May 17

I can’t believe this is the last journal entry!  It really feels like I just started my project.  I feel like that’s such a cliché, but it’s so true!  Also saying that is kind of a cliché, but I’m okay with that for now.  But actually, so fast.  It makes me kind of sad.  I feel really even more excited for next year than I ever have, though.  It feels so good to have actually made something, and I feel like I’m going to feel like that all the time next year.

            Today I flipped over the rest of the tiles that I made and I Set them all on the bisque shelf to dry before they get bisqued, whenever that will be.  Apparently there’s going to be some competition for space in the little electric kiln before the year is over.  I feel like I should get priority ‘cause I’m a senior. 

            I was going to make more tiles, and I started wedging more clay, and it was really dry and impossible to wedge, and I already have way more tiles than I know what to do with, so I just decided to be done, and to go work on my history paper some more.  And I felt really good about it and not guilty at all, so I feel like that’s a good thing.  I just got back from Lindsey and Molly’s show, and it was so cool.  I really hope that mine goes well.  I’m so psyched to see it all set up, and it was so cool to see theirs all done.  I keep telling Lindsey not to sell any of the pieces yet because I’m actually going to buy her out.  The jewelry is so cool!  I have dibs on a necklace with a little paper elephant, a pair of earrings, and a cuff bracelet.  So that’s pretty exciting.

            I hope people like my show.  I was worried that nobody was going to come, but then I remembered that Bob and Tina are also going to be in the gallery, so it will probably be pretty packed.  Hopefully nobody knocks the table over accidentally or something like that.  I worry.  I’ll have to make lots of please don’t touch! signs.

            We have our senior advisor dinner with Ms. Smith on Sunday.  It’s going to be me, Mark, Lindsey, and Kristen, and also Emma and Annie, who are Ms. Smith’s “fake advisees.”  There are going to be a lot of tears.  So many tears.

            Goodbye!

May 16

Today I made a bunch of tiles.  I made sixteen.  So now I have twenty six.  And my goal was twenty-five to thirty, so I’m pretty much good to go.  Tomorrow I’m going to have to clean them up and flip them over and let them dry, and then over the weekend they’ll dry, and I’ll be able to bisque them next week and hopefully get them all glazed before the year ends.  They’re definitely not going to be ready before the show on Thursday, but that’s ok.  I don’t actually really know what I’m going to do with all of them.

            If I had all the time in the world, I’d like to try to make a whole new set.  Now that I actually know how to do everything.  I think I could probably make better plates, and better everything, really.  Especially those salad plates…  But it’s ok.  I think it’s good that I even know that I could make better ones.  And then if I had even more time on top of all the time in the world, I’d make things like berry bowls and other superfluous dishes.  Because it quantity, not quality.  Just kidding.

            It’s my secret dream that a cool big store will buy my designs and sell them.  Like Anthropologie did with Molly Hatch’s ceramics.  Really Anthropologie is the dream.  It’s kind of a really big dream, too.  I always tell myself that something awesome like that will happen eventually, I just have to keep with it long enough.  I feel like if I can trick myself into thinking that then maybe everything will turn out the way I want it to. 

It’s going to be really time consuming to glaze all of these tiles.  I don’t know why I decided to do that.  I was totally done.  I guess I felt kind of guilty for being done, so I decided to stack on some more work for myself.  I always do that.  I feel like I just need to relax.  This summer will be good for that, lots of beach reading.

I have a history paper due on Sunday.  The first few pages are due tomorrow.  I thought it was going to be really difficult to write, but I already wrote an outline, and when I sat down to actually do it, it went really quickly.  I just need to find some good primary sources and then it’ll be good to go.

26 tiles

May 15

            Today I finished up and flipped the tiles that I made earlier this week.  You have to flip them over a bunch of times so they dry evenly and they don’t warp.  I didn’t really get that much else done today.  I was going to make more tiles, but I needed to go to senior conditioning early because I had an appointment in Buzzards Bay.  I went and did yoga for forty-five minutes, which was really nice.  It was kind of odd, though because I was just in that little nook in the hallway of the fish center, and people kept walking by and I felt all gross.  But it felt really good anyway.  I’m going to do that again tomorrow.  It was nice to just take forty-five minutes and have relaxing music in my headphones.  And taking my glasses off it really odd.  Then I went to How On Earth and I got a Kale salad.  Which was delicious.  I love How On Earth.  It’s amazing.  Then I went and had my appointment with my therapist.  It was so amazing; she’s so great.  It was one of those where you feel like you’ve actually had a massage when it’s over.  It’s funny how it can be such a quick fix.  I don’t feel anxious at all anymore.  I’m a little stressed about this and that, but I feel good.  It feels good to feel good.  When I got back to Falmouth, I went to Coffee O and I wrote in my little notebook for a little while.  I really like to write about what’s going on in my head.  Then I read for a bit and had some tea, and then my sister came home from school for the summer!  So today was a really good day.

