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I Think I Missed March

2014
04.10

raku wall masksI would like to attribute my March writing-absence from the world of potters, ceramics, and all things clay art to something besides getting older.  There was this Madness thing going around…and my family stays up to their eyeballs in basketball when the Belmont Bruins are playing.  Then, there are these little guys (and one princess) that are called grandchildren that seem to provide an endless source of entertainment. Then again, old man winter kicked me out of the studio for an extended period…I could go on.

Surprising to me, is the amount of clay work that I have accomplished in the last few months.  I re-discovered the hypnotism of doing raku firings and have enjoyed my venture into the world of whimsical masks that have been raku fired.  Those pieces now outnumber any other artwork hanging in my office.  I fully anticipated that it would be something else (like several ceramic musical instruments)…but, no.

And, after a year of procrastinating/pondering the use of custom decals, I have made several, applied them to test pieces, and successfully fired them.  It took a little digging, but the discovery that my old HP LaserJet printer ink contains iron in the pigment, made it a good candidate for water-slide-off, paper decals.  Like so many things in the word of ceramics, making one’s own decals takes a bit of planing and set-up time, but the results are simply cool.  If I can quit jumping up-and-down long enough, I might even get images of new cityscape bottles online with the decal embellishments.

So. March is gone. It was the best of Madness. It was the worst of missed writing opportunities. It was the age of procrastination. It was the age of re-discovering lost arts.  I evidently missed the Dickens out of March!

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