Sunday

I woke up this morning with a ridiculous craving for donuts, so on the way to the studio Dave and I stopped for coffee and donuts at Duke City Donuts.  We'd never been there before, but--oh. em. gee.--they have the best donuts. I had a chocolate-glazed, chocolate-cake donut (cake donuts are the way to go, man--forget those yeasty raised monstrosities) and Dave had an apple fritter. We split a key-lime donut-ish thing with whipped cream on top. Every single one of them was the Platonic ideal, donut-wise. They were so ridiculously good that I'm glad they're not closer to us. We added a couple of coffees so the caffeine could help even out the sugar high.

I had a long-ish, varied day at the studio. I set up a wheel near Dave and we threw pots for awhile. (I'm making a few tumblers to use as glaze tests and demo pieces.) After that, I finished glazing one of the cells. Then Dave and I loaded a glaze kiln. When I was finished with that, I started construction on the biggest cell yet. (Big Cell doesn't have an official name yet.)

While I worked in my cubicle, I listened to some crappy music station playing crappy music from the 70s and 80s. Man, there was a lot of crappy music back then. Of course, I can sing along with most of it.

More pictures of pictures from my Mother's collection:

Look at this picture of my older brother! Ha! Ha! Ha! He was the cutest little kid ever, no?

When he was younger, he looked like a Kewpie doll, but then he grew out of it and into this.

My little brother on the left, me on the right, in my grandmother's house. I wonder what we were doing. Playing some made-up game, I'll bet. I was probably around six--?--which would make my brother around four years old.

I like that picture of my grandmother.

Learning C(a/u)rve

We spent all day at the studio but when we got home I had the chance to try out my new buddy!

A Speedball carving set, handle and five blades.

I've been wanting to learn how to carve stamps for awhile, but for one reason or another have always hesitated. Today I decided that I was just going to go for it, so Dave and I went to a local art supply shop and picked up the carving set, a brayer, and two kinds of carving blocks (the cheaper, crumblier gray block and the pricier, rubberier pink block).

Step one: The drawing of a little Day of the Dead-ish figure on a post-it note that I transferred to the gray, crumbly block.

I carved out the stamp and inked it up with black acrylic craft paint to get a first impression.

Then I made a couple of small adjustments and carved out the background and made this next impression:

Still needs a little cleaning up, but otherwise I like it!

The stamp itself is kind of scary looking, don't you think?

I'll definitely be doing more of these. I'm fascinated by the process. The Brain has a hard time figuring out the negative, reverse-image impression aspect of it and I'm sure the first time I try to carve words should be fun.

Photos of Photos (from My Mother's Collection)

This photo was in my mother's collection--it is of me and my two brothers--but I swear I had never seen it before.

I must have been about four years old when it was taken, but I have no recollection of that either.

This photo of my uncle somewhere in Germany, I do remember. He must have sent it to my grandmother sometime in the early 70s when he was in the army and stationed there, and I remember seeing it in the dresser drawer she kept photos in.

I had never seen my this photo of my grandmother either. It must have been a school photo--?--or a photo booth photo. My aunt pointed out the holes in the seam of the sweater here--a sign of neglect or the sign of a worn out favorite article of clothing?

This is a photo of a photo of my great grandfather, whom I never met.

Spring? Yes? Spring? Spring? Yes? No?

It's spring and then it's not spring, but this tree, the plum tree in the driveway, thinks it's spring still.

This little tree has been going nuts for a couple of weeks now. The first day it was in full bloom, I walked out to take a look at the flowers and the whole tree was abuzz with pollen-drunk bees.  They paid me no mind.

At the studio, I've been working on getting the last of the bisqued cells glazed. The inclusions are getting bigger and bigger. Some of them are the size and shape of plums and some are the size and shape of those little gem donuts you can buy in convenience stores in packs of six. (No, I wasn't especially hungry when I made them.)

I have another cell completed and drying right now, the biggest yet. Can't wait to go bigger even.

