100% local Hawaiian beeswax candles organically scented

My supplies are all gathered. I've poured enough bad candles, and made enough mess filtering beeswax. Now I'm ready to pour professionally.  I believe my next candles will be worthy additions to my stores of beautifully useful hand crafted goods. I set my boys to making wicks assembly line style.  They make great company!

Raine or Shine

At my wheel yesterday, the rain began to fall. I happened to be working with the largest piece of clay I have ever been able to make into something beautiful (not large really, but I'm still a newby remember.) or have I told you my beginning? I threw my first lump of clay last Spring, 2011. So that's not very long ago, I can throw any shape of pot I want but it has to be small, xtra small, tiny, or tincy-wincey. I've yet to figure out bowls and plates. Now I'm all about pots! Anywho, I was at my wheel on a summer's day and began to feel some rainfall. I wanted to call for a child to bring me an umbrella and hold it over me, because it was all going along so beautifully, but no one was near. So I began to rush, I don't rush very well. The rain felt nice anyway and I began to think "RAINE or Shine Potery CO." haha! Finally, the storm broke over head and threatened to wash my pot away alond with the magic I was feeling. I covered my station with a tarp and took cover. When I began this business endeavor, I was living in Washington state. I'd already been feeling the stirrings: we most assuredly would be heading back to Hawaii soon...and I would be doing pottery, rain or shine. At this point I was still reeling from the joy I'd found in pottery and the knowledge that it was one of those few things in life that will always be with me. Moving was of little consequence. I had just figured out "I am a potter!" Of course, I dreamed of potting outdoors all year long! Oh, how great would it be to throw and throw and never have my hands freeze up from the cold! Good-bye to those impossible Winter months, January, February and March! Now here I am contending with the sudden, warm and fragrant shower. If it had been naught for the pot, I would have happily endured. My life is a dream. . I can barely believe it's real, and I'm enjoying it because I know it will never last!

The Scent of Paradise

Preparing my first Hawaiian product: 100% Local Beeswax Candles has been exhilarating!  Can't you just imagine these lovely pots full o' magical honey-smelling wax? We will also be scenting them with local flavors. Pikake jasmine, mango, lilikoi, coconut, and lychee are among the most interesting aromas we are testing.

A Beautiful Life

My life is so easy and beautiful! What a shock! What do you do with yourself when you're no longer hanging on for dear life? I guess I'll find out! I've had this feeling before and it makes me want to reach out and touch the world around me, not for despiration, not even for solace. Just for the joy of being alive with all the living things around me. .even people! I feel as though I've been lifted out of the mud and set in paradise. Everything is shiny and bright and clean. Except my bathrooms! My family life is taking shape. It's hard to believe just three months have gone by since our adventurous move to Hawaii. This wave of peace may leave me stranded on the beach, but I'm going to ride it all the way in.

My First Formal Instruction

I HAVE THIS VISION of creating complete gifts. Pots with some of my favorite things in them. Candles, orchids, cut roses, sedum are the few I have been dreaming about. I ordered some English roses for my thirty-fifth birthday and they should arrive airmail from the mainland soon. Maybe even Monday, which already is looking to be a stellar day. At an orchid show this afternoon, I met a potter. We sat in her booth (she was selling pots) for quite a piece of time. She gave me the inside scoop! Who's doing what and where for however much and when? Who's company is enjoyable, how long is the commute? She explained the workings of the pottery guild in Honolulu, which in her well informed opinion was the only way to go. Turns out there is one thirteen week session for each of the four season. And classes start on Monday! She was nearly positive they were all filled full up! Then she spotted a guild member walking by and asked him. He was pretty sure there was one spot in one Monday night class taught by Steve so-and-so. We were speaking insessantly when another potter came strolling along with the tiniest orchid specimens. He is in the Monday class and was certain the only remaining spot was in Steve's monday night class. Suggesting we call to make certain and send me off to Honolulu as soon as the traffic would allow. And so it came to be, my first real instruction on the wheel, thirteen lovely Monday nights on the other side of the island. AND as much studio time as needed, any time of the day. I do not miss Honolulu side, all the traffic and skyscrapers, but it is there the sun sets . . . and I do do miss those tropical sunsets. Now I suppose I'll catch a few.

A Place to Pot

I am settled now in a sweet little neighborhood on the bluffs in Kailua. Duplexes fill both sides of the street which gently curves until it reaches it's dead end. There are some 30 children living on this street, so there are many little people wandering about. Our street is quiet in the mornings and playful in the afternoon. I have a good view of the goings on down there from my second story living room. The entire set up affords me quite a bit of quiet. Which of course is my favorite thing in all the world! I have my studio coming together down stairs in my tidy finished garage. There is a utility sink, praise the Lord, and some nice white cupboards previously installed on the nicely finished white walls. It looks like everything is going to fit quite well.A private lanai sits off my back bedroom and a little square deck is just below it. Maybe this week I'll go to Honolulu for some clay and see about trying to throw back there. It would be quite solitary and refreshing. Just a few feet from the deck, a spindly tree and wild grass covered hill jets up, so there is nearly nothing back there. . . Just me, our Jackson chameleons and my wheel.

