No rest in my sleep

Tonight should be interesting.  I loaded a bisque kiln with another student who is a hopeful sophomore ceramics major.  He never fired his own kiln before and had signed out our largest top loading kiln, "Satan", who can only be shut off manually (mind you this is the only electric kiln out of our nine that doesn't have a trip to stop it).  I woke up at 5 this morning to finish a paper due today and was at the studio at 8 to load this kiln.  I wasn't aware of how very last minute his projects were that he wanted to bisque and I was expecting to candle the kiln for four of five hours (which means holding the kiln's temperature at around 200°F to get rid of all moisture.  If there is water in pieces after it passes 212°F...BOOM!).  However, the student, Jacob, didn't finish his pieces until the PREVIOUS NIGHT!  His excuse was that he kept it in the hot box overnight but they are large pieces and it takes usually a good week and a half to two weeks to fully dry out work.  So instead of candling for four hours, it turned into ten hours, which means that the kiln didn't actually start to get going until 6 o'clock TONIGHT.  Satan doesn't turn off on his own; someone needs to watch the kiln through the peep holes to check the cones that tell you if the kiln is reaching temperature.  ("Cones" are ceramic material literally shaped into cones that have a specific firing temperature.  They range from cone 020 to cone 12.  When you fire something in a kiln, you make a "cone pack" consisting of usually three cones: the actual cone you wish to get to and one above and below to help judge temperature.)  What I'm trying to get to that you cannot go to sleep when you are firing a kiln like Satan.  Jacob said that he would watch for the night shift since he had some work but I was just at the studio an hour ago and he wasn't there.  I texted, called, and left instructions in my studio about finishing the firing process but I haven't heard a word.  I NEED to sleep.  I told him to call or text me when he gets to the studio but I have alarm set for 1 o'clock this morning and if I don't hear from him until then, that means that I have to go to the studio...there's no way around it.  Someone has to shut it off otherwise we risk pieces melting.  NOT excited but there is nothing I can do.  I just hope he's taking a nap and waking up to get back to the studio.

I would have otherwise posted a very nice blog about what I'm doing but I was so swamped yesterday working on my paper until midnight and then waking up at five to finish that I'm too exhausted to stay awake any longer to upload some photos!  Tomorrow is another day and I finish classes at noon.  I foresee a nap, reading, and hanging out with some friends before spring break gets here.  I'll let you know if I have to be at school at 1 o'clock in the morning.  If I do, I'll have time to post a new blog while checking the kiln!  Silver lining... 

Accepting the consequences

It's come down to the point that I just cannot finish some things in time for class.  My surfaces projects are due tomorrow and I have not yet completed half of what I would have like to accomplish.  Instead of worrying about it and pulling yet another all night tonight, I am going to get some good sleep, work a little in the morning, and deal with the consequences face to face with my teacher.  I will eventually complete the projects, probably by next week before spring break but I cannot put in more work into ceramics then what I already do.  I do not want to kill myself, and where would my art go if I was dead?  For the sake of art, I'm getting some sleep tonight.  But here is what I was doing today:

Left:  This is my wall piece that will look like a majolica plate when displayed.  This is about 1/5 of the total pieces.  These are unfired so until Friday, I will not know what the colors will look like exactly.  It's going to be fun!

Right:  This is my urn that collapsed in the kiln the other day.  You can see that the supports are now fused to the bottom and it's hard to see but the it has sunk into them as well, causing the lid to also warp and lock into place.  However, the wings look really nice, don't they?  I'll be making a new and better one in a couple weeks.  Hopefully I will have learned my lesson from last time.

This is part of my surfaces project I mentioned before.  I have only a small Tupperware container filled with slip casted bullets.  I'll have more pictures coming as this project develops later.

That's all for today folks!

Utter Exhaustion

This is how I felt all day.  Yesterday I woke up at 7:30 a.m. and didn't get any sleep until 5:30 a.m. this morning.  And even then, I only slept for three hours to go to work study at 9.  I was working on one of my Malleable Object projects in which I am creating tiles that will be arranged on a wall to resemble an Italian majolica plate that I saw.  I have a kiln signed out for Thursday and I need to finish glazing all 61 pieces.  I glazed about 40% last night.

