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RH Garden Club hears about projects
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Richmond Hill Garden Club member Gloria Shearin stands with guest speaker Erica Childress of Midnight Star Pottery during the clubs recent meeting at the John W. Stevens Wetlands Education Center in J.F. Gregory Park. - photo by Photo provided.

The January 2014 meeting of the Richmond Hill Garden Club featured Midnight Star Pottery owner Erica Childress demonstrating pottery projects for the garden.  
Childress explained that no one has “to be an artist” to create beautiful items to display plants and enhance their beauty, whether indoors or outdoors.
She suggested that people search Pintrest or magazines for inspiration or examine some of the items on display in her Richmond Hill shop. She urged people to bring in their idea and she and her mother “will help put it into action.”
Childress first demonstrated flower pots, which can be painted in any color and design and come in various sizes. Childress will offer tips on painting with various brushes.
Ready-made patterns are available, or designs can be created free-hand. After the pots are painted and glazed, the store fires each piece. Items are ready for pick-up in about a week.
Other ceramic garden items include mushrooms that can be partially painted with the bottom left untreated so they can serve as watering stakes and even garden gnomes and toad houses.  
Glass pieces also work well in the garden. Special effects also are simple; a sprinkling of glass crystals can give almost a magical effect.  
As Childress said, these items — plant stakes, wind chimes, hanging plaques and sun catchers, for example — are, perhaps, more easily “personalized than painting a set piece.”  Although glass designs look fragile, she noted they are surprisingly sturdy, and even if a part of a wind chime is broken, it can easily be replaced.
Working with clay is another option for creating garden decorations. According to Childress, it allows people to “make something natural that lasts forever.”
It’s also easy to make plant stakes or markers that will last forever and help identify the site of bulbs or perennials.
In other garden club news, the club announced that the annual plant swap will be Saturday, April 12, in Gregory Park.
Also, a check for $200 was given to the Richmond Hill Library for the purchase of gardening books for adults and children.
The club’s February meeting will be at 10 a.m. Feb. 12 in the Wetlands Center in Gregory Park.
Mary Sweeney-Reeves of the UGA Marine Extension Service Adopt-a-Wetlands Program in Coastal Georgia will be featured. The public is invited.

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