Sunday

I got a quick picture of the plaster casts from yesterday's mask making venture. No, the man I cast doesn't have a horn. He added that later after one of the plaster casts came out poorly, making him look quite Neanderthalic.  After he added the horn, he tried to think of how to combine his name, Kai, with "unicorn."

"Uni-Kai?" he asked.

"Kai-nicorn," I suggested.

I went back to the studio today to throw my requisite weekly bag of clay. I throw a kind of clay called B-Mix after the guy who "invented" it (who is also incidentally my first throwing teacher and the director of the studio where I work). No, his name is not B-Mix. His family name is Butt. He understandably didn't want to call his clay "Butt Mix."

Anyway, that wasn't the point. The point is that I threw a bag's worth--twenty-five pounds--of B-Mix today. Throwing twenty-five pounds of clay shouldn't be a big deal, but I'm working up to that point. I get between twelve and sixteen thrown pieces (bowls and cups mostly) out of that amount of clay. I'm not a particularly resourceful thrower, either, and I tend to lose at least two pieces when I throw (they collapse mostly) and one or two pieces when I trim (by trimming through the bottom usually). It took me about three and a half hours to finish that much clay.

After throwing, I came home and Dave and I made sushi. I say that like it was the easiest thing in the world, but in fact it is not really that easy--and besides, we've never done it before. This is our first attempt:



We were halfway through our dinner when I took that photo.

We made several different kinds of rolls, all vegetarian. We had kappa-maki (cucumber roll), oshinko (pickled plum and shiso roll), and carrot roll. We had tamago-yaki (sweet egg omelet) with green chile and cream cheese. We had quorn with the same green chile-cream cheese mixture. We had also planned on making inari-sushi, but we forgot! (We also ran out of rice.)

You see in the center of the picture, that bowl with the green chopsticks in it? That is natto. We were also going to make some natto-maki, but we forgot it, too. When I remembered, I decided not to make more rolls, but to just add the natto as a topping to some of the other rolls.

Now I'm lying in bed, full of sushi (but wondering if some ice cream wouldn't help with digestion).