Luke Judge

We’re rolling right along on this blog train!  you will be thrilled today when you meet Cassie from Primitive and Proper.  If you haven’t seen her blog already you must go there when you are finished here and leave a comment.  I’m sure you will love everything you see!

Hi there!  I am Cassie from Primitive & Proper!  first of all I want to thank Sommer for having me here today on her lovely blog full of lovely ideas.That’s me with my family, including….my husband, Chris: the manual labor of my business.  He helps with all the heavy lifting, and is the best dad ever, always willing to hang out with the kiddos so I can work, thrift, or craft.my son, Sawyer: Kindergartener Extraordinaire!  He is one of the goofiest kids I have ever met, and definitely gets that from both Mommy and Daddy.my daughter, Emmy: Princess of the Casa Bustamante!  She is a fair and gentle ruler, unless she’s not getting her way.  then she reminds us who is boss.And that white fur ball on the left is Jake, 1/2 of our furry children.  Charlie is a Curmudgeon of an old Beagle who didn’t want to be in our family picture.I am so excited to share with you today how I have my  home decorated for Christmas.  I was trying to go with a white and glittery scheme for the most part, but I have so many decorations that have been gifts over the years, and I can’t bear not to have them out!  we have a split foyer and I focus on decorating our upper level, where we entertain.Won’t you please come in….This is the yarn wreath I made for my front door.  you will see that I loved it so much I made a couple others for the inside of the house! we don’t have a fireplace or even a mantle, so I hang our stockings off the backside of our bench (on the side of our dining room).  our stockings are very special because they were needle pointed by my mother-in-law who is ridiculously talented with a needle!
 I received mine the year we were married, and Chris has had his since childhood. last year, Sawyer’s was added to the collection, and is strikingly similar to Daddy’s.  Emmy’s will be added either this year or next.  Good things come to those who wait! This is an old hutch I got free off craigslist and painted.  it sits outside my Kitchen, and normally houses enamelware, but I have replaced that for now with all my glittery Christmas decorations! This adorable little retro snowman was handmade, and I purchased it off Ebay last year.  I just loved the colors! I love all the little cardboard houses, real vintage and retro-style! This is another china cabinet that I purchased from Craigslist and painted.  it is currently filled with more Christmas goodies! Of course, the plate for Santa’s cookies will be put to good use this year! One of my favorite decorations, this is a vintage tree cake pan that I spray painted and added glitter to (to look like snow).  It’s just a nice handmade and vintage Christmas touch.  and of course, it had to have glitter! My dining table is set with items I bought on clearance last year the day after Christmas. the reindeer came from Pottery Barn. the silver snowflake came from Crate & Barrel, and the two swags came from Michael’s. the wreath on the window also came from Michael’s day after Christmas clearance, and the “peace on earth” German glass glitter ornament hanging on it came from Pottery Barn. I had recently redone my entry with items purchased from Pier 1, but then I finished a pair of tables that I just had to keep.  So when I started decorating for Christmas, I decided to change the entry up and add those tables.  I used some of the Pier 1 items on the dining room side bench, where all is silver and glittery! These cute sparkly trees came from Pier 1. and I made this yarn wreath using their ornaments. and now my favorite part!  This is the entry (the top of our stairs, really!) with my new tables, and some glitter, and natural elements thrown in.  I am loving how this looks right now!  and of course, take notice of yet another yarn wreath on the mirror.  Told you I had a thing for them! the “Peace” and “Hope” came from Target’s dollar area last year.  I think they were $2.50 each. the glass hurricanes came from Home Goods and are filled with natural and silver glitter filler from Pier 1, and some silver and white candlesticks, as well as a “B” ornament from Pottery Barn. I found these little teapot place markers at a craft market.  they are made out of ornaments and polymer clay and I just thought they were so unique and pretty…. and what do you know, glittery! On top of my other china cabinet, I have a collection of angels.  My favorite angel is the tallest in the back.  My mom and I crafted these angels out of old ceiling tile, spindles, peat moss, and miniature grapevine wreaths.  we had a lot of fun making them, and they are so rustic and unique.Well, that is how I do Christmas in my house.  Basically, if it has glitter on it or can be glittered, it will fit right in here!   Thank you so much for having me here today, Sommer!  come back soon to see what my tree looks like, and visit me here:

Ceramic & Pottery Making princess, sommer

On behalf of the Empty Bowls Steering Committee, I want to thank the hundreds of people and organizations that helped us raise over $24,000 for the Brattleboro Area Drop-In Center this year at our recent dinner.

