April 11

I finished trimming plates today!  Now I have six that are ready to bisque that are a lot nicer than the first two that I made.  They’re more curved and I guess they have less overhang.  I’m really psyched to get them bisqued so that I can glaze them.  Today I trimmed the four plates and I threw two drinking “glasses.”  It was hard to get back into throwing tall forms after making all those plates.  The bowls were easier I guess because they’re more shallow and wide, but the glasses are basically just going to be tall cylinders, which are being a challenge for me in porcelain.  Ms. Smith said that I should try to throw some in stoneware first just to practice.  I think I’ll do that tomorrow morning before getting back into it. 

            I think I’m getting a cold.  I’ve been taking lots of airborne and sleeping a lot, which is good, except my throat still hurts and I’ve been feeling incredibly sleepy, pretty much all week.  Today I took a nap in the health center and I felt a lot better when I woke up, and then I went back to the studio and worked more.  I’m a little stressed because I have an obscene amount of world religions homework to do, but I’m glad I got my English homework done yesterday so that’s all I have to do.

            I have a tea set that I made in the beginning of the year and it’s been sitting on a shelf, unglazed, all year because I’ve been having trouble mixing a glaze that works on it.  Mr. Barmonde gave me a couple glaze recipes that I mixed yesterday and today that I’m going to use on it and finally glaze it and take it home.  I really don’t like making glazes.  I guess it’s kind of nice to hang out in the glaze lab and mix everything together, but it gets really tedious really quickly.  I still have to mix water into the glaze.  There’s a green one and a white one.  The tea set has little leaf shapes wrapped all around it, and the bodies of the pieces are going to be white, and the leaves are going to be green.  So I’m going to paint the green glaze onto the leaves and then wax over them, and spray the white glaze onto the rest of the pieces.  There’s a tea pot and two teacups and two plates, and a platter.