Saint Polychromatous
The entries in this post were made in real time.
Prologue
21 January 2024
After the fall semester ended, there were nine people signed up for the spring workshop. I'd been the first to sign up, picking one of the four Monday night openings. We were allowed to pay for multiple slots. As long as there were ten registrations, we were told, the class would run.
I was checking the registration site every day. Nothing was changing.
In the late afternoon of December 30, after a bike ride, I met Extra at a studio in Philadelphia. The drive took an hour, and it wasn't an easy hour.
Extra had been there several times before, working by herself. She was in the middle of a piece when I arrived. She seemed comfortable in the space. Her plans for the spring were uncertain. She wasn't signed up for the workshop. While Extra worked, the studio manager showed me around.
There were some things I liked about the place: the quiet electric furnace, the one glory hole per bench setup, the raw glass that didn't fight me, the torch at the breakoff table, the cleanliness of the studio, and the studio manager. There were other things I didn't like: the distance from my house to the studio, the distance from the furnace to our bench, the way the yokeless furnace burned my hand when I went in for glass, the tightness of our allotted space, the small size and too-high heat of our glory hole, the subpar frit containers, the upcharges for everything beyond the basics, and the fact that I would have to drive all the way back to pick up my work or pay at least $35 to have it shipped.
I spent my first half hour getting used to the glass by making flowers and a wonky, too-large cup with a lip wrap. It was the thinnest cup I'd ever made. I was halfway through my next turn, working on a long-neck vase, when I realized how much I missed the classroom and the people up north. It was home. I thought about Sundays.
I made some more flowers.
I told the manager that my plans were uncertain. "I'm likely to be locked in until the end of April," I said. The manager offered to bring my work to her house, fifteen minutes from mine, instead of charging me to ship it. Could I see myself coming back here regularly? Sure, but only if it were my only option.
On New Year's Day, out on a towpath bike ride, I made my decision. When I got home, I became registrant number ten. I let the rest of the group know.
With the blessing of my biking pals, I would sacrifice thirteen Sundays to make sure we could keep glassblowing alive for another semester. I knew how much everyone else wanted this. It ended up costing me, in total, only a little more than I would have paid had this been a regular semester. To make up for it, I promised myself that I wouldn't buy any more color.
Two days later, Low Key, who had been on the fence, signed on for Saturday afternoons, ensuring that the one other registrant for that time now had a partner. "You can take yourself off for the extra slot," she wrote. "I'll stay on that second slot for now," I replied, "just to be sure we have more than enough."
Pumpkin Master suggested people could buy me out of some Sundays so I could ride. New Grace suggested we find a time to show everyone our work. I made a contact list and sent it to everyone.
Today is January 22. If All The Glass is right and they're going to cancel, they'd better hurry up about it. My first session, on a Monday night, begins a week from today.
I texted Rose, my Monday partner: "See you in a week! I'll be there early to reload my locker." She replied, "I'm excited. I'm ready."
Week Zero
28 January 2024, 10:45 a.m.
Rose calls. She's standing in the classroom the day before we're supposed to have our first Monday night workshop session. The furnace is off, the door under repair. Tools are strewn about. "Looks like we're not starting tomorrow," she says. It takes at least two days for a newly-filled crucible to fully melt a full load of cullet.
"They'd better let us make up for this," I tell her.
"They'd better."
"See you in a week and a day."
She sends me pictures.
I ask Pumpkin Master if he knows what's going on, since he's going to be the building tech on Sundays and Mondays. He says things will start next Sunday.
Rose emails the Dean, who, despite this being a Sunday, emails back right away. She apoligizes and says that we will get an extra day at the end of the semester to make up for the miscommunication between the office and the arts staff.
Week One
4 February 2024 5:59 p.m.
I'm so glad I did this.
Pumpkin Master is the building tech on Sundays. I'm working with Sage and Classmate's Partner. I had the highway to myself. Mine was the only car in the lower lot (where, technically, I'm not supposed to park, but nobody cares at night or on weekends) at 8:30 a.m.