Some people seem to be able to hold it together when they have little sleep.  I know some students here who love pulling all-nighters to get work done.  I, however, am not like these people.  Maybe I was able to stay up later the first two years of college but now I go to sleep at 11 and wake up 7:30 almost everyday.  I'm on a sleep schedule.  Staying awake for 22 hours, then sleeping for three, and working for another 9 or 10 hours destroys me.  I barely have my eyes open now as I type these words. 

I get really emotional when I'm exhausted like this.  I made an urn for myself for one of my classes.  It's made out of beautiful white glassy porcelain with inlaid turquoise slip patterns around the surface.  I also made delicate wings as the handle to the lid.  The urn is very smooth oval with no foot on the bottom so I am making a base of realistic intertwined clay branches that will support the weight of the urn.  I fired the urn last night on three stilts to keep it off of the bottom of the kiln since I had not made the base yet but we were going to apply decals during class today so it had to be glazed.  I opened the kiln this morning and I was devastated.  The urn was too thin at the bottom and at such a high temperature, the porcelain warped and melded into the stilts I made and completely bound itself to them.  The urn warped so much that it even trapped and welded the lid in place which was really startling since it was too small of a lid before I even fired it.  Well I just stood there, urn in my hands and cried.  I'm already so stressed out as it is to get all of my work finished in time and this was just the icing on the cake.  I hesitantly showed my teacher Matt Towers and I did my best to hold back my tears as he looked at my piece.  He was wonderful.  He said that he would rather see me take big risks like this and fail then to play it safe.  He has had many many failures but he learned something from each one, and I have learn a lot from this collapse.  Still, it broke my heart.  After spring break I'll be making a larger, better, and more awesome urn then my other one ever dreamed of. 

P.S.  I was so tired today that I took at ten minute cat nap on the toilet...I swear it wasn't intentional.

Am I really "lovin' it"?

Unsatisfied.

I am recreating a classic McDonald's meal as my next project.  I must begin with some hard research...which lead me to a McDonald's drive-thru to get the most classic of all meals: the Big Mac.  I also threw in a medium fry and four pieces of Chicken McNuggets.  I must admit that some nights when I'm driving home late after working in the studio, the last thing I want to do is spend time over the stove so I have been known to purchase a McChicken from the dollar menu to fill my tummy for a $1.06.  I do try my best to eat well besides that and it really helps that I don't have a meal plan on campus so I must cook all of my own food.  It's been a while now since I've gone on a mission to indulge in fast food so when I bought this "reference material" for my project, I had to take a bite of everything...and you know what?  I was not impressed.  I have never eaten a Big Mac and upon opening the box expecting to find that perfect of all burgers with three buns holding in beef patties with the works so succulent and divine pictured on billboards across America, I was almost brought to tears.  This so called burger in front of me was nothing more than a sad attempt at deliciousness.  It actually appeared that the burger had been deflated of all happiness and was nothing more than a lowly, crushed, wilted, and spongy sandwich of high cholesterol and saturated fat.  Tasting it was no better then just evaluating it's looks.  I felt sad just taking a bite.  The chicken nuggets were not crispy and were so bland that only when completely covered in BBQ sauce was I able to swallow one.  Worst of all, the fries were soggy and limp!  Who wants to eat limp fries?  I've had great McDonald's fries before, or at least I thought I did, and this was just awful!  I'm not sure if this was just a bad batch of fast food or just that I've never examined a McDonald's meal this in-depth.  I saved what remained for dissection.

Now to create a trompe l'oeil (which is French for "deceive the eye").  I have made a miniature portrait of each individual fry that came with my meal out of porcelain.  I then coated each fry with fine white grog (it's like sand) so that it gave them a rougher salty texture.  I have already made the sat-on top bun and in the next two days I will be making the rest of the meal.  I'm even going to pour slip (liquid clay) into a coke cup and fire it so that even the drink is porcelain.  After firing, the entire meal will then be repackaged in the original paper boxes and bags and displayed as if someone had taken out their McDonald's meal only to find that they cannot eat it and walked away from it.  I will show pictures later this week of it.  I am going to make it as realistic as possible.  No glaze, just bare white clay.  I hope I can get across how limp the fries were, how sad the burger was, and how tasteless the nuggets were.

These are not my hands

Look at this finger.  How old is this finger?  60?  75?  Can you believe it's actually 21 years and exactly 30 days old?  This is nothing compared to what it usually is.  This is after washing my hands with soap and water so there was a little moisture soaked in.  My hands are stained from clay, dry, cracked, scarred, unnaturally colored, flaking, itchy, rough, and wounded.  This is a ceramist finger on an okay day.  You know when you're eating cheesy popcorn or messy chicken wings or anything delicious enough to lick off your fingers?  There are cracks deep enough in my hands to store some of this heavenly goodness for later when I get hungry.