In cat-related news: Gray Kitty has been under the weather since the dental work but Saba has bounced back, despite her getting the worst of it. Poor thing is always trying to sneak outside (she's not allowed until she's back on solid food, two weeks from now), but she wants to go out and eat grass. She's had a few chaperoned walks but there's no grass to speak of yet. Today as a treat for her, I went to the hippie-dippy co-op where we do our shopping and I bought her a $7 square of wheat grass, meant to be juiced by hippies.

Yesterday I ran around a bit with my mother before heading to the studio to do more glazing. I worked for about three hours then got to the point where I just stopped being able to make decisions about where to go next, so I packed it in and came home.

When I first arrived at the studio though, I came in on the tail end of one of the classes and so I stopped and chatted for a few minutes with the teacher and one of the students. I remarked on how quiet it was, people working away, and the teacher said that was a sign of people engrossed in making art. Which I guess I agree with generally, but someone needs to tell The Brain that because it insists on chatting away even when I'm being quiet and working. Sometimes I need to stop and write things down so that The Brain will stop chewing on them.

And then last night there was a dream about clay and---what? In the first part of the dream, I was riding a motorcycle through a city at night. It was raining and there was a lot of traffic moving swiftly. The roads were crisscrossed with trolley tracks and I had to dodge several trolleys, all lit up inside and carrying passengers. I arrived at a small apartment building and parked on the sidewalk and spoke to someone outside the building about the ride. I went in, checked my mailbox, and then that part of the dream ended. (There may have been some part of the dream in which I was in the apartment, but I don't remember any details.)

In the next part of the dream I was taking down a booth at a show, trying to pack up my things so another potter could set up her wares in the same booth. I had several pieces in my booth from another potter at the studio, a woman whose work I like, but mostly because I like her quite a lot. As I was packing up my things, one of the show's organizers came over and asked me about all the work I had and I said that some of it wasn't mine but that I hadn't paid for it. I explained that the other potter, this woman I like, had given it to me and I was trying to sell it. The organizer said that the other potter was problematic, an oblique reference to the potter's mental illness (a real-life fact) and I woke up thinking about that and whether my liking her--and by extension liking her work--had something to do with the fact that she has this mental illness.

I'm not drawn to people with mental illnesses in general, nor am I repelled by them, clearly.  I suppose I have some empathy and some sympathy, though that depends largely on their levels of neediness. (Growing up with an addict parent has made me hyper-sensitive to people who are putting out their feelers for co-dependent enablers and I am able to hack those feelers off with a hatchet.) But this woman, this other potter, is not in the least bit needy, so I like her.  I think if it ever comes down to it in that way, I would want to be her.

(Oh, I forgot to say that in the first part of the dream I was male and in the second part of the dream I was female. That happens from time to time in my dreams--and from time to time in real life.)

The First Rule of Glaze Club

Yesterday was the first meeting at the studio of something that I'm tentatively calling Glaze Club. The whole idea stemmed from a suggestion by a new studio member who asked me how she could acquire more knowledge about glazing. I organized a small meeting and invited everyone in the studio via some signs posted on the door and about a dozen people showed up.

Glazing can be complicated.

I had made arrangements for three of us to have short presentations with examples. I presented a sponged glaze technique, another potter talked about how he glazes with squeeze bottles, and Dave showed two examples of one of his favorite glaze combinations. A fourth potter brought some work as well and she spoke about her glazing and post glazing techniques. There were questions and answers and an exchange of information, which was nice.

It was determined that we'll meet about once a month and I took volunteers for the presenters for next month.

Test tiles. 

Getting people to make test tiles is like trying to get them to pull out their own teeth.

It's funny but when I was talking to Dave about it, he said, "It'll be good for you to give away some of your secrets." As if that were ever going to happen.

 (I do not like to give away my secrets.)

No, but really: I am a bit (more than a bit if I'm going to be completely honest about it )of a secret keeper when it comes to my work. It's not that I think other people can do what I do, but nothing irks me more than seeing my work knocked off by people who don't have the knack for it. (I'd probably be more irked by seeing my work knocked off by people who were better at it that I am--although that's probably not going to happen because people who are better at it than I am are doing their own thing. The real problem is people who are just good enough at pottery to adequately steal ideas from other potters. I think imitators should have to stand trial and lose a finger or two. But that will only happen when I run the world.)