One of the frist things I noticed when I arrived was Our Instructor's phone number written large on the blackboard. This would not have been permitted under the Colonel's command. Apparently, Our Instructor was here to help with the furnace repair. If anything goes horribly, horribly wrong, we can call him!
CP took last semester off, not that anyone can tell by the way he got right back into it today. I was sort of the float between him and Sage while they worked. CP helped me.
Pumpkin Master and LT2 had been working on the furnace and glory hole all week. They dropped the temperature of the furnace down to what it used to be before the Colonel took over. I thought this might make the glass more difficult to work with, but it turned out to be fine.
CP eased back into it by making a cup. I followed, asking him to bring me a Capri Blue bit for a lip wrap. This color is one I've had since 2019. At the time, I really liked it but found it difficult to work with. Now I have that frit out again. I want to see if 5 years of experience helps any. A skinny lip wrap really isn't a good test, but at least I'll be able to look at the color when I drink.
Rose, who works for campus security on Sundays, stopped by on her rounds. "Wanna make a quick pumpkin?" I hollered over my shoulder as I stood at the glory hole.
"Nah," she hollered back, and then she was gone.
Sage warmed up with a clear vessel that she deliberately dumped halfway through. She's been at this for decades. She's in no hurry. She was wearing a t-shirt worth noting:
"Either you love glasssblowing or you are wrong." I'm not sure what the two sloths have to do with anything. I took it as a reminder to take it slow and easy the way Sage does.
Word on the street is that the budget shortfall was because of the hotter furnace. Punching the temperature up by 100-150 degrees and leaving it that way for two semesters can burn some propane. The Colonel wanted it that hot. It was good for sculpture work.
CP made one of his signature pitchers. His handles are perfect. "Mine are a mess," I said. "I've made like a hundred of these," he said. "I'll teach you." I said I'd have to watch a bunch more first.
I told him that I want to make drinking glasses from the square mold. I want to make round openings with lip wraps, eventually. Today I focused on getting the glass out of the mold in decent shape.
The first one didn't go totally wrong. The bottom third was too rounded, though. CP liked how it looked, so I kept going. I made a rookie mistake at the end, though, splashing some water on the bottom when I wet the punty to break it off. The bottom cracked. We chucked it. "Go again," CP said. It went better the second time, although the top is too thick for a good drinking glass.
The thing I like best about the square mold is the chill marks it leaves on the sides.
The glory hole suddenly shut itself off during all of this. Pumpkin Master came in, did some voodoo on the control panel, and got it fired up again. Because it was already warm, getting the hole back up to temperature was a matter of minutes.
What a blessing to have him in the building while we're working. He's on duty Monday nights too. Last semester's technicians had no clue how anything in this room works. Things were really falling apart. Now we have Pumpkin Master two days out of three. He's also blowing glass on Saturday mornings. In other words, he'll be here every day that the glory hole is on.
Sage made an elegantly-curved vase from a mixture of blue frits. CP attempted one of his hollow tube hearts that he had been working on last spring. The tool he needed for the job was at home, though. We improvised. He didn't like how it came out, so he dumped it into the re-melt bucket.
The glory hole switched itself off again. Pumpkin Master did his magic again.
Last week I had an idea for a bunch of scrap discs I'd cut at the end of last semester. The discs came from somebody's leftover green aventurine that had been encased in clear and dropped into a mold for a pumpkin stem. I wondered what would happen if I picked one up like a rod, encased that in clear, picked another one up, encased that, and then picked up a third.
"I've been thinking about it in bed at night," I told CP. "But I never get past the pickup before I fall asleep. I have no idea what's going to happen."
What happened is that the first and second pickups got stretched to near invisibility, while the third sat at the very bottom where the punty eventually went.
