom plant a garden or arrange them in a container.

5. Mini Greek Pots and Containers
These are a personal favorite. These gorgeous handcrafted pots made on the island of Crete are perfect for indoor or outdoor container gardening. Instead of arranging flowers, create a mini garden for Mom–it’ll last longer too!

We hope everyone has a lovely Mother’s Day weekend!

In past articles I have discussed how freeze/thaw has an effect on ceramic containers and I have also discussed clay pot irrigation. We are in the worst drought in the state of California’s history, so by irrigating with low fire pots with high porosity,  water can be sent directly to the root system and feed plants on demand, as opposed to spraying the crusty, evaporative surface.

Technically porosity is the amount of empty space in the structure of the fired clay that makes it capable of absorbing or distributing liquids. Simple, right? So if the terracotta is absorbing water and the temperature drops below freezing, you’re going to have potential problems with your investment as the water expands while it freezes.  But if your intention is to use the porosity to slowly distribute water, then the more porous the better. There are other uses for porosity in ceramics, for example insulation. The less dense a brick is, the more insulating capabilities it has.

Natural clays can have a very high porosity.  When the grains are very small, there are countless small pore spaces, but what clay does NOT have is good permeability, which is the way you would measure how connected these porous spaces are. So generally speaking, if the clay is high fired it will be far less porous. This is advantageous for a freeze/thaw condition. If the clay is low fired, or under fired it will be porous and best for releasing or absorbing water.

So the bottom line is that the level of porosity you should seek depends on your intention for use of the ceramics.

Lisa Cox, of Lisa Cox Landscape Design has happily designed landscapes ranging from simple tract homes to vast estates.  As she plans an outdoor environment, she envisions a transformation that communicates the lifestyle and personal taste of the client, while incorporating her own style. Each garden is designed and built with all materials including stone, plants, trees, water features, and garden art selected by Lisa using local, top qualified growers and suppliers.

Commitment to sustainability, the use of drought tolerant plants and trees, including California natives, has been an integral part of her design process, allowing a more “naturalistic” result that mimics the local terrain.

When Lisa met with her new clients in the Santa Ynez Valley, they requested that the newly constructed home not have any sod in the front area, and that she use drought tolerant plants including grasses and succulents. Working with a blank slate, except four nice sized olive trees at the entrance, she was free to design the space, including selection of a plant palette that complimented the Hacienda style of the home. With the use of local sandstone boulders, salvias and phormiums as her base, she also incorporated deciduous trees and perennials for color in the Spring and Summer, and a few rows of grape vines because after all, it’s the Santa Ynez Valley!

Choosing Greek terracotta pots from Eye of the Day, filled with “Blue Glow” Agaves gave the clean, rustic look she was looking for on the front porch and the traditional Terrecotte San Rocco terracotta pot in front worked perfectly to show off the “Little Ollie.”

It seems everything progressed perfectly for Lisa and her clients, but there WERE a few important challenges:

1. The need to place a gopher basket for every plant as the local area is inundated with gophers that would quickly destroy the plantings, and
2. The necessity of paying close attention to selecting plants that can stand the heat as well as the sometimes frigid nights where temperatures can go into the low 20’s or below.

As Lisa’s work on the project came to a close, she felt deep satisfaction; in fact she felt this was a home environment she could inhabit herself.  The project was a dream to work on and the end result was exactly what the homeowner envisioned.

Visit Lisa Cox Landscape Design to view more of her work.

Terra Incognito: The Method Behind the Form

There are various forming methods than can be used when working with clay.  As a self-proclaimed clay nerd, I can tell you that one of my favorite parts of the journey is actually forming the piece. There is a “form” and there is a “surface” and if you learn to treat the two as separate aspects of the same whole, you will have a successful composition. In ceramics, there are many ways to form something from clay. For example, a piece  of clay can be thrown on a potter’s wheel, press molded, slump molded, pinched into shape, coiled, built with slabs or extruded.

For this article I want to focus on just three forming methods: Throwing, Press Molding, and Coiling.

Throwing
To “throw” is to form clay using a potter’s wheel.  As the clay spins on the wheel it is then “lifted” into shape. This is a very popular method, usually used to fashion functional or utilitarian pieces, such as plates, cups, bowls, teapots, or containers.

The word “throw” comes from the old English meaning to twist, turn, or propel—a perfectly apt definition. The potter’s wheel is a relatively new invention in the 30,000 year history of ceramics, and not used by all clay cultures. Much of the Greek pottery at Eye of the Day is wheel thrown.