One of the most exciting things about this event is that there are virtually no overhead costs, and at the end of the event, we pack up leftover food to go to the Drop-In Center and leftover bowls to pass on to the Bellows Falls Empty Bowls event or to use for next year.

I would like to mention just a few who have helped us for all or most of the seven years of doing this event.  I apologize in advance for not being able to include everyone.

Brattleboro Clayworks is the original and key sponsor of this event. The vast majority of bowls are produced, fired, and donated from there, and doing so has become a year-round endeavor.

Billie Stark, in addition to co-chairing Empty Bowls, has made hundreds of bowls over the years.  Monica Hastings, another co-chair, is responsible for making sure we have enough bowls and this year solicited more than 1,300 bowls and made hundreds herself.   Annie Lauterbach has overseen the many “bowleramas” at the Clayworks that have been offered over the years, has made hundreds of bowls for the event, and been in charge of putting out bowls for the event every year since it began.

Other key contributors of bowls and time from Clayworks include Claudia Teachman (firing coordinator), Willie Finkel, Lucinda Alcorn, Alan Steinberg, Rob Cartelli, Shari Zabriskie, Nancy Riege, Jen Perlowski, Sue Dinolfo,  Kate Wylie,  Bronna Zlochivar,  and Rochelle Prunty. Thanks to other area potters (Laura Zindel, Liz deNiord, Malcolm Wright, 3-Dot Pottery, Walter Slowinski,  and others) who contribute every year.

Landmark College and Chartwells Food Service have made the event possible by providing the beautiful space for the event, feeding the students elsewhere on campus the night of the event, and providing soups and a lot of support and enthusiasm.

Landmark sold over $2,000 worth of tickets and bowls prior to the event, and more than 300 bowls were crafted and fired at the college this year. Many Landmark employees and students are an integral part of making this event happen, and several (Marie Breheny, cleanup and recycling; Peter Falion, tickets, table sales and getting all the bowls washed and ready to go; and Ruth Wilmot, student helpers) are key members of the steering committee. We could not do cleanup or table sales without the help of many Landmark employees, including Dotti and Dan Osterholt, Linda Kerr, Sandra Marr, Melissa Wetherby, Tom Kosiba, Chris Arieta, Lena Jahn, Jean Fulton, and Mary Jane Maguire.

The Steering Committee for Empty Bowls starts to meet in May.  Key members include Elizabeth Ungerleider (head of publicity, poster creation, and tickets), Micky Moos (box ad and sponsor procurement and table sales czar), Maria Ogden (getting over 125 gallons of delicious soup donated and delivered to Landmark), Linda Whelihan (poster distribution, table sales, lead worker coordinator), Naomi Lindenfield (publicity and bowls donor), Liz McLoughlin (table sales, lead worker at event, sponsor procurement), Bonnie Stearns (acknowledgement of contributors, lead worker, bowls donor), Sharon Snider (window displays),  Cherie and David Giddings (decorations and major workers at the event), Shelley Dresser (publicity).

The Brattleboro Food Co-op has served as a key anchor in donating 30-40 gallons of soups and many other supplies each year since we began.

Thanks to Nancy Braus and Everyone’s Books for selling tickets for us since the event began and for being a big supporter of the event. Andrea Darrow and Green Mountain Orchards have given us nearly 1,000 apples every year. Vermont Bread Company has also given us bread to serve 1,000 people from the beginning. United Foods has consistently donated our drinks and ice cream, and C& S has done our printing.

Thanks to the many potters, restaurants, and other businesses who donate year after year. Thanks, too, to the many people who turn out to help during the event each year:  Karen Boutelle (this year’s soup czar at the event), Priscilla Svec, Anna Piergentilli, John Willis, and Pauline Brett, as well as more than 20 students from Brattleboro Union High School, and others.

I extend a huge thanks to all the amazing staff at the Drop-In Center who work so hard on this event: Melinda Bussino, Jamie Vigneau, Chris Chapman, and William Davison (head of parking coordination every year) and his crew — Ed Johnson,Farris Cathey,Tom Carlton,Clifton Johnson, Charlotte Marcy, Paul Mansur, and Paul Kickery, Jr.  — who work outside on the night of the event.