While I was picking up pieces, the glory hole shut itself off for the third (fourth?) time. Pumpkin Master was right there to fix it, but that meant I had to use the furnace right after the pickup. This is dicey; if the color pops off and lands in the crucible, I'll have ruined the whole clear batch if I don't fish it out right away. That didn't happen, fortunately, because I kept my pipe at the door, but it meant that I couldn't heat things the way I needed to. Sage graciously sat aside instead of starting another piece.
I pulled the lip because the top was so thick. I'm not good at pulling and cutting. It results in mangling. I whipped it back into reasonable shape that should look all right from a distance. I turned the experiment into a vase.
I had showed CP a picture of one of my "Junk in the Trunk" experiments from last semester. He wanted to try one. He was about to pack it in for the day when I commanded him to make a quick cup with a lip wrap so we can fill it next Sunday. He did it like it was nothing.
And then it was 12:30. Time to go home.
Some time last fall, Tall Vase had fastened two of his reject rondels to the metal wall in the courtyard. I saw them for the first time today.
The sunlight hit all the reject ornaments he had fished out of the trash and hung from the cherry tree at the side of the building. Sage pointed down to the ground. Little spikes of daffodil leaves poked up from the mulch. "The flowers are coming!"
6:44 p.m.: Wow. Okay. I've written way to much about four hours. I might have to release this in installments after all.
10 February 2024, 6:13 p.m.
I knew I wouldn't be able to blog after class on Monday night so I scribbled down a bunch of notes for later. My day job subsequently ate me alive, leaving me with neither time nor energy to write.
While I was working on last Sunday's post, I was texting Our Instructor. Sage told me he got himself a puppy, so I had to text him about it. After some back-and-forth, during which I explained why I was taking two workshop sessions, he said he might stop by on Monday night.
That made me happy and nervous. The last thing I wanted was to be in the middle of a piece when he walked in, because for sure I'd botch it.
I got to the classroom early. Our work from Sunday was already out of the annealer. It had come down too fast, but everything was intact. I took one look at the little square box, decided the top was far too ugly, used the saw to cut the top off, and ended up disliking the bottom just as much. Perhaps I could use it for another Junk in the Trunk piece.
Lucky for me and Rose, Our Instructor showed up with the little dog as we were setting up. LT2, New Grace, and Pumpkin Master drifted in. We talked for 45 minutes.
The conversation revolved around the classroom, of course. LT2 was upset that the furnace temperature was turned back down. "I went to bring New Grace a [some Italian word] for a goblet and it was too cold.
"These people aren't making goblets," Our Instructor said.
"Hey!" Rose said, "We're right here! These people."
"Women over 50 are invisible," I reminded her, and that cracked everybody up.
The puppy wound himself between our legs while we were talking.
I asked him, "Can we get serious for a moment?"
The puppy chose then to lunge for his crotch. Of course we all burst out laughing again. "Can we get serious?" he squeaked, and I doubled over.
"Yes, we can get serious." He already knew what had gone down with the Colonel over the past year.
"What can I do?" I asked.
He suggested we keep the Dean informed about how much we like the workshop, and let her know that the larger community is important. I think that's what he said. When I went to write it all down, I wasn't sure if that's what he said or if that's what I thought he said. Gah.
He gave us some information I can't repeat here. There might be more going on than just the money.
Rose said, "Are you coming back?"
"FUCK NO!" he replied.
"Everyone wants you to swoop in like some kind of god," I said, "Winding back time to the way it was. That can't happen."
"No, it can't."
The pessimists from last semester might very well be right. Unless we can convince the Dean to keep this classroom open, glassblowing here will soon be over. Without Our Instructor, who was full-time in another department for decades, there's no institutional connection. There's no institutional memory beyond the students who have been here for years, and they have no sway at all. An adjunct instructor has no pull.
"It's 6:45," LT2 said. "You should make some glass."
"Right," I said, and headed for the bench. When I turned around, Our Instructor was gone. I went into the hallway. It was empty, as if he'd never even been here.
Rose and I worked separately at our own benches. That's not at all what I'm used to, nor what I was expecting. We've always been about partnership. One person works and the other assists.