(Someday.)

After Glaze Club broke up, we had to run to buy Dave some gloves at REI. He's headed off to Minnesota where temperatures have been consistently below zero for a while. (Unlike here in NM where temperatures have been in the upper 60s for awhile.) I worry about him in the cold, simply because temperatures below zero are unimaginable to this desert-born brown girl.

Today is Sunday and it's not early (10:30-ish as I write this), but I would like to get a little more sleep out of this morning and then get some stuff done at the studio. That's my plan for the day. That, and I need to go out and pick up some bananas.

Happen at Once

A straightforward retelling of the days just past would have to include the books that I've finished (a biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder and a book of the articles she wrote for the small newspaper that serviced her small farming community in the Ozarks), the book I just reconnected with (Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch), the lunch I had with my mother at the Hispanic Cultural Center's restaurant, the class that David and I taught on Wednesday evening, and the pizza we had for dinner last night after retrieving these two from the vet's office where they had dental work done:



A cleaning for Gray Kitty.



A cleaning and three extractions (bringing the total up to 12 since we've had her) for Saba, poor thing. She is the most darling cat ever, but humorless, and didn't appreciate the enforced seventeen hour fast just prior to being sedated for dental work. She came home (they both did) wonky and sad and starving. I felt terrible for them, so they got lots of canned food and pets and space and time to sleep it off.  They'll go back next week or the week after to check that everything's healing all right.

I haven't been to the studio this week any day but Wednesday when we were teaching so I couldn't work on my own stuff. I went into my cubicle for awhile and just looked around at all the stuff in progress and felt momentarily overwhelmed. I want everything to happen at once, of course.

Cats Cats Cats

At the end of last month Albus, the former studio cat, moved with his new owner to Oklahoma.



We--Dave, Stuart, and I--went to see him a couple of days before he left. I would say he's in a better place, but that place is Oklahoma so it would be a lie. Let's just say he's in a different place then.

He so used to love helping me work.

Here he can be seen helping Dave at the slab roller. So helpful!

Our home cats have had a new cat tree since before Christmas. They don't fight much over it.


Because if they did, it'd be tough to declare a winner. Gray Kitty has grown from a former skinny-minnie into a tubby little chubster. He outweighs Saba by almost four pounds (not an insignificant amount of weight for a cat). Saba is far meaner than he is though, so she's still pretty much the alpha.



Don't let her cute kitty centerfold pose fool you: She knows how to fight dirty.

Gain the Whole World

Glaze tests, two, (iron oxide, matte and other glazes, glass beads):



Arranged:



The first of the (almost) finished cell, brought home tonight for some post-firing finishing touches (wax, gold leaf, watercolors, patina, etc).

Yesterday was a long studio day. I went to the studio around noon with Judi and I worked a bit on the largest of my cells so far, called "El Olvido" then I taught the 6-9 p.m. class (only three students, low stress, build a bust of a pelican).

I've gotten such strange reactions to the cells. Everyone wants them to be what they want them to be, which is fine. I'm such a control freak though; I never give anyone a straight answer, even when they are able to ask a direct question.

Before and After

Before:



After:



You can see how much the work shrinks. Generally, it's only (depending on the clay body) supposed to be about six percent (plus the four percent it shrinks in the bisque firing), but I've never taken pics that show the before-and-after spacing in the kiln.

Here are the pieces that go inside the empty cell:



I didn't get any close up shots yet. I unloaded the kiln when it was still 325 degrees, so I didn't want to handle the work too much.

There was no time to let things cool and then play because after I unloaded the kiln, Dave and I had to run off to my eye appointment. I had my eyes dilated (which I hate because I have this horrible fear that they'll dilate them and it won't reverse itself) and the doctor looked and said that everything was fine. (So of course I don't trust the doctor. Sucks being a hypochondriac, believe me.)

