"Morning doves are calling
They are calling, always calling
Their harrowing farewell"
-Nick Cave
There is a soundtrack to our lives here in Maine, especially if you're near water- the haunting echo of Loons calling at night to catch up in the middle of the lake, the din of peepers out in the swamp as the sun goes down, the soothing call of the Mourning Dove in the dawn as the sun starts a new day. Very much like the Loon, the Mourning Dove is a bird heard regularly, maybe not seen quite as much.
So imagine our surprise when, while heading out to the shop for another day of work this summer, we walked in to find a Mourning Dove perched on a windowsill. It didn't want to be stuck in there, was happy to be scooped into a box and ushered back to the outside, but that brief rescue mission gave us time to snap a few pictures and realize their incredible color and beauty up close.
Usually when we develop a new ornament, we spend a lot of time looking at pictures, asking each other what our visual memories of a different bird or animal are and this new Mourning Dove ornaments was really the first time we all simply could not agree on one color, one shade, one visual dynamic. They're gray, they're brown, they're a little pink, a little yellow. They have a beautiful blue ring around their eye. And on and on. So this is the first ornament that doesn't have one agreed upon glaze design- we did some with certain layers of glaze, others with different layers of glaze, in this case of handmade ornaments, we can truly say no two will be the same!