"Whatever you need, I'll help," she said. How could that happen if we were both on our pipes at the same time? This would require some serious coordination.
The first thing I wanted to do wouldn't require any assistance anyway. I'd cut off the bottom of one of last semester's Junk in the Trunk experiments. I'd placed it in the big oven and set it to ramp up to 1050 degrees, which took the hour we were talking anyway. I coated a gather in Capri Blue, then picked up the piece from the oven to melt the two together. I wasn't sure what would happen. The bottom ended up crooked, but I could sand that down later. The effect was an improvement over the original form.
original
reworked
We took it upon ourselves to learn how to punty up and break off solo. These are the two most frought moments for me. Breaking the piece off the pipe onto the attached punty is something I knew I'd have to do by myself eventually. It turned out not to be as bad as I'd thought. I only dropped one piece, and it was so hot and heavy that it bounced and I rescued it (but it cracked when I broke off the punty at the end).
I decided to work with the square mold. It's a tall, rectangular mold with a side opening. One is to drop the glass in, blow until the glass hits the four sides, then have a partner open the mold so one can take the piece out. I tried this solo, by holding the handles between my ankles. I got a squat cube out of it.
It wasn't at all what I wanted. I asked Rose for help on the next one. That's the one I cracked at the end. The third time was the charm. I managed to pull the top thin and round. It was too flared and not even, but it was a start.
Sad about Our Instructor's answer, Rose said, "You know I had to ask him, right?"
"Yeah."
I went for blue with the next one. I tried to pull in rather than out for the opening. It was straighter, but tilted to one side.
Rose was making crackle cups. She showed me how. "Next week I'll try," I said.
For the last piece of the night, I wanted to pick up the remaining aventurine scraps on a yellow gather. I rolled the gather across the top of the pipe warmer to pick them up. The fourth one exploded off the gather, leaving a smudge instead of a disc. When I started to blow the piece out, the scraps pulled the bubble into a square. Rose was cleaning up at this point. I asked her at the last minute to hold the square mold for me, since my glass was most of the way there anyway. There wasn't time to pull the top thin, so I just opened it round and broke it off the punty.
As we were leaving, Rose asked, "Do you think the Colonel will come back?"
"He needs the money," I said, and shrugged. "Starving artist and all that."
When I got home, I texted Rose. "I think I actually learned some things tonight." I learned how to punty and break off solo (only burning myself once), and got better at pulling and trimming.
She wants to make pumpkins next week. I'll work on figuring out how to make tree of life ornaments. I guess I'll save the partner-intensive ideas for Sundays for now.
I brought the lip wrap cup into work. The glass is full of minuscule bubbles because we hadn't raked the raw glass after the cullet had been thrown in the night before. Air gets trapped in the molten glass, and unless the top surface is skimmed, the air stays trapped. I liked how the sunlight hit it, and my office window would be the best place for it.
I was in a daze at work on Tuesday as I sat at the vibratome lifting delicate slices on a brush into little wells. Our Instructor's visit felt surreal. Like everyone else, I want him to wind back time to the way things were. It can't happen. All I can do is tell the Dean how much the ten of us appreciate this workshop. Maybe I should try to meet with her?
Work was so intense and stressful that, on Wednesday night at 7:30, rather than go straight home, I drove to the classroom to pick up Monday's glass.
I decided that Junk in the Trunk Reworked needed to live in my office. I took the cup down. This looks better.
Tomorrow I plan to cut the bottom off of another Junk in the Trunk experiment and do the same thing, I'm also going to fill the clear square mold block with scraps and see what happens. I'm going to teach Classmate's Parnter how to do this.
Week Two
Sunday, 11 February 2024, 9:23 p.m.
My legs were still sore from yesterday's long bike ride. I floated between Sage and CP when it wasn't my turn at the bench. This arrangement is working out well. There's always someone to lend a hand.