It’s good to know that as usual our community pulls together to do what we can to help those in less-fortunate straits.  Let’s keep it going. If you would like to help out with next year’s Empty Bowls dinner, please contact me at

Ceramic & Pottery Making alcorn, bellows, co chair, empty bowls, prunty

I gioielli in ceramica esistono dalla notte dei tempi, ma mi sono sempre sembrati grossolani e poco donanti. Ultimamente ho dovuto ricredermi, non solo perchè mi sono data anche io a questa antica arte, ma anche perchè le nuove creazioni mi entusiasmano. Dimenticate le palle, tubi, perline, qui parliamo di gioielli dove la ceramica è parte integrante del design. Insomma questi gioielli sono belli, delicati e moderni. Per mettervi anche voi al lavoro ecco un nuovo libro di Joy Bosworth con in copertina gli anelli della bravissima Ruth Tomlinson

Ceramic & Pottery Making antica, arte, tomlinson

It is more or less widely accepted that human civilization consisting of planned cities, organized governance, writing, manufacture and trading began about five thousand years ago in a region of earth comprising the Indus valley, Mesopotamia and Egypt.

The precise details of when and where specific aspects of civilization began are not yet known fully. There are many similarities between Sumer, Egypt and the Indus Valley – the sites of earth’s earliest civilizations. These are some of the hottest, driest and most inhospitable places on the planet. It takes considerable agronomic and hydrological knowledge to convert the marshes and control the floods to turn these into productive farmlands. Civilization originated in these harsh, desert environs lacking many basic resources. Rapidly they invented mining, chariot, sailboat, writing, cities, engineering and so on, and all this while most of the world’s tribes was still living as hunter-gatherers. It is difficult to explain the radical departure from the human norm by several tribes without invoking some insexplicable genetic deviations. Recent discoveries including the discovery of submerged cities of the gulf of Camaby India are however shedding new light on the matter. A possible scenario for the emergence of civilization is as follows.

About six thousand years a small tribal community living on the western coast of India was inspired because of a yet unexplained genetic evolution to begin the construction of planned cities and invent the first few symbols to depict human words or language. They emerged from their prehistoric existence as civilized humans that wanted to develop pottery, cities, and agriculture, and become literate by developing writing. These communities developed the first few pictorial symbols to represent human names and words. Remaining at first a small community for the first few hundred years these coastal people were eventually forced to move northwards and westwards due to seismic disturbance and submergence of their coastal cities about five and a half thousand years ago. They chose only arid plains to establish their new habitations, along the greatest of rivers that flowed at that time, since it is these they were used to and familiar with. Interaction with existing local communities in their new habitats provided them with much needed manpower for a rapid expansion of civilization. Forests scared them because of the threat of wild animals and they were completely unfamiliar with mountain territories considering them unsuitable for agriculture and hence these were avoided in the first march of human civilization. A branch of this community migrated to what is now Iraq and developed the Sumerian civilization on the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates. From here they spread to the Nile valley as well.

The Indus valley people began moving towards Sumer as early as 3300 BC and established their first settlements in ancient Sumer. They spoke the language of their forefathers. It was a completely different language from that of local populations of the area. Ancient Sumerian language is different from other languages of the area such as Hebrew, Akkadian, Babylonian, Assyrian and Aramaic, which are Semitic languages, and Elamite a non-Semitic tribal language of the area with African connections. However, as the ruling class, the colonizers made Sumerian the official language. The local population continued to use Akkadian language. The Sumerian language is a linguistic isolate unrelated to other languages on earth many of which belong to well-known groups of languages. The isolated character of the language is proof that it belonged to a single tribe that had developed in isolation. Whenever an official language differs from a local one, it is a clear indication that the rulers are of foreign origin. It is surprising that ancient historians on earth have not used this as a clue to tracing the origin of the people who brought civilization to Mesopotamia. The extent of the civilized world around 3000 BC lies in a belt extending from the Nile valley to the Indus valley. Since ancient Sumerian is completely different from the local languages around Mesopotamia, it is not difficult to guess where these new colonizers had come from. Their language was different from that of Nile Valley as well. However, since it was the Sumerians who established civilization in the Nile Valley too, some of their vocabulary did enter Egypt and continues to be used till today, as for example the word Khet for an agricultural holding. By the time Sumerians reached the Nile valley they had no need to establish Sumerian as the official language of Nile valley since they had become familiar with local languages of the area. As intermarriages between local Akkadians and ruling Sumerians increased, Sumerian was replaced by Akkadian as a spoken language around 2000 BC. Nevertheless, it continued to be used as a sacred, ceremonial and scientific language in Mesopotamia until about 1 AD. From the beginning of the second millennium, Babylonians and Assyrians maintained and utilized the extinct Sumerian language in much the same way that ancient Greek and Latin are used for artistic, religious and scholarly purposes today. Although the Sumerian language is not an Indo-Aryan language it uses the root system for developing words. This was later adapted by Indo-Aryans in the development of Sanskrit in the Indus Valley. The use of Sumerian language began first in southern Mesopotamia and spread northwards indicating from which direction Indus people arrive in Mesopotamia, probably through the sea route. Ancient scribes have provided equivalence between Sumerian and Akkadian words and these can be employed to advantage by historians struggling to decipher the Indus Script. So far they have been looking elsewhere trying to establish its equivalence with Dravidian or Indo-European languages and failed. The Indus language was replaced by Indo-Aryan languages in the Indus valley as in much of the old world with the arrival of Aryans. Some of the words of the Indus-Sumerian language however continue to persist in local dialects till today.

