Getting there.
I stayed at the studio until about one in the morning several days last week; Josh was on travel, so I used the time to get stuff done for my July 29th Great Grapes! fair in Annapolis. I made 12 creamer/sugar sets, ten lotion bottle/tumbler sets, four casseroles, a couple platters, four vases, more oil lamps, and six teapots. Plus little trays to put the sets on. Doesn’t sound like much, maybe, but it’s all I’ve got time for at this point – instead of working frantically till the last minute, like with the Greenman Festival, I set myself a date two weeks before the end and promised myself I’d have everything bisqued by then. And I made it… almost. It’s certainly a start.
Most of the stuff worked out well, except the tepots, whose (dratted porcelain!!!) spouts won’t attach. I lost one handle, too. So I’m definitely switching to another clay; though I love the way porcelain throws, I need more reliability for attachments. (There’s no reason those spouts shouldn’t have worked!)
And then there was the mystery of the gorgeous 15″ platter that I had set out to dry on the overflow shelves, that had huge fist-sized chunks broken out of its rim when I came in to check on it the next day… What a heartbreak. It had been perfect, its rim about three inches wide (a feat to take note of), imprinted with a fern frond that I had hiked a half hour into the woods and back to pick. Already trimmed and just about ready to go into the kiln room, I just wanted one more night of drying before subjecting it to the undue stress of too much heat. It was sitting there where I had left it, ruined. No note, no apology, nothing, which leads me to wonder whether it might have been malicious. Though normally I’d dismiss that train of thought as ridiculous, in my current circumstances it’s actually not all that far out there. -sigh-
But I did get it all done. Now all I need to do is trim some stuff, which I’ll spend about an hour or two on tomorrow. Then I’ll glaze whatever’s done, so it can sit quietly on the shelves over the next couple weeks and duck into the kilns whenever there’s an opening (ha, ha, ha).
Well, off to bed – if I can get Josh to take some pictures of my lilies and my new turtle tomorrow, you may get a cuter (and less cranky) update on my garden life.