I brought in my tube full of leftover stringer scraps. CP and I filled our cups for Junk in the Trunk. One of mine was the small square mold from Monday. The other was the third Junk in the Trunk attempt from last semester. I sawed off the bottom; the goal for today was to blow some color into it. The big oven takes an hour to come up to temperature, so we worked on other things while our cups warmed to 1050 degrees.
I had another go at the square mold. This time I made sure to lengthen the glass and send the bubble far down. I tried to make the walls thinner too. The top was still thick when I broke it off. I did better with pulling this time, and used my diamond shears to center the top before I cut it. CP held the paddle while I opened the top. (I should put this in my notebook, not here!) It came out straight and thin. It looked more or less even all the way around when I put it in the annealer.
When our cups were up to temperature, I demonstrated how to make a Junk in the Trunk. And I messed up right away. My gather hit the inside lip of the cup before I could blow the color in. The whole thing was a lopsided mess. The color was a blob through the center instead of a full bubble. I'd have to grind it flat, too. Sheesh.
I tried again with the square mold cup. This time, my gather was too short, and the pipe was inside the rim of the cup. I tried to swing the pipe, hoping gravity would do the job, but it didn't. When I put air into it, the whole piece went round.
"Go into the square mold with it," CP suggested. For that, I'd have to get it hotter. But instead, it started to collapse. I let it collapse completely until it was a twisted heap of molten glass. I reshaped it, put a jack line in it, and broke it off the pipe. "There's a lot going on in there," I said, explaining why I didn't blow it out into a vessel shape. "I want to be able to look at it." It'll need some grinding flat too.
This was embarrassing. "I made four of these, no problem," I said.
"Use mine," CP offered.
"You sure?"
"Go ahead."
I hadn't seen what colors he'd dumped into the bottom. I mixed the two red-adjacent frits onto a gather and made a long, thin bubble. This time, I got it right. Things were still a little off-center, but at least the color went where I wanted it to. There was even enough glass between the pipe and the piece that I was tempted to punty up and turn it into some sort of vessel. But this wasn't my cup, so I stuck to the plan.
The third time's the charm. Since CP made the cup and the lip wrap, and it's his scraps in there, this should be his.
A year ago, CP was making tubular hearts. He tried one last week that he didn't like. Today he made two that were, as far as I could tell, perfect. He also made one of his signature pitchers as a warmup, and one of his get-out-of-the-way-he's-gonna-swing-that-random-thing pieces where he cuts the top, wraps a thread around the cuts, gets the whole thing hot, and swings it into a random droop with fingers of solid glass held together by thin threads. Our Instructor and the Colonel both hate these things, if for no other reason than the threads are tiny and often sharp. One thread stabbed me through the thick, heat-resistant gloves as I was helping him put the piece away. I didn't think it was possible to draw blood through a quarter inch of heavy cloth. "I have a kitten," I told him as I washed my hand. "This is every day."
During a text exchange before the workshop began, I told Dale I was looking for ideas. She suggested a bulb-forcing vase and sent me a picture.
I looked at the vases for a while and realized that I could make something like this relatively easily. I told CP that all I had to do was make one of my usual long-neck vases, "but screw up."
So I set about deliberately making the neck too short, and then getting it wide enough for a bulb to nestle in. It's funny how mistakes during the learning process can be useful for something else later.
(Now I remember Our Insructor telling me, after I flubbed a threading attempt, "It wasn't a failure. It was a learning experience." Sigh.)
I texted Dale a picture of the vase in the annealer.
"Perfect!" she wrote. I explained our superstition of never praising a piece until it's made it out of the oven. I break that rule all the time. We all do. For me and Alchemy, it's a running joke. "Looks like dog shit," he'll say.
At the end of class, CP handed me the warmup cup he made last week. "Use it for Junk in the Trunk," he said. I might.
Tomorrow, Rose is dead set on making as many pumpkins as she can. I figure I'll work on the tree of life ornaments for a while, play with the trunk junk, then beg her to help me with the square mold again. If I can get consistently good at opening the top, I want to try to put a lip wrap on.
