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I made this outrageous vase for holding lilacs. It solves an engineering problem of displaying these woody branches effectively by creating four tubes of varying heights to hold them in. The functional design worked beautifully. The glazing job was the outrageous part, and while it didn’t come out exactly as I imagined, it looks rather becoming when distractedly filled with lilacs.

On Mother’s Day when the kids were young, each one chose a lilac bush to give me, which we planted in a row, with the girls’ identical ones on each end and our son’s different one in between. Our son’s bush blooms earlier and is a bit redder, and are the ones you see here featured yesterday on Mother’s Day for our church service. The blooms from the other two bushes will look different in the vase, since they are more purple in color, but I think the glaze job will carry that color as well or better.

So while this glazing choice was a risk and not perfectly executed, sometimes it is good to get your excitement in challenging yourself this way, instead of taking a safer route.

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