Have you ever had something turn out better than you planned on? Haha, maybe if you’re lucky 🙂 well in ceramics it doesn’t happen all that often, so when I pulled these out of one of my salt firings, I was grinning like an idiot (a crazy firing where the top three shelves toppled over after cone 10 fell and I had already introduced the salt). This is exactly how I wish the glaze would look every time I fired it. I guess I need to learn how to control the atmosphere better so it doesn’t reduce so much on top and on the right side. These were in the bottom left, along with a few other equally pleasing pots.

In other news, it was a great workshop day. I had a few ideas last night, and the first thing I did this morning was start making my bulbous cup forms, and some more little bowls like the one above. I have decided that I want to try and duplicate the glaze on the bowl as many times as I can, so maybe I can part with a few (I can’t possibly sell this one 🙂 ). My other idea with my cups is to do more inlay designs on them. Today I tried drawing things besides trees and simple abstract birds on my pots… I did draw a couple of trees, and a very detailed hummingbird, and a detailed lily flower, and a grazing deer, and a quail in the grass. As I finished the hummingbird and picked up the next cup to work on it, the visiting artist came back to look at what I was working on because he saw one of my trees from far away. He turned my cups so he could see each illustration, and he said: “Wow! I didn’t know you could draw like this! Did you know she could draw like this?” he said in amazement  to the guy standing next to him. He was talking about the hummingbird. I was flattered by how complimentary he was. Usually, I am used to people who walk over to look at my work telling me what’s wrong with it and how to change it. It was definitely unexpected. “These are beautiful!” that’s what he said when he was talking about the tree cup 🙂 He said my best pieces were the ones where I only illustrated one thing at a time, like the lily or the bird. He said that the tree cup didn’t need the imagery on the back side (I drew a sun and two cranes on the back). He also complimented my forms, and said that their simplicity was the perfect thing not to distract from the images. I was really surprised that he didn’t have any other criticisms besides keeping it simple.

For lunch, we repeated Monday’s theme: go to the bar, have a pint of beer and a big ‘ol sandwich. It was really good. I didn’t know that they served chocolate stout, or I probably would have ordered it on Monday. I didn’t know it until someone else in the group was served a nice tall glass of something dark without ice… so I knew that it couldn’t be soda 🙂 Anyway, I couldn’t believe how hungry I was. I ate a giant chicken sandwich (it was actually a grilled chicken burger on a wheat bun) and didn’t feel stuffed afterwards. I guess one of my professors at the other table wasn’t able to finish his… so I must have been starving. I felt just as hungry yesterday, even after I ate. Maybe my daily hike burns more calories than I thought it did. Anyway, we are supposedly loading a salt kiln tomorrow morning. I hope we do, because I want some results! 😛