Tuesday, 13 February, 12:24 p.m.
It's a snow day and the university is closed, but I'm going into the lab later anyway. For now, I can blog.
I was tired. I knew that it would be an off night. I could feel it.
The Monday night dynamic is different from Sunday mornings. After a series of bad partners, Rose became self-sufficient. I've had bad partners too, but the things I want to do I really can't do by myself at my level of experience. On one hand, I feel bad about asking Rose for help. On the other hand, we're supposed to be partners. On the third hand, this isn't a regular class where partnership is expected; this is a workshop, where there are no rules.
I arrived half an hour early to set up some cups for Junk in the Trunk. CP gave me one of his that he didn't want. I fished out of the waste bucket the sawed-off square mold cup I'd discarded yesterday. It had a smudge of rust on it from part of the saw, so I hadn't put it in the re-melt bucket, which is why it was still around for me to reclaim. I sawed off the uneven edge. I filled both cups with frit and scrap, then turned on the big oven. It takes an hour for it to reach 1050 degrees.
Rose wanted to churn out pumpkins, which she says she can make by herself in 8 minutes. My plan was to work on tree of life ornaments until the big oven was ready.
When I tried to make these ornaments last semester, most of my attempts ended in failure. I was fortunate to salvage a few witch's balls from the wreckage. The only tree of life that succeeded was my very first try, a qualified success that I haven't come close to repeating. I don't know how I did it.
Now I tried again. And again. And again. And again. Rose, who has made some witch's balls, paused in her pumpkins to give me a hint. That one failed too, but the next one netted me a small witch's ball, even though I'd been trying to make a tree trunk. My next attempt failed too. Tonight was not the night for this. Sometimes that happens.
I asked Rose to lift the big oven door for me so I could go in with my hot gather to pick up the first cup. I went in too hot, and the edge of my gather hit the lip of the cup. I pulled it out, cut the glass off, and put the cup back in the oven. Rose went back to her bench. I went down the hall and asked Pumpkin Master, who was helping out a metal worker, if he could lift the door for me in a few minutes.
I succeeded this time. The loose scraps were rolling around the inside of the cup as I turned it in the glory hole. Rose came over to watch. "I have no idea what this is going to look like," I said. At least it worked the way I wanted it to.
Pumpkin Master lifted the lid for me again as I blew a yellow bubble into the square mold cup. The sides collapsed around the bubble. I pushed them in farther with my tools, so that each side of the square was now curved in to meet the bubble. The bubble itself peeked out over the top of the square. I went with that, making a lopsided opening. I could have evened it out if there were someone hanging around my bench to lend a hand, but there wasn't, and I was tired, so I left it looking tilted.
When I was free at the same time that Rose was finishing a pumpkin, I lent her a hand. "I usually do this myself," she said.
"But you don't have to," I replied.
I asked her for help on a lip wrap. Between the gooey color and my exhaustion, it didn't go on very well. I wasn't sure how much Rose knew about making bits for lip wraps. She said she knew what she was doing. I said I didn't know what she knew. Everyone does it differently, too. The cup was tilted and the top not fully open anyway.
When I tried again, I put the wrap on worse than before. It was so bad that I asked her for another bit. I added to the wrap, going down and around the cup in a random pattern. Chaos reigned. I liked it when I put it away.
I tried one more time, botching the wrap again, then making the mistake of asking for a paddle when the top was too hot. We were both pushing too hard and the top started to lean out. That wasn't what I wanted, so I heated the hell out of it and started swinging, letting the asymmetry of the top pull the lip into an angle. I did this over and over again until I got a curvy pitcher shape. It's a shape I've made before when my tops have gone wrong.
In the end, it was a bad night as far as goals went, but a good one for rescues and groovy-looking chaos.
I need more sleep.
Thursday, 15 February, 8:42 p.m.
