Nobody Could Sleep

Yesterday I wrote about a new low-fire glaze that I tested in the last kiln firing. Here's another piece, a bust about an inch and a half tall, with the same glaze on the face:

That texture slays me. I love it.  The shoulders are white and ivory underglaze over red clay. The teeth are white underglaze and Gerstley borate mixed into water and painted on. The eyes are grayish black, a mixture of black and white underglazes.

And this sculpture is basically finished:

That's the front. If you turn her around, you have this:

A pair of cartoonish calavera lovers embracing, their bulbous little feet hanging down.

This closeup is a bit blurry, but you get the idea:


All Day, No Sleep

On Monday night, no one could sleep, not me, not Dave, not the cats. It was too bad because Dave had to be up pretty early in the morning. I watched the latest episode of The Blacklist online (it was a really good episode, actually), and  finally got to sleep close to 2:00 a.m., while listening to a documentary about Prohibition. I woke up a couple of times in the night to find myself listening to some strange fact about Prohibition. Did you know that there were exceptions made for Jews who used wine in religious ceremonies? So some non-Jews declared themselves to be rabbis so that they might have wine. So there you go, Prohibition factoids.

In the morning, I packed up Dave's lunch for him since he was running a bit late. Then I went back to bed. I slept for a little while longer, then got up, showered, did some housework, and watched a documentary about the Lindbergh kidnapping. Did you know that Charles Lindbergh was a Nazi sympathizer and believer in eugenics? Lindbergh factoids!

After the kidnapping and murder of his child, Lindbergh and his wife left the US and spent years in Europe. Eventually they returned to the US, but Charles had made a few European contacts apparently: He ultimately had three secret families in Germany with three different women, one his private secretary, the others two sisters who his secretary introduced him to. He had seven children with those three women and swore them all to secrecy. The whole thing was revealed when one of the sisters died (almost 30 years after Lindbergh did) and her children found a sack of letters he had written to her. Until then, they hadn't known that their father was Charles Lindbergh. They thought he was some man named Careu Kent.

What a strange man!

Another mask from Sunday's kiln. Finished? Hmmm.