The Weekend That Was

Saturday

Well, Saturday morning turned out to be a bust. Apparently the testing lab didn't get the orders from my doctor, so I fasted--and got up early on a Saturday--for no reason.   No matter--I'll call the doctor on Monday to try to sort things out. And it did mean that Dave and I were up early enough to snag a couple of breakfast burritos from Lotaburger. 

After that little bit of fail, we came home and I took a nap while Dave watered the poor parched plants on the patio. And later we spent some time over our Thai food lunch discussing the things that we want to plant in the garden this year. Dave thinks we should move our tomato plants to the shadier bed and ixnay the orncay, but I like growing corn if for no other reason than I like the way the plants look. (And there is no other reason, really, considering that we've never really had any harvested corn to speak of.) I also want beets this year again. (Beets are going for $3-4/lb at the co-op, which: Beets! should not cost $4 per pound.) We'll have eggplant, too, and a couple of cucumber plants that, like the last two years, will produce absolutely nothing. On the patio, I think we'll stick to flowers this year and lots of them.

It'll be time to plant soon!

After lunch we went to the studio and I glazed on the cells for awhile. While I started glazing, I was thinking of the giant clams I saw in the wild, while diving off the Great Barrier Reef. As I was trying to recreate their color patterns from memory, Lynn came into the studio and I heard her announce that she had just been at the aquarium and won a raffle to dive in the shark tanks. How awesome is that?

I finished! finished! one of the cells. Now I have to load and fire it. It's going to be a definite chore because the majority of the pieces will have to be balanced on stilts.

Sunday

We got to the studio around noon and started loading a kiln, seen vertiginously here:



On the left is a big bowl of Dave's (and some other student work) and on the lower right is the first cell I made (The Persistence of Memory) and on the upper right is another nameless cell. (The nameless cell's pieces are two levels below, most of them propped up on stilts.) After I took this photo Dave added a small bowl to the empty spot and started the kiln.

The kiln will fire overnight and if I get to it first, I'll take a picture of the pieces in situ.  I'm curious to see how they turn out.

Happy V.D.!

Happy V.D.!

For V.D. dinner, Dave and I had a variation of pimento cheese sandwiches (grated cheddar cheese, mayo, mustard, smoked paprika, cayenne, pepper, all mixed together and served on toasted hot dog buns) and steamed broccoli. Romantic, huh?  After, we ran up to LUSH and I bought myself a bunch of treats to celebrate, including a huge tub of my new favorite lotion (Sympathy for the Skin) and one of their Emotional Brilliance lipsticks called Ambition (a crazy bold red).

What did you do for V.D.?

Oh! I did do something else:

Therapy Friday does not have quite the same ring to it as Therapy Thursday, but no matter: Therapy days are now Friday. Tonight the therapist and I had a somewhat extended discussion of the therapy cliche The Inner Child. The whole subject is funny to me because I'm well in touch with my own Inner Child, so much so that she's hardly worth referring to as "inner." Also funny: The whole time I was talking to my therapist, my Almost-Inner Child was hiding behind a curtain, whispering, "Don't tell her anything about me!" So I really didn't.

But we're friends, you and I, so I can tell you a few things.

One thing is that my Almost-Inner Child loves yoga, especially when I approach yoga with my new attitude that I like to call Drunken (Yogini) Master. For those of you not familiar with the Drunken Master concept, here is a short instructional video:



Only instead of alcohol, I like to use bubble gum.

The other thing is that my Almost-Inner Child loves trees, especially trees like the ones I grew up with, the ancient-looking quince tree that grew in my backyard, an apricot tree and especially the giant senescent cottonwood in my grandmother's yard. We were friends, me and those trees.

What's Coming Up This (Long) Weekend

I'm fasting as we speak (grrr) because my new doctor wants another fasting glucose test, so after 12 hours with no food (about at the edge of my no-food tolerance) I get to have blood drawn. After that, I'm planning on a giant breakfast burrito from Lotaburger (maybe) and then a trip to the studio. I'm determined to finish at least one of the cells this weekend.