Finding Home

We sign on a place in the morning. A place of our own, in Kailua, with room for a studio! Not sure I can fire electric there, and don't know how the neighbors will like raku, but I have secured a place to fire not too far from home. . . a small private school in a neigboring town. I'm dreaming of mornings on my private lanai, just me and my wheel.

Some Paradise

Techie? Not me

I am dying to post some photos of my Paradise. I do at least have that. So, what's the hold up? With the photos, I mean, not the pottery. I don't wish to talk about that (we are beginning week four of house-hunting!) You know, this is not my first blog, but I am IN NO WAYS techie. That is why I have this simple iPad. But don't be mislead! all the bennifits of its simplicity are not out weighing its limitations. To my greatest disappointement, the blogs I view have no music! Music! What are my favorite blogs without it? Soooo much less... pleasurable. And now the photo thing! I know there's some way to do it. I've accidentally created five mobile blogs and find myself to be much simpler than this lovely white thing I am now using to spout my frustrations!

How dreamy!

We looked at a home today: beautiful, in Kailua, near the elementary.  Not such a great price, and not quite finished yet either. The landlord was helping me imagine my perfect studio on the back lanai, which was not yet constructed, although promised in the next two weeks. There is also to be a pergola all along the back (not so distant) fence.  It was a great dream she and I were having, but my husband wasn't having any.  He looked at me a bit sideways as I ooo d and aaah d as I turned every corner.  Of course she loved our credit score and the bio trev gave her.  I thought for sure I could make up the extra five hundred dollars a month with a complete studio on the premises and my children all at the same school, in walking distance and the Kailua's year-round farmers market so close also.  It was a grand life I imagined leading there  in that scarcely finished but beautiful house.  Have I told you yet it was BEAUTIFUL?   I was a bit offended when my husband didn't believe in this dream of mine.  So I began to look for ways out, ways not to be mad at the poor guy.  Well,  it isn't exactly  finished and what if it isn't finished in a timely manner, or never finished at all.  And the backyard will have no privacy until the pergola is finished AND covered with vines.   Didn't I  notice the dirt was all turned up in several places too?  It will be all over our ten feet and all over my house! So, I can barely wait until tomorrow night.  We have high hopes for this property we have been waiting so long to see.  It sounds like it might be just right for us. Us meaning the family.  I have no clue whether or not it will work for my pottery.   The landlord is old, eccentric, and too afraid to give us the address ahead of time.  Neither could she meet us at any earlier time.  So we've been holding out, well not really.  We haven't found anything, before today, we were happy with.  I'm just glad HE'S the picky one.  He always holds out and finds the greatest places.  But I'm not so sure I can hold out as long as him this time. God help me!

Well, we're here!

As of yet, I have no pottery in paradise, let alone a home for my family and school for my children. Myfamily and I arrived in Honolulu late last Friday night. Some old friends surprised us at the air port. When one placed a woven tuberose lei around my neck, I thought "oh, Hawaii, how I missed you." We are now settled into little apartment above our hosts garage, in the beloved valley of Manoa. Because we're on the second story, we live among the tree tops. The apartment is fully furnished, with all our comforts provided for, and breezy sheer curtains at every window. This is our long awaited return to O'ahu. We left suddenly in 2008 after, what now most assuredly appears to have been, my nervous breakdown. I was undone, I was like a child, I was a zombie mommie! My life was a swirling puzzle: how do I get the spoon, milk, bowl, cereal, chair and child to the table all at the same time? But I was free!!! When you can't do much of anything, you aren't expected to do much at all! So as I grew strong again, I added things back into my life in the order of my choosing! Before I could do much of anything though, the only way to make it from one impossible day to the next, was to CREATE. The combination of my fidgetty hands and my intense imagination, made the pain bearable. So I began to let myself make something new each day. I grieved every day, cried and did my best to comfort myself and process the traumatic events which left me so. . so. . desperate. But with plenty little people around to love me, a faithful though frightened husband, and my newfound freedom, I managed to wait on my healing and recovery. Making things had always been my way of life, as child, student, wife and mother. As a child I was constantly making and remaking, putting this with that to make a one-of-a-kind thing-a-ma-jig just right for whomever I chose to bless with it. Honestly, I never tucked that part of myself away. I just really underestimated it. I hadn't realized this was what I had to give the world. I swept it under the carpet and looked to God for more, for something more important, something "more grown-up". It seems growing up has taken me back to my childhood, back to Hawaii and set me free!