Sewing

Things I'd like to try:
This wallet from Confessions of a Fabricaholic.

Places to go on the web:
Love sewing mag

Same Time Next Year

It's been over a year since I updated my little crafty blog. Why? I suppose it's because I started incorporating crafty stuff into my regular/personal blog. And also because my non-clay craftiness has been at a veritable standstill for the last year (!).

Should I delete this journal? Continue to let it limp along with a yearly update? Update it with clay entries cross-posted to my personal journal?

Well.

Monday Morning You Sure Look Fine

I am still here. I still exist.

It's the end of the semester and thankfully I am only taking one class, because even with just that one class, I've been feeling pretty under the gun recently.

I'm here in the lab this morning, having a cup of coffee and printing out the paper that's due by noon. I actually finished it yesterday--which may or may not be a first for me in terms of term papers--and I got a full night's sleep which sounds like a good thing only I was being chased by a zombie all around my dreams. (He was a scary twenty-something zombie, but in the end, when he was attacked by a larger, scarier zombie, I kinda felt a little sorry for him.) So it wasn't a particularly restful full night of sleep, is what I'm trying to say.

I haven't written a blog entry in about a week and I feel rusty.

Also, my ear is stuffed up and hurty and I'm afraid I have some kind of ear infection. I probably should go over to the student health center and have a doctor look at it.

Let's see what else?

The car went to the shop this morning. It's been spewing some evil smelling, brain cell killing fumes into the interior whenever we drive it for longer than fifteen minutes or so. So that's a good thing, I guess.

And I got a lot of my Christmas shopping done at the arts and crafts show that was being held in the student union building last week. So that's good. Supplemented with some of our own pottery, I think we might be almost completely finished with Christmas shopping.

Christmas seems so far away, and yet, it's only, like 19 days from now. Right?

So you're wondering what my paper was about, aren't you?

Well, it was the final write-up of the tobacco experiments I did in botany this semester. I worked with three other people (although by using the verb "worked," I don't mean to give you the impression that they did anything except stay out of my way and weasel out of doing even the simplest tasks). Grrr.

So it's Monday. I'm going to make it through the day at least. That's something.

Swiftly

I really have been working--lots! And Dave and I just participated in the studio show, where we sold about $300 worth of stuff, so that was nice.

4:00 P.M.

I couldn't tell you what goes through my mind as I'm glazing--except today, when The Brain could not shake this little ditty about Cletus the slack-jawed yokel from an episode of The Simpsons.

This was my workspace circa 4:00 p.m. on Friday afternoon. On the left, you can see my muse, 44 ounces of diet Pepsi. Then there's an Empty Bowls bowl, a few glazes, and my glazing notebook. Behind that, my inspiration wall.

I work best in a bit of self-generated chaos.

Details

These are some detail photos (taken with a cell phone, so necessarily blurry), of a piece I made years ago. It's called the hand, the eye, the word, and it doesn't exist anymore. On Saturday, after I took these photos, I had Dave fling it against a cinder block wall. (If you want to see the whole piece, intact, there's a photo at my non-craftsy blog, Rosa.)

This is the back of the piece:

The piece was built on this example of my very early carved work, a skeleton holding a trio of flowers. I made this piece first and it sat and sat and sat, waiting for me to be inspired enough to glaze it. I never did. Instead, it was pressed into service as the base that I built the rest of this piece on.

Here are a couple of things you might notice about the back:

One is that the piece was hung by discarded keys (glued to the piece with a two-part epoxy) and wire. I used two sets of keys because the piece was so heavy that I didn't want to risk one set. The other thing is that the whole piece was held together with glaze. Those heavy swaths of white glaze were actually acting as kind of glue to hold all the bits together.

This is my hand, a cast of my hand anyway. It was also held on with glaze. I used my hand at one end and the hand of a then-friend (someone who is definitely no longer in my life, hasn't been for a long time, and never will be again) at the other end.

This is that friend's hand.

I hated this as soon as I applied the gold patina to it. It reminded me too much of Lt. Data on Star Trek: The Next Generation.  I do/did like the glaze effect on the background. It was a mixture of several different glazes, a glossy white, a runny gun-metal green, a crackle glaze, and a Chun red. It was meant to look like a turbulent, angry sky.

This is the eye part of the work. All those eyes belong to another friend who I am no longer in contact with. Again, I hated the gold patina on it.

You can also see examples of the words there, pages ripped from a trashed copy of a Dostoyevsky novel.

Here are a couple of close ups of those words:

I'm glad this piece is out of my life, actually.

Beads Beads Beads

Yes, it really was May the last time I added anything to my little crafty blog. I have been working, I just haven't been posting anything here.  Recently, I've taken up bead making. I was inspired by a pair of pottery earrings I bought from a street vendor in NYC and here is a bit of the fruits of that inspiration:

These are my little red clay, iron oxided beads, strung on some elastic thread until I can figure out what to do with them.

Most of them will be turned into earrings like these:

This is a photo of the inside of the kiln after my first bead tree firing. (A bead tree, in case you don't know, is a device that allows you to fire beads on high-temperature wire.)

The larger pieces around the bead tree are not mine. Those are mostly student and studio members' pieces and glaze tests.

Two firings yielded a nice bead soup that I've started to play with.

 (I made the plate underneath the beads, too. Unfortunately, the glaze on the plate developed a common firing fault, dozens of tiny pinholes in the surface. But it's fine for using as a bead tray.)