On Sunday there will be more studio time, I'm sure, and then Dave and I are having dinner (burgers at Fuddrucker's) with my mother and older brother.

Monday is President's Day so Dave has the day off. That means more studio time with a break in the afternoon for me to go have my eyes examined. I did have an exam in October, but the doctor didn't dilate my eyes. Since I've been seeing more floaties in my vision recently, I want to go have them checked out.

A Long Time Coming

I was well enough to return to yoga this week, returning to the same "restorative yoga" class that we (Dave, Judi, and I) had taken before I got sick. It's a very gentle introduction to yoga, intended to teach people how to do yoga after they've had some type of injury.

Shavasana, corpse pose, is one of my favorite parts of yoga--so much so that I almost take it personally when people fall asleep during shavasana. I love the sensation of pretending to be dead. The Brain loves it, too, because it is pure awareness without expectation. Nothing ahead. Nothing to worry about, past or present.

At the end of shavasana, our instructor reads a poem. This week, she read this poem by Rumi:

The Guest House

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice.
meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.

Be grateful for whatever comes.
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

What's not to love about that?

Working back through the week, Dave and I spent the weekend at the studio.

On Sunday, I spent six hours glazing and didn't quite finish one of the cells. (I remembered, just today, that I had intended to use glass bits in some of the pieces, a way to add more dimension to the glazing. I'll have to go back and reconsider some of my glaze choices.) My mother stopped by the studio for a visit, a surprise, but nice. It gave me the opportunity to take a few-minutes break from glazing.  Sunday was also Kelly's birthday, so we took her some purple tulips and some pieces that will eventually be part of a cell that I'm making for her as her eventual real present (since I can't seem to finish the glazing process for any one of them yet, they take so long to finish).

On Saturday Dave and I (and Hannah, the sculptor from the studio) made a quick run to the local pottery supply shop to buy a handful of stilts and a couple new glazes. (We have sixty-plus glazes available at the studio for our use, but sometimes something catches my eye. I brought home two Amaco glazes, Vert Luster and Opal Luster.) I also spent the day glazing. The Brain is having a hard time wrapping itself around the glazing process for these things, so it's slow going.

On Friday I saw a new doctor. After my last disastrous visit with a doctor who I will never, ever see again, I asked around for recommendations for a new primary care physician. This woman was highly recommended by my therapist, so I decided to give her a try. She seems nice, but it's hard to tell from a nine minute visit. (At the old practice, the one with the shitty doctors, you got 15-30 minutes. So I guess I'm going to have to decide between quantity and quality--only it's hard to judge quality after nine minutes.) I'll probably give her another go.  I was also supposed to see my therapist in the afternoon, but she wasn't feeling well and called to cancel my appointment.

On Thursday I went to the dentist for a cleaning. I was dreading it because my last cleaning was with the most brutal hygienist ever, but it went well with a different hygienist. (I actually told the office manager that I never wanted to be scheduled with the brutal hygienist again and I don't know if it's a thing, but she didn't even question it, just rescheduled all my future cleanings.)

On Wednesday...gosh. I can't think that far back. Or, no. I think I was at the studio again. I was there with Judi, but we ran into Lynn and her little charge, Lali. Lali is three years old and so imaginative and knowledgeable that I had to stop glazing and spend a few minutes just talking and playing with her. Lali had made a small clay turtle and we talked about how she could fly with magic, but the turtle had wings hidden under her shell.  I petted the turtle and talked to her and Lali answered back in the turtle's voice. After they left, Judi commented that I was good with little kids. I am, but in small doses. So long as I don't have any real responsibilities concerning them, I am a-ok with little kids. The minute I have to take some responsibility for them, all the fun goes out of it and I find myself falling into the patterns, many of them not very healthy, that I learned as a child from the people who were responsible for me. Not good.

And that was my last week. I'm sure I've left out a few things here and there, like, say, the chili dogs we had for dinner, the numerous coffee runs, the trip to Target to buy mundane things like paper towels and soy milk, the book I finished reading (Coreyography by Cory Feldman). You know, the little details that make up a life.

