Monday Morning You Sure Look Fine

1. Dave and I got up very late today, around 11:00, and went to lunch at Nosh, the Jewish deli. I had a huge rare roast beef on rye sandwich and shared a knish with Dave. He had a vegetarian hash with eggs and rye toast, half the knish, and an order of cheese blintzes. I don't know what it is about Jewish comfort food. It's delicious, but after lunch I felt like I had swallowed a cannonball. It just sat in my stomach, weighing me down. We decided to take a walk to see if we could dislodge it.

2. We walked around the Nob Hill shopping center doing a bit of shopping. I went into Beeps and bought a new handbag, a gray Baggallini cross-body bag with a hot pink lining. I've been needing a new bag. My old one is getting very beat up.

3. After lunch we stopped by the studio and unloaded the cone 3 kiln. I was not happy with the results. More on that in a moment.

4. We had a lot of errands to run--trying to get everything done early so as to avoid the pre-Thanksgiving grocery store crush and the post-Thanksgiving Black Friday insanity. We are in the market for a new kitchen table, so we went by a couple of furniture stores and an import store to check out what they have and compare prices. We also went by K-mart and picked up some long-sleeved t-shirts for me. (I never shop at K-mart, but I happened to go with my mother one day and, on a whim, picked up a long-sleeved t-shirt. It turned out to be awesome, much better than the ones I've gotten from Target for 50% more, price-wise, so I went back today and bought five more.)

5. After running our errands, we went back to the studio to do a bit of work.

About that kiln: I was not pleased with the results for so many reasons. One of the reasons is illustrated in the picture below.

You can see the difference in the whites between the small piece I'm holding and the larger piece in the back. That difference is, in part, because the underglazes I used burned out in the higher firing. If you're not a clay person, you're probably wondering what that means. It basically means that in the higher firing, some of the coloration--here, the white--disappeared, leaving bare spots that reveal the red clay.

My first thought was: All that work for nothing.

My second thought was: This sucks.


I set about repairing some of the damage, as you can see here, by adding yet another layer of white underglaze. (The white I used stuck around, but unfortunately I had mixed it with two other underglazes--antique ivory and flaxen--that burned out at the higher temperature.)

Every single piece I've made was negatively affected by the firing.

6. Hold on. I've got more to say, but something I ate for dinner is giving me hives and I'm going to take an antihistamine. Ugh. Nasty.

7. After dinner we went by Whole Foods for some groceries to get us through the week. We bought the usual array of veggies as well as cheese and milk to make mac'n'cheese for a vegetarian Thanksgiving main dish. So many people were in WF, a thing that makes me nuts usually, but I did have a happy moment when I saw a little girl, maybe four or five years old, singing and dancing to the in-store music:

We-de-de-de
De-de-de-de-de
De-we-um-um-a-way
We-de-de-de
De-de-de-de-de
We-um-um-a-way

In the jungle
The mighty jungle
The lion sleeps tonight
In the jungle
The quiet jungle
The lion sleeps tonight

A-wimoweh, a-wimoweh
A-wimoweh, a-wimoweh
A-wimoweh, a-wimoweh...

She knew all the words, too.

8. I got some new things yesterday too, a handful of these dimensional liners and a new book. Here is my new favorite book:

This amazing book is full of art and symbols and poetry. I opened it up and this quote is the first thing that caught my eye:

When the soul wants to experience something she throws out an image in front of her and then steps into it.  --Meister Eckhart

I looked at each of the 800 pages and made notes about the things that caught my eye. I was interested to see what snagged The Brain (clouds, rain, dusk, fruit, spider, butterflies, crow/ravens, bear, fox, bat, bone, brain, eye, tears, teeth, tongues, hand, breast, heart, blood,  boat, ax, knife, chain, net/web, scissors, veil, crown, city, niche, siren, mermaid, spiral, wound, crack, ghost, ancestor).

Some of the entries led to some new knowledge. (Did you know that bears gave rise to the word "berserker" (the Norse warriors who "fought in a wild frenzy")? Or that bears were sacred to Artemis and that a cult comprised of nine-year-old Athenian girls worshiped bears in her name, donning bear skins and masks and living in the wilderness?) Some entries led to sketches for future sculptures, helping me to focus and clarify where I want to go. I know one thing: I need more bears in there.