3800 mussels, 940 blades of grass, and 500 brown dots on my hands

My teacher, Dawn Holder, is having a show in Tampa, FL for this year's NCECA (National Council for the Education of Ceramic Arts), which is next weekend.  I have been one of her busy little helpers getting everything made for this show and I have to say...NO MORE MUSSELS! 

Theme provided by NCECA for about ten of these installation shows is migration.  Dawn's project is about these invasive mussels from China that are not inhabiting the waters near Tampa.  There will also be clusters of sea grass that are native to Tampa but are now invading Chinese waters.  These will be displayed in a ten by twenty foot gallery space.  She is also bringing with her giant logs that she will cover with clay and then place the mussels into the clay just as they could come out of mud in the water.    The picture on top shows these mussels with a coat of pearlescent glaze on them before firing and the picture on the bottom is after they have been fired.  To make these mussels, Dawn and I made press molds from actual mussels in plaster.  Then small bits of clay could be pressed into each mold and after the clay stiffens up a bit, the two halves can be attached.  Before being bisque fired, they are given three layers of color sliped, turquoise, brown, and black to imitate the natural colors of mussels.  Then after the bisque firing, they are dunked into glaze and given a final firing.  The same process was used for the blades of grass.  The small patches you see on the glazed mussels are where we had to wipe away some glaze on the bottom before putting them into the kiln because otherwise they would glue themselves to the kiln shelf.  That can latter be patched up with clear nail polish.  

I also noticed this the same day I was unloading the mussels.  I currently have many many brown dots the size of the head of a needle clustered on the tips of my thumb, index, and middle of my right hand with scattering every where else on my hand and palm with a small cluster also on my left hand in the pouch between my thumb and index finger.  These spots do not itch or wash off.  They seem to be embedded into my skin.  I was beginning to freak out a lot last night and wasted a couple hours researching online about what it could possibly be but I could not find an answer.  There are plenty of people online who have posted on forums that described exactly what you see in this photo but no one had a clear answer.  I showed this to my professors today and we have found the culprit: silver nitrate.  I was making a cone 10 in-glaze luster recipe with a couple other students for my surfaces class and I was handling toxic materials.  I'll pause for a moment and just say that I work with around materials that could harm my health and I especially have to be careful with the air that I breath and wear a respirator when I am adding particles to the air around me that could get in my lungs.  This glaze called for 50 grams of silver nitrate, which costs about $100 and comes in small 25 gram pill-like bottles.  I was wearing a respirator and goggles but for some reason I didn't wear gloves while opening these bottles and emptying them into the glaze buckets.  For the rest of the glaze making process where I was in direct contact with materials, I did wear gloves.  I guess since I thought that I wasn't actually touching the material inside that I wouldn't get any on me but there must have been traces of the material on the small jars.  Silver nitrate has real silver in it and it is toxic and corrosive (which I later found out by experience).  The metal can leave stains on skin and can even leave burn marks if really grabbed by the horns.  The little amount that I came into contact with will not do any harm to me but I will have to suffer with "dirty" fingers for few days to a few weeks.  My teacher, Matt Towers, has experienced this before himself and assured me that I will be fine but this must be a lesson to me to always wear gloves!  It looks like someone dipped a toothbrush in brown paint and then ran their finger over the bristles so the paint flicked off onto my hand in the tiniest of flecks.  These spots also accompany a slowly fading rash on my wrist that I got from mixing glaze the other day...I promise to take better care of myself!