uh oh!

I just have to say that last night it ABSOLUTELYROCKEDHUGELYFUCKINGHELL being back at the studio. When I threw my first big plug of clay down I kind of sat for a second and literally couldn't think how to begin so I just put my hands on the clay and didn't think and my hands remembered what my consciousness could not. I had it centered in about 2 minutes and started building. I ended up throwing 6 pieces which will be ready to trim tomorrow night: 5 kind of normal Susanbowls and one very fun bowl-sized pot that comes way back in on the top - kind of the shape of a spittoon without the top flange. By the time it reduces in firing it'll end up kind of a fun round vase. It's about the size of an extra large softball right now, and shape, too, come to that. The opening at the top is about 2.5" in diameter but after firing it will be more like 1.5-2" and the pot will be somewhere in between baseball and softball size. Fun! The other bowls are fun, too, one in particular is quite thin and rather a different shape for my stuff, altho it could be construed as kinda dangerously thin but we'll see. Some people used to say all my stuff was too thin but nothing of mine EVER exploded or cracked in the kiln due to thinness. Once in a while the bottoms cracked but it was the clay body since everyone else's pieces were cracking, too. (And actually lots of others' pieces used to crack on the bottom when mine would be fine, due almost completely to Barb's tutelage at the Cleveland Heights Potters' Co-op where we learned to compress our pot bottoms religiously. So there.)

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Anyway most of you have not seen my tools so here are some very happy pottery utensils which finally got to be in the studio again...


My lonely 7th bat is not quite so happy but he is confident he will get to have a fun pot thrown on him tomorrow (bats fit on the throwing wheel - you build on them so they can be removed with each pot to do another)...


As long as we're doing pix, I changed sheets yesterday and last year's beauteous quilty goodness finally got to come back out of the closet...


As usual every good quilt looks better with a Lucy sitting on it. In fact it looks like these two were made for each other, no?


Oh and here's a weird bruise I have on the very top of my shoulder; I have no idea where it came from. You still can't quite appreciate the vividness but trust me it's quite striking (npi)...


ps - Coltrane seems to be having the same effect on Sammers as Ira Glass. He sat up from a dead sleep when I switched from Joshua Redman just now. Speaker-feline sexcapades soon to follow if I don't extract him pronto!