I'm taking a few vacation days this week. If I don't, I'll have so many that I'll stop earning any more. Yesterday I went on a hike in the Pinelands. In the late afternoon, I drove over to the classroom to pick up my glass. There was so much of it!
The one surviving witch's ball was so disappointing that I didn't even take a picture of it. I dropped it into the re-melt bucket instead.
The reworked Junk in the Trunk, the first one I tried on Sunday, was so lopsided that I used the disc saw to slice it down. I had to do that three times before I came close to getting it level, and even after that I spent far too long on the sanding wheel to make it look halfway presentable. When I went to photograph it, I noticed a three-way crack on the top that I was sure wasn't there before I started hacking it to bits. This isn't the first time I've used the wet saw on the base and created cracks elsewhere.
I can hang these sawed-off bits as a mobile or something. Maybe I should saw the entire piece, since it's cracked. On the other hand, if I take the saw to it again, it might very well explode in my hands. Not worth the stitches.
The other trunk junks from Sunday fared better. The one that collapsed is the most interesting of the lot.
The one from CP's lip wrap cup ended up okay. This belongs to him. It's his cup and his scraps with my bubble.
The square mold vessel is the most symmetrical one I've done so far, but it's not perfectly even.
The bulb-forcing vase, on the other hand, came out exactly as I wanted it to. This is the exception that proves the rule that one never gets it right the first time. Truth is, I've made so many of these things that I knew what I had to do differently to get what Dale wanted. If I'd been aiming for one of my long-neck vases, this would have been a failure.
On to Monday night's chaos:
When I loaded the square mold with dark blue aventurine frit and scraps, that was a mistake. It settled in as a nearly black blob at the bottom, the scraps only visible from above. The inner bubble is yellow, but the way the light hits it makes the whole thing look yellow. The top is clearly uneven; the whole thing looks soft and blobby.
When I got home, I put an LED tea light in it.
I want to try this again a few more times. I might sacrifice the two square molds I made during the first week; the tops are all wrong anyway. And what if I use the sawed-off tops to blow into too? Something to think about as I drift off to sleep.
The Junk in the Trunk that I made from CP's clear warmup cup came out well. This should be his too.
The cup with the yellow lip wrap was neither as good as I wanted nor as bad as I thought it would be. The lip curves inwards. One more good heat would have been enough to fix that.
I drank out of it all day today though. It has a decent feel. I think I want to make loads of lip-wrap drinking glasses and give them away in pairs or sets. It's a simple enough project. With CP, I could knock off a bunch in one session.
The chaos cup, the one where I messed up the wrap so badly that we coated the whole thing, came out pretty well. A piece of the thread on the bottom fell off in two pieces in the annealer.
I glued them back on this morning. There's still a small gap. I guess that piece fell through the mesh in the oven. Because of the glue, the cup will have to live with me. I couldn't in good conscience sell it or give it away as a present. Oh, darn.
Then there's the second chaos cup that beame a sort of pitcher thing. The top is sort of wavy.
I unloaded everything onto the Window Sill of Judgment. Two weeks in and I've filled the ledge. That's not even all of it. One cup is already in the permanent display cabinet, and a reworked Junk in the Trunk is in my office.
What to do with all of this?
Left to right: don't know, saw in half, saw in half, keep or sell, keep, cracked so discard, keep, permanent fixture from two years ago, belongs to CP, gave to Dale this afternoon, belongs to CP, keep, already in the kitchen, keep, keep or sell.
This is how the Window Sill of Judgment works. As things get taken away, the remaining pieces move to the left to make room for new pieces. New work changes the context for older work. I might like something one day and detest it the next. Every so often I'll give the pieces a quarter turn and re-evaluate.
I'm going to get up now and make good on the judgment.
Much better.
This is why nothing good ever ends up on my Etsy site.
16 February, 7:10 p.m.
The original plan for this Hot Mess installment was to post it after the thirteenth week. I've already written far too much for that. So here you go, all 12 of you who read the Hot Mess posts. Week 3 starts in two days.