Oh! And I'm supposed to, as an assignment from my therapist, think of three things per day that make me happy, so here goes:

1. Saba finding new ways to snuggle with me, pictured here:


2. Chocolate-covered pretzels. Yum.

3. Re-watching episodes of "Call the Midwife" on Netflix. That show is wrenching and lovely all at the same time.

Glazing the Cells

The Brain thinks it's a three-step process.

The first step is a wash of iron oxide.

You can see the two pieces that have iron oxide on them in the upper right. (Each of those pieces, with the exception of the large nucleus, is unattached.) I love iron oxide on red clay. It is one of my favorite parts of working with clay. I will never be done with it. 

After all the pieces are washed with iron oxide, I can move on to step two.

Step two is the application of the glaze.


This, by the way, is a totally different cell from the first photo. In this piece, all the bits are attached already. You're looking at many different glazes (copper blue, charcoal satin, creamy matte, orchid satin, pewter, white crawl, blue crawl, purple matte, copper jade, black, rhubarb), some of them mixed with silicon carbide to make them bubble and crater, and a couple of stains (metallic black and matte black) besides the iron oxide.  I'm a long way from finished with the glazing step, but I stalled on it and put the piece aside for now.

The third and final step is firing the piece. This, again a totally different cell from the other two, is the first to be fired. It was my least favorite cell, so I used it as a test tile of sorts.

Most of the bits inside are unattached--except for the colorful pieces in the nucleus, which are fused in with glaze.

Sorry, the picture is not very coherent. I had dumped out all the inside pieces to show them to someone and didn't have time to arrange them before taking any pictures.

Anyway, here's the outside:


I'm not convinced by the finished piece, but that's a good thing.  Someone asked today about whether I liked it or not, and I have to say that I don't. I like parts of it, but I'm not sure which parts yet. I think I'm on a good learning curve, but I suspect I'll have to make about 100 more before I feel I have gotten something I can understand.

Sicko

Organ Recital

This is me whinging about being sick:

I've been sick as a dog since Sunday.

It started out feeling like crap, congestion in my nose, sinuses that felt like they were packed with concrete (they hurt so much that my front teeth ached and turned sensitive to cold), fever, aches--all the trimmings. Then, just when I thought I was turning the corner, it started to move into my lungs. So now I have a dry, hack-y, unproductive cough. I hate taking medicine or drugs of any kind, but since getting sick I have taken four ibuprofen (so I could sleep despite the sinus pain and fever) and an expectorant tablet (hoping to get some gunk moving out of my lungs). I've also been rinsing my sinuses using my neti pot (a thing I'll never resign myself to doing despite its clear benefits).

Of course I'm tired of being in bed, despite the company of my collection of Laura Ingalls Wilder novels for girls and online episodes of Sherlock, Downton Abbey, and the documentary series The Blue Planet: A Natural History of the Ocean. I'm tired of drinking massive quantities of tea and water. (So sick of it that, yesterday and today, I asked Dave to bring me home some tropical punch-flavored Gatorade just to have something different to drink.)

I haven't even been outside since Monday, which sucks.

My fever seems like it's subsided, though my lungs and sinuses still feel like crap. I expect it'll be awhile before those get back to normal.

Foot, Hand, Cell

I've never tried my hand at lifelike sculpting, but I've been wanting to for a while, so yesterday Dave and I attended a small workshop taught by one of the new artists in the studio, Hannah. Hanna is a cute, bubbly, young twenty-something woman--the kind that is normally anathema to me--but she is very talented and friendly, so we get along just fine. She's never taught before, but after several people in the studio approached her to try to ferret out some knowledge, she decided to try teaching a workshop.

About ten of us showed up and we started with hands and feet. Hannah (nervously at first, but more confidently as we went on) demonstrated a couple of ways to make each. After about an hour of demos, she handed out clay (white stonewear) and we tried it on our own.



