hunt for rust 7.7.2016

Last month, my daughter’s boyfriend Seth took me to an auto junk yard – my very first time visiting such an amazing collection of old cars and trucks. Seth was on the hunt for the brown Honda Civic he junked last year, and I was on the hunt for rust. I’m amazed and delighted by the beautiful colors and patterns I found!

I was looking for smallish pieces of rust to decorate my ceramics, similar to the vase I wrote about in this post. The best rust, of course, was in the part of the junk yard with the oldest cars. I found a decent amount of usable pieces from the trunk of a beautiful old 1965 Chevy Impala.

After soaking and scrubbing the pieces, I laid them out in the sun to dry.

Some of the rust pieces still have a blue hue from the original car color. They are so gorgeous! For those, my plan is to find a blue glaze to use on my ceramics that will enhance the blue in the rust. For the others, I’ll probably use glazes in hues of whites, browns and tans. It’ll be my clay and rust series. Or maybe I should call it my earth and metal series!