With this being the hottest weekend of the summer, I’m tagged & ready for another Chicago Triathlon tomorrow! It’s going to be a sweaty race… as I’m currently in the studio sweating & racing to finish a new batch of oval vases. We’ve had no air conditioning on the second floor of Lillstreet for over a week now!!! Not good during the heat wave hitting Chicago this week! Just trying to hydrate, hydrate, hydrate…
I always love a good studio process shot… like these sweet cups coming along in Cory McCrory’s studio! Looks like they now have bottoms… moving along nicely for our collaboration project!
We started the morning yesterday with some of my Summer Campers scraping & cleaning the ware boards they had uses the day before. No one likes a dry crusty ware board… wouldn’t it be nice if EVERYONE would do this before they put the shared ware boards back on the racks?!
Okay, so it took awhile…
but I finally have all forty… err, thirty-nine… handles attached!
After summer camp today, I putz’d around in my studio for awhile trying to catch up on a few “projects” that have been hanging out for quite awhile now. One of them was to pull out my latest batch of reclaimed clay & put it on a large plaster bat so it can start to dry. Goopey-gloppy fun… and a lot of FREE CLAY!!! Do you see the not-so-hidden surprise???!
Last night I had the pleasure of doing a little ZOOM studio tour & demonstration for the Glenview Art League. They all “stopped by” for some chatting & banter…. then a few demos of throwing on the wheel, followed by some stamping & surface decoration… and more discussion. Hopefully they all had fun… I know I did. After all, it was all about ME!!!… ha!
Such weird times when we’re still showing our studios, artwork & process through a small, non-tactile computer screen. I so look forward to getting back to in-person face-to-face fun! Keep getting those vaccines so we can get some herd immunity and get back to more normal days!
We’re nearing the end of the month…
and again, I’m looking for a little inspiration!
It’s a new day.
It’s a new clay!
Finished up my latest batch of reclaim clay with a bit of wedging & bagging today. Sure, it still needs more wedging when I go to actually use it… but for now it’s back to being real clay… real FREE CLAY!!!
And now that my reclaim bucket is empty… it’s time to start filling it up again! A little while back one of my students was cleaning off her shelves and brought me her bag of porcelain scraps asking if I wanted them to reclaim. Of course the answer is ALWAYS yes!!! Even better, her last class was a print-on-clay class, so all of her reclaim had already been rolled out into thin slabs. So I just broke them up, spread them out and I’ll let them dry out overnight.
Then I’ll crush them down to small little pieces with a rolling pin and into the reclaim bin they go. Thanks Katie for kickin’ off my next batch of FREE CLAY!!!