Over half of my life was lived in Asia and Africa as a teacher and librarian in international schools and, as an educator who sat through many staff meetings, I learned to doodle. On the sides of my notebooks, you could follow page after page of doodles. Patterns emerged, as well as a certain visual sensation and my creative doodles eventually became more sophisticated. As my ceramic interests expanded, I sought to transfer my doodling to ceramics. I discovered sgrafitto! Sgraffito, in Italian, means scratch. My sgrafitto vessels are decorated by scratching through the underglaze, exposing the underlying clay body. The pieces are lively and offbeat and should evoke amusement, and playfulness. Though I no longer sit through staff meetings (thank goodness!), I am still creating sensations and discovering patterns through doodles, not in the margins of notebooks but on the surfaces of my clay vessels.