Snarkland

I hope, Anne, that you don’t mind me posting about this!

Project: Smiling Happy Buddha

Technique: Painted, followed by a clear glaze

For Sale: It was, for about 25 minutes! This was a special order for Anne, my very first custom Etsy order! Thank you so much, Anne, and I hope that it is enjoyed!

I have a set of molds for pouring ceramic figurines. It’s a set of six molds, two figurines to a mold, and they are titled by the name of the month. Each month has something vaguely to do with that month… for instance, off to the right here is December.The molds were produced by Duncan in 1960 and 1961, were among my favorite things to make G-ma pour so that I could paint them when I was younger, and are not made any more. So it broke my heart a number of years ago when my ceramics room suffered the Great Falling Shelf Disaster of 1998 and I lost a number of molds… including one of the molds from this set – May and June. When I discovered a few years ago that people sold molds on eBay, I would look every few months, but… no luck. Nobody had one. And it’s not like I was doing a lot of ceramics anyway.

So I recently thought I would pour the ten that I have. I know many little girls, who all love princesses and the like, and I’m sure they would love a set even if they were only ten of them. It’s not like I’d have to tell them that there was supposed to be twelve! They’d never know!

So I set about pouring, and painting, and while not on the top of my list (Christmas seems so far away, although I’m sure next month I’ll feel differently) I do work on them.

A few weeks ago I started doing a mold inventory; what I have, lists of what I might like to find, a few molds that I have but would like to find duplicates of. Most of my molds are from the late 50′s and early 60′s… and where is a fine place to find things like that? Ugh. eBay. So about three times a week I pour through eBay doing a variety of key-word searches and browsing, trying to find molds. I’ve actually found a few to buy (the owl jewelry box, the sitting Hoi Toi) and have my eye on a number of others.

What I usually do is a key-word search, followed by looking through other molds that seller has available, if whatever I find looks in good shape. So I was looking last week for… crap, I don’t even remember now, because in looking through the other molds this seller had available I found… you probably know where this is going by now…

May and June. Or more accurately in the photo above, June and May. Which I promptly bought. And have poured twice since it showed up last week. They may not look like much to the outsider, but to me they look like an affirmation of the path on which my feet have found themselves. I mean, what are the chances?! This random mold, not produced in over 40 years, and I find a seller that has one.

Thanks for looking out for me on that one, G-ma. I love you, too.