Monday, April 18, 2011

... how do you feel about mondays? ....


i don' t love mondays ... for exactly the same reason most other people don't love them .... i had a good weekend and monday is back to the usual instead of the weekendish .... my usual is pretty darn good, but mondays, the kids back in school and mr.e.beck.artist back at work make my house quieter .... i miss them ... but don't really dig the mess that gets left behind from the weekend .... how is it that monday morning i am always stunned by the detritus of the weekend ... i should just be expecting it ... but no ...

so ... this morning i went and worked out after my kids left for school ... i usually walk them (and the dog) to school .. but not when i do early exericise ... then it's kind of a hurry up or i'll be late kind of thing .... in the eons i was away from this blog i had a hurt neck (c5,6,7, pinched nerves, numbness in the left hand, pain across my shoulders ...) ... all i needed was an orthopedic spine specialist, a very nice physical therapist, and time.... oh, and lots of ibuprofen .... so now i 'm back to working out ... but i spend most of my workout worrying that i'm going to hurt myself again .... i'll know i'm better once i'm not worried anymore, i suppose .... this is all actually pertinent to the art thing ... stay with me ... so ... in my six weeks of decreased activity(i had been doing tennis three times a week, exercise class three times a week, and jogging twice a week) i had all kinds of time on my hands ... i'd carved out all sorts of exercise time that was empty .... so, i decided to go back to pottery ... now, neck is better, exercising is back on and i'm doing pottery ... all that means then is the monday morning weekend mess didn't get cleaned up today and now, late at night, i still have two loads of laundry to fold ... alas, something has to give, at least it's not my neck at the moment ....

so ... this morning i took that much too early exercise class so that i could go to pottery class ....
the first class of the quarter i got a 20 pound bag of white clay ... and made three small pieces .... that leaves approximately 17 pounds of white clay left .... and yet, the next week, i bought a 20 pound bag of chocolate clay .... they only come in 20 pound bags, so i'm not actually choosing excessive .... that day i made four chocolate clay pieces ... and they made me so very happy that i was doing pottery again ... i loved them ... now, while they are still raw clay .... all manner of catastrophic things can happen to them between now and the finished product, but .... still ... happy, happy ....
i took a form (big plastic bowl, flat deli platter, weird bowl) and covered it with plastic (so the clay won't stick to the form forever) .... i then took pieces of clay and rolled it out... with a good old fashion rolling pin .... we have a slab roller at the pottery studio ... and i love it ... but for small bits, the rolling pin is grand ... then, those rolled bits, i pressed with textures and designs .... i added some dots of clay ... and pressed out some balls into crevices ... and have a highly textured piece ready for bisque firing.....
that's my story ... i'm a potter again ... i made four more of this type of piece today at my pottery class .... each one takes about an hour ... smaller is a titch faster ... later the glazing process will add more time to each one ... i have a good glazing plan ... we'll see how it goes, huh?

third day in a row of blogging .... i have a plan for some art time tomorrow ... so i'll blog it ... see you then ...

my laundry definitely suffers for my artistic endeavors, alas ....

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