Press Molding

Press Molding is when a piece of clay is actually pressed into a mold or form. The mold is made from an original form which is made from clay, then reproduced in Plaster of Paris, which becomes the mold so the shape can be replicated over and over again. This is a particularly helpful method when forming large pieces that would otherwise be hard to reproduce. The Italian terracotta carried at Eye of the Day is traditionally press molded.

Coiling

Coiling is one of the oldest methods for forming clay. The material is rolled back and forth until it looks like a “rope” of clay. You begin with a shape in mind, then the coils are placed on top of each other until the desired shape is formed. This is a particularly slow method, the clay needs to harden a bit before more coils can be stacked, so a potter will begin one piece and then move to another to begin, then move to another, and so on. By the time he has begun say the fourth or fifth shape, the first one will be stiff enough to continue the next phase of the shape.

Eye of the Day has an array of vessels produced using each of these traditional methods, authentically manufactured and imported directly from the very best potteries of the world.

Planted pots and containers add color and visual interest to your landscape design, garden and outdoor living areas. Choosing the right pots can be a challenge with the wide variety of options available today. Consider adding beautiful Italian terracotta pottery, created to handle the elements and last for decades.

What is Galestro Clay?
Eye of the Day’s Italian terracotta pottery is fabricated from Galestro clay, fired at an extremely high temperature. It is a high-quality, dense clay known for creating particularly durable pots, frost resistant to -15 degrees Fahrenheit. Galestro clay is found in Tuscany, near the borders of Grosseto, Arezzo and Siena. Pots made from this clay are created by hand and air-dried before firing. If conscientiously maintained, this pottery will last decades.

Terracotta Pottery: Style
In addition to customary classic pottery like the beloved double roll rim, more ornate Italianate styles featuring details such as garland, rosette and leaf motifs, are available to infuse your home with old-world design. Eye of the Day’s Terre Colorate line brings clean, modern Italian design to contemporary garden style.

Whatever your garden style, with Eye of the Day’s help you can add a clear visual appeal using Italian terracotta pots.

Eye of the Day Garden Design Center provides high quality pots for decoration and for planting. Learn more about our Italian terra cotta pottery.

As the days grow shorter, and we inch toward the certainty of a cold winter, it seems fitting to talk about fire. I love fire. It takes a deep understanding of this primary element to master the process of “firing” clay. In my last installment we talked about frost proof ceramics and even that conversation must begin with a discussion about fire.

Clay begins as granite, decomposes and compressed for a millennia, then becoming a sticky, malleable mud with memory. When it passes through human hands, turning it into functional art… the real fun begins: the firing. Once the clay morphs all the way back to stone, it changes from stone to mud and back to stone again, transformed by fire. I feel lucky to be in the middle of this cycle, the one that gets to instruct the clay. Kind of a big responsibility really, manipulating the earth while it regenerates itself.

It takes a lot of heat to fire ceramics and even more heat to fire clay to vitrification (refer to Baked Earth installment How It Works: Frost proof Terracotta). Firing clay depends on what material we burn. This is why so many ceramic wares are under-fired: limited combustibles. In the developing world many traditional peoples have to travel further and further to harvest the wood or brush. As the forest recedes, they begin to use less fuel to burn the clay, because transportation is more difficult. Travel can take three or four times what it used to for procuring wood, or other combustibles, to fire the pottery, cook and heat their homes.

In the US, you will see many types of firings: wood, salt, recycled automobile oil, sawdust, dung, natural gas, propane, passive solar, and electricity. We are fortunate to have so many options within reach when it comes to firing pottery. Regardless of how the work is fired, some basic transformations occur on the clay’s long journey back to stone.

At 212°F the water in the clay converts to steam and is slowly released. At approximately 400 °F, all organic matter in the clay has burned out, and the cristobalite (a crystalline form of silica found in all clays) suddenly shrinks. Between 1000°F and 1100°F the quartz crystals change from an alpha crystal structure to a beta structure. Referred to as Quartz Inversion, the temperature must increase gradually.

From 1500°F to 1650°F, “sintering” begins. This is the stage where clay particles begin to cement themselves together to form a hard material called ceramic. From this point on, depending on the temperature range of the clay, vitrification occurs. For earthenware clays, this happens at approximately 2050°F. For stoneware clay, about 2300°F, and for porcelaneous clay, 2500°F.

The transformation of clay from stone and full circle back to stone is a long, hot journey that no other material makes. And here’s a little point of reference: Kilauea, the volcano on the big island of Hawaii, spewing lava into the Pacific Ocean was recently tested for temperature. The orange lava is only 1800°F—low fire in the world of clay!

See you next month!