Egyptian civilization began with an ancient historic event. The Sumerians Nirmer along with his son Menes and an army of 5000 Akkadian guards set out on a conquest of the Nile valley around 3200 BC. They followed the northern route along Euphrates that reached the Nile valley through Syria. On the periphery of the Nile valley they subjugated local people of African origin and expanded their army further, eventually conquering the Egyptian valley without much of a fight. A prehistoric flint knife, with a handle carved from the tooth of a hippopotamus, in the possession of Louvre and found at Gebel el Arak near Nag Hamâdi depicts a scene from the conquest. On one side of the handle is a battle-scene including some remarkable representations of ancient boats. Many of the warriors are nude with the exception of a loin girdle, but, while one set of combatants have shaven heads or short hair, the others have abundant locks falling in a thick mass upon the shoulder. The nude warriors are obviously of local African origin. It displays the wisdom of the conquerors in utilizing locals for their campaigns. On the other face of the handle is carved a hunting scene. In the upper field is a remarkable group, consisting of a personage struggling with two lions arranged symmetrically. The rest of the composition is not very unlike other examples of prehistoric Egyptian carving in low relief, but here attitude, figure, and clothing are un-Egyptian. The hero wears a turban on his abundant hair, and a full and rounded beard descends upon his breast. A long garment clothes him from the waist and falls below the knees, his muscular calves ending in the claws of a bird of prey. There is no doubt that the heroic personage is represented in the familiar attitude of the Babylonian hero Gilgamesh struggling with lions, a favorite subject of early Sumerian and Babylonian seals. His garment is Sumerian rather than Egyptian. The design itself is unmistakably of Mesopotamian origin. There was no physical barrier to the use of the river-route from Mesopotamia into Syria and of the tracks thence southward along the land bridge to the Nile’s delta.

After the conquest Nirmer (The Scorpion King) returned to Babylon leaving his son Menes in charge of the new kingdom. Menes unified the scattered communities of the entire Nile Valley. There he established the First Egyptian Dynasty with a Sumerian civilization. The unified state led to the development of writing, the start of large scale construction and the venturing out from the Nile Valley to trade. The most remarkable evidence of cultural connection is shown in the architecture of Early Dynastic tombs of Egypt and Mesopotamian seal-impressions showing exactly similar buildings. A problem that early Sumerian ruling class faced upon arrival in Egypt was the different, even contrary religious beliefs. Egyptians glorified the floods whereas the Sumerian dreaded it because of their religious records of the deluge that had originally flooded their homeland and beautiful cities on the western coast of India leading to their exodus. However the Sumerians soon assimilated everything useful they found in the new lands and thus developed their culture even further. Unlike the colonists of eighteenth century the Sumerians arrived in any new territory with the intention of making it their home and progressed from strength to strength as they marched westwards. However the Nile valley was the limit of their expansion since their were no other great rivers flowing through vast arid plains to the west of the Nile. Nimes established the first Egyptian dynasty. The second Egyptian dynasty that ruled with the symbol of the dog rather than a bird appears to have emerged on Egyptian soil itself.

Ceramic & Pottery Making genetic evolution, planned cities, recent discoveries, seismic disturbance, submerged cities