My hands are used and abused everyday.  They are constantly being soaked in water or wet clay and dried again either by a dirty towel or with dry ceramic material.  They throw pots on the wheel, roll slabs of clay, stir up settled glaze in buckets, break bone dry clay into tiny pieces, delicately paint on slip, unload hot kilns, spray on glaze, hose down the studio floors, sweep dust into pans, and are plunged into thick clay buckets of reclaim.  Somehow they also function normally outside of my studio but I am embarrassed to show my hands to people in public.  I even kept my gloves on in the post office today for fear that my hands might cause alarm.  I need to take better care of my hands!  Putting plastic gloves and tubs of moisturizer on the top of my imaginary shopping list.

Black Jelly Beans on my Chicken Drumsticks?

No, they were not jelly beans.  Jelly Beans are sweet, sugary, delicious, and colorful.  I am talking about something quite the opposite of Jelly Beans...

I'm not sure how I'm feeling right now, both mentally and physically.  I'm sitting besides one eaten drumstick and two untouched ones.  I baked these in the oven a couple nights ago and kept them in the refrigerator for later.  Now is later and after reheating them in the microwave in the ceramics studio, I quickly devoured one while I was waiting for a netflix movie to load (Letters from Iwo Jima if you were wondering).  Grabbing the second I noticed a black gooey bean sized (I hate to say it) growth or protrusion on the side of the drumstick.  Even worse, the third had a similar spot.  All I can imagine a slimy fungus slithering down my throat, cackling with pleasure knowing that it's destiny is to spread rapid disease and infections throughout my body, starting with my stomach.  A few laps in the chicken/stomach acid juices of my belly will probably suit it just fine and then traveling through my blood stream it will eventually consume my body and soul.  I swear my tummy hurts right now, but I know that it could be a trick of the mind.  The black eyes of the chicken fungus are watching me!  I must put an end to this madness and dispose of this chicken immediately and simply pretend this never happened.

This is what I get for cooking food ahead of time so that I don't have to leave the studio and stop working.

As my mother says, my stomach is percolating...

You can sleep when you're dead.

My studio. Behind the curtain is another table.

I wish weeks were eight days long and each day thirty hours.  I think then I might be able to accomplish all that I plan to and still have a normal social life.  Yesterday I was up at 7:30 and didn't leave the studio until 12:45am this morning.  Thankfully I met my mom and my sister for lunch, otherwise I think I might have gone insane.  I can't even recall everything that I did yesterday.  When I get so tired, I go into zombie mode and it's hard to get a decent conversation out of me.  I was simply in solitude in my studio, cutting creature tiles out of slabs and cleaning them up.  There are 61 pieces for just one of my projects and I had to finish making all of them yesterday so that I could fire them this morning.  Right now they are in the kiln, probably at 800º and needs to get somewhere around 1700° and I need to stay here until it reaches temperature, which might take another six hours.  I make all of my own clay, slips, glazes, and fire my own kilns.  Tonight might be another late night with throwing teapots and making a power point presentation due tomorrow.  I'm writing down in my planner right now to sleep in Saturday morning!

I wish I framed it.

I didn't mention this on Monday because I didn't think it was important but I smashed my pinky right at the side of the knuckle between a concrete block and a kiln.  I was loading our largest top-loading electric kiln affectionately called Satan and to reach the bottom of it, I need to stand on a concrete block.  This thing is a giant cube, not those wimpy building concrete blocks with openings in the center.  Since it was too heavy to carry or drag, I was wiggling it side to side across the floor and BAM, pinky between concrete and the hard sheet steel of a kiln shell.  It was but a patch of skin scrapped off for a second but quickly turned into a small bloody mess.  Why is this important now?  Because last night, in my stupor of exhaustion, I was sketching out new creature designs for my huge 61 piece ceramic wall art project.  I had removed my band-aid earlier in the day thinking that it would be fine but I think the friction of the paper against my minor wound caused it to reopen the hatchways.  Upon lifting my hand to take a look at my drawing, I noticed this startling other drawing made by the blood of my pinky.  Well it made me smile but I had to start on a new sheet of paper with a band-aid covered pinky once again.

My pinky is no longer bleeding as of today, thank you for your concern.