Carolyn Janet Efner

Pottery is both messy drudgery and wonderful fun. I started by cleaning up cast bisque a long time ago and now throw porcelain, mix most of my own glazes and am learning to fire crystal glazes in an updraft gas kiln. I sand every pot when dry (with lung protection) which provides control over the final, subtle changes in the curvature.

Crystal glazes are tricky -- firing them is a gamble . The number of things that can go wrong are too numerous for this brief bio. I prefer to use at least two glazes on every pot since they interact in surprising ways. Taking the good pots out of the kiln into the sunshine is addictive. Rotating the pot changes the reflections from the slightly 3-D crystals.

Before moving to Santa Fe, I sold hand-built pottery at the Bartlesville, Oklahoma, OK Mozart festival gift shop. The one thing I learned there was that people would pay for something if it sang to them. I am assisted by: my daughter, Louisa, who is my website guru, has a knack for picking glazes and enjoys occasionally painting designs on my pots, and by my husband, Howard, a retired chemist, who is a mechanical genius at getting my three kilns to work. I am a retired computer programmer, gardener and serious cook.