Christine Smith, Michelle Oetinger, Jill Darban,
Sharon Svigel, Charla Blacker, Ann Peters. Not pictured Steve Penner.
Two hundred pounds of clay cut into 214 unique tiles decorated with 29 different glaze colors and around 350 hours of work by SaddleBrooke Pottery Club members resulted in the colorful roadrunner mosaic enhancing the outdoor dining area of the RoadRunner Grill.
This year-long project was inspired by the success of the club’s earlier “Lizzy the Lizard” mosaic, which decorates the wall at Ridgeview Drive and Idlewind Lane. While “Lizzy” was large, “Roadie the Roadrunner” is even larger, spanning an area seven feet tall and eight feet wide, including a native landscape of cacti and rocks. The small cactus on the right side, beautifully inscribed by Janice Mihora, includes the names of the Pottery Club members most involved in the project, directed by Christine Smith with team members Charla Blacker, Jill Darban, Michelle Oetinger, Steve Penner, Ann Peters, and Sharon Svigel.
The project couldn’t have been successful without the help from other club members: Tom Atkins who applied his professional architectural skills to scale up the original picture to its full size, and members of the firing team, Harriet Hason, Steve Law, and Frank Mucklo. Suzie Auster created Roadie’s beautiful fused-glass eye. Jeff Egon’s SaddleBrooke One maintenance team spent five days scraping and grinding stucco off the block wall and then carefully positioning the 214 tiles into their proper places under the eagle-eye supervision of the Pottery Club Roadrunner team.
Many thanks go to the SaddleBrooke One Property and Roads Committee, who approved the project at each stage of development, and to John Reed, SaddleBrooke One director of operations, for suggesting the project in the first place.
The name “Roadie” was chosen as the result of a naming contest in which Tim Mahanna, Debbie Muise, and Patty Oswalt all submitted the same name and received Roadrunner Grill gift certificates for their efforts. Additional thanks go to SaddleBrooke One Director of Food and Beverage Kelly Evans for providing a champagne toast at the dedication ceremony for Roadie, as well as the gift certificates.