That is my first attempt at a foot. And this is my first attempt at a hand:

 

Never having done it before, I was surprised by a few things. One is that it's easier to sculpt a hand or foot than it is to draw one. I wasn't expecting that at all. It turns out, too, that I'm perfectly happy with the suggestion of the thing I'm trying to sculpt; I don't need to have it be perfectly lifelike. (If I wanted perfectly lifelike, I'd just pull out the alginate make a cast.)

Another thing I noticed--and this made me very happy--is that my very dominant right hand made a very lovely portrait of my left hand. Hilarious.

I am pretty excited to try more.

Cells, Continued

The glazing, as always, continues.



This is a look into the first cell with the nucleus in place. It looks like it's going to be a white mess, but there are (at least) fourteen different glazes in there, including yellow, red, coral, purple, green and blue--lots and lots of blue. Some of the pieces, like the little round nucleolus in there) will be bare clay (with an iron oxide wash to highlight the texture), some of the pieces will be only partially glazed, partly for textural contrast, partly for the joy of discovering the colorful underside to an apparently monochromatic piece.

I also loaded the second cell into a bisque kiln this afternoon along with lots of other little bits and pieces that will go into the cells, either glazed in or fired separately and arranged after the final firing (so you can take parts out and rearrange them like you would miniature furniture in a dollhouse).

I like working that way, building a big frame (in this case the cell membrane) then making hundreds of little parts that may or may not be included. That way after everything is bisque fired, I can lay it all out and start mixing and matching while I glaze. Some pieces were specifically intended to go into each cell, but some pieces are one offs that may or may not fit. 

Six Word Memoir, Pieces of Things

Is that all there is, remembering?



I've been making parts to go into the cells:



Those are hollow little playthings. Meant to represent--what?--transport vesicles? Mitochondria?

I modeled this while thinking of the cell's nucleolus:



And I'll just pause here to add that the part of the cell that gives me the most trouble building (or abstracting or whatever) is the Golgi apparatus. It's so clear in my head, but my hands have no idea how to make it happen--yet.

This thing:


Has no real life analog as far as I know. It's a hollow piece with holes cut in one surface so you can see the large, loose pieces inside. The pieces are too large to fit through the holes. Some of the inclusions have texture, some have words stamped into them, some are smooth.

This piece is similar:



My six-word memoir (as seen above): Is that all there is, remembering?

My favorite six-word memoir, from Stephen Colbert: Well, I thought it was funny.

Form Follows Function

Here's something that gets drilled into your head when you study biology:



“Form follows function” means that the form of a structure within an organism is directly related to the function of that structure. (For example, a bird’s wing and a human arm are homologous structures and have the same bones, yet are differently modified to serve different functions.)

Here's something that I would guess most biology majors will never be exposed to:



"The Chronicle of Wasted Time" is from one of Shakespeare's sonnets:

When in the chronicle of wasted time

I see descriptions of the fairest wights,

And beauty making beautiful old rhyme

In praise of ladies dead and lovely knights,

Then, in the blazon of sweet beauty's best,

Of hand, of foot, of lip, of eye, of brow,

I see their antique pen would have express'd

Even such a beauty as you master now.

So all their praises are but prophecies

Of this our time, all you prefiguring;

And, for they look'd but with divining eyes,

They had not skill enough your worth to sing:

For we, which now behold these present days,

Have eyes to wonder, but lack tongues to praise. 

It's one of the smaller cells, the chronicle of wasted time:

None of the inside pieces are attached, everything is loose and will possibly be glazed into place, but they're pressed inside to maintain the curvature of the parts.

Here's a detail shot of the outside:


This is the glazing process (nearly complete) of my test piece, my least favorite of the five cells I've made so far and which I'm using to test various glaze combinations on:



The outer surface is covered with iron oxide and an array of matte glazes (green matte, blue matte, purple matte, iron matte, and turquoise) as well as a blue crawl glaze.



The inside will look bland until it's fired, but it is covered with iron oxide and shiny, runny glazes (Archie's base, blue-purple, ice blue, red gold) as well as other shiny, non-runny glazes (eggshell white), satiny glazes, and crawl glazes.



We'll see where any of that takes us.