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I am so happy to share the first-ever reader submission on Your Clay Project! And not just because the featured project is ADORABLE, but also because of who made it.

Have you ever been in a flood? And by “flood” I don’t mean a couple inches of burst pipe water in the basement. I mean, the basement is full of THE RIVER and by the way so is the living room, and all it’s foul-smelling, bacteria-infested, dead-fish-floating, mixture-of-river-chemicals-sewage-and-oh-my-god-the-stench-will-never-leave-my-nose FLOOD.

Well, I’ve been through that kind of flood, twice. And let me tell you, clean-up from this type of ordeal is quite simply overwhelming, physically and emotionally. And in 2008, when it was Day One of clean-up, who was there to help?

TO THE RESCUE!

A guy named Howard. A great guy, a motorcycle buddy. The kind of guy who would do anything for a friend.

Including haul a muck-filled mattress out of a muck-filled house, and squish it, end over disgusting end, out to the curb.

Including fearlessly climb over the pile of debris into our tiny former office and scoop out how many shovels full of slimey ruined books and other wretched, stinking debris.

Including so many more gross, God-awful clean-up tasks, that you could never ask anyone to do, but they just step in and do them because they’re your friend.

Anyway, short version: I love Howard, he is a dear and treasured friend.

And he was 8 years old when he fashioned this little owl figure in elementary school art class! It features sturdy, chunky wings, button eyes with a hypnotic starburst pattern, and a charismatic beak that protrudes out and down, giving it a personality much bigger than its 3 x 3 x 5 inch size.

The year was 1968 and when the owl was complete, Howard gave it to his dear grandmother – who must have immediately mailed off a picture of it to iconic TV producers Sid & Marty Krofft, because I’m pretty sure they used little Howard’s project as the inspiration for the Witchiepoo character on “HR Pufnstuf” (a show that was not LSD-induced in the slightest, so please do not spread those rumors).

Well at the very least, Grandma kept it and cherished it and dusted around it for decades, until she passed away in 1991. At that point Howard lost track of it. Then about seven years later, the little owl re-surfaced – Howard found it at the home of his uncle in 1998, after the uncle’s passing.

So it seems that our cute, wise little friend has a way of turning up when it’s unexpected. Just like Howard, who turned up on Holcomb Street ready and willing to haul the muck out of our flooded house. I’m so glad that Howard and his little owl have been reunited!

Have a clay project you’d like to share? Just email me a few photos and the story behind your piece at submissions@yahoo.com.

I’m linking to the What’s It Wednesday Party over at Ivy and Elephants, and also to Vintage Thingy Thursday at ColoradoLady! Click through for tons of inspirational projects, and of course wonderful vintage thingies!

I seriously do not understand how things like this end up being donated to the thrift store. I mean, I get that people die, and their families don’t want to keep their stuff. But didn’t anyone  look at this fanciful little lavender pony and fall in love?

I mean, what part of him failed to completely captivate the ogre who carried this box to the donation center? Was it his 4-inch height? His shiny lavender body?

His magenta mane?

His curly rolled tail, or the little indented “buttons” on his chest and rump?

Well, no matter – I for one am completely smitten. He might even be magic!

If you were a kid and were asked to name your favorite animal, what would it be? Dog? Lion? Giraffe? Salamander?

To be honest, I’m not even sure how the salamander might make the short list of suggestions for a favorite animal. And I do not say that to slight the salamander – they are really interesting creatures, as evidenced by this brief bit of description found on Wikipedia:

They are typically characterized by a superficially lizard-like appearance, with slender bodies, blunt snouts, short limbs projecting at right angles to the body, and the presence of a tail in both larva and adult… Unique among vertebrates, they are capable of regenerating lost limbs, as well as other damaged parts of the body…  Some salamander species are fully aquatic throughout their life, some take to the water intermittently and others are entirely terrestrial as adults.

But a “favorite animal”? It is just not a choice I would expect to even occur to a kid. But that is no matter – my very own precious daughter did choose the salamander as her “favorite animal” in second grade, and so made this clay figure for a class project.

I did ask her about it at the time – “How did you come to choose the salamander? I don’t recall ever hearing you talk about them…” And she said, “There was a list, and all the good ones were already taken.” At that point I shifted gears and tried to build up the poor slighted salamander in her eyes, but it was no use. She had felt pressured to choose him, and so he was not really her favorite.

But her clay figure, although his little feet have chipped off and not, apparently, re-grown as promised… is spot-on “totes adorbs,” as James Earl Jones might say.

And treasured, at least by her mother.

… was this little finger-pinched monster guy. The blobby lump of his body has a pretty parti-colored glaze, and some sort of tool has been used to make the round, tooth-filled “mouth” in front. I’m amazed his little pinched arms have survived at all; his pencil-poked eyes give you a woeful look. He stands about 4 inches tall.

I was walking around a thrift store one day – and not just ANY thrift store… this was the “last stop before the incinerator store” – a warehouse where our local Salvation Army took all the stuff that hadn’t sold in their network of stores, set it out in bins and boxes, and let you come in to dig around and maybe find just what you didn’t even know you were looking for. Stuff in here was dirt cheap – a clerk there sold me lamps, bicycles, and really good stuff for $1, $2, and even less.

Anyway, I was digging through a box of cast-off household stuff when my eye caught a bit of shiny yellow clay. “Hello…” and I pulled this little guy up and out of the box.

Well being the softy that I am, I was immediately overcome with the need to adopt him. How had this object – obviously a child’s art creation, for goodness sake – ended up in the almost-trash at the thrift store?

I might have been the teensiest bit hormonal – at this time my own daughter was still pretty young and I had a couple of her clay projects at home, and I couldn’t imagine parting with them. It made me quite sad to think that someone had likely died, and their childrens’ art had been donated along with – most likely – a houseful of other belongings.

Anyway, Little Ricky here came home with me for a quarter, and after that I started purposely looking for children’s clay projects in the thrift stores. It still amazes me how often I find them.