            I was looking at shoes online for a while, too.  There’s this really cool company – John Fleuvog.  Everything they make is so incredible, but so expensive.  I kept adding shoes and things to my little online cart, just for fun, because I don’t actually have any money, and it was way more than a thousand dollars.  I thought that was funny.  I might get this one pair of sandals that’s on sale and really adorable.  I think they’re going to look cool with my prom dress, and also I’ll wear them all the time after that.  I always have to justify buying things for myself.  They’d be totally worth it.

May 14

            More tile making today.  I was really productive.  I made a bunch of tiles, by making a slab and then cutting it, and then I decided to just make a bunch of slabs so that I could make the tiles all in a row.  I was going to make six by six tiles, but I keep cutting the slabs too small and I have to make five by five ones.  Which is okay, too.  That was the size I wanted originally.  It’s hard to make big enough slabs because they clay gets so cracky and dry with all of the grog in it.  Cracky is apparently not a real word. 

            I’m almost done with the twenty-six pounds of clay.  Actually, probably not.  I made almost the whole bag worth of slabs, but I still have to cut the tiles and then wedge the scraps back up and make more slabs and then more tiles and then wedge the scraps and make more slabs and more tiles until I pass out.  Probably.  I feel like I’m baking sugar cookies.  I think I might bake real sugar cookies at some point.

            Making tiles is way more time consuming than it looks like it should be.

            We had our English class in hoyt today.  I’m going to miss that class when the year is over.  I really like the book club idea.  Maybe I can convince some of my friends to have a book club with me this summer.  Although I’ll probably spend most of the summer finishing I am Charlotte Simmons.  Which I love.  I love Tom Wolfe.  He’s probably my favorite author, besides Richard Fariña.  I started reading the Right Stuff earlier this year, but I got too busy to finish it.  Maybe I’ll finish that this summer, too.  It’ll just be a Tom Wolfe summer.  I’m really excited to go on lots of bike rides this summer.  There’s this place in Falmouth called Bourne Farm, and it’s perfect.  You can get there really easily on the bike path, and then walk around and it’s really beautiful, and then there are lots of trees to sit under and have a picnic or read.  I always sit outside of Coffee O and read after work.  I feel like that’s how I spent most of last summer.  I don’t even remember doing anything else.  Hopefully this summer is a little bit more exciting.  I’m going to Quebec with my mom and my sister right after graduation!  So that’ll be a good start.

Tile making

May 13

I started making tiles today!  It’s so much work.  Even more than I was expecting it to be.  I’m using a whole thing of porcelain.  The porcelain comes in twenty-five pound bags, so I’m using twenty-five pounds.  Plus I had to wedge a few pounds of porcelain grog into it.  It took all morning.  I felt like I was doing push-ups.  Grog is porcelain that has already been fired and then ground up again, so it doesn’t shrink at all in the kiln.  You wedge it into the porcelain so that the tiles won’t warp at all.  It kind of just feels like sand.  It was really easy when I started each chunk.  I split the bag into five-pound chunks and wedged as much grog as I could into all five.  But it was really easy when I just started wedging each chunk, and they clay was still soft and just absorbed the grog, but then after there was a lot of it in the clay, it was really dry and dense and super hard to wedge.  Then when I finished wedging all of the clay up and back into one big twenty-six pound ball, I started making the tiles.  I wasn’t really able to make tiles, because there’s some thing that I need that Mr. Barmonde is going to bring in, but I don’t really understand what it is.  It seems like some kind of a mold or something.  I don’t know why I just wasn’t understanding when he was explaining it to me.  But yesterday I just made a bunch of slabs.  Which was also a lot more work than I thought it would be.  The porcelain was so dry and cracky because of all of the grog, so when I rolled it out it kept splitting and being uneven.  But I think I got some good ones.  I’m making six inch tiles.  I’m worried that some of the slabs aren’t going to be big enough for that.  I think they’re all six inches, but because they clay shrinks about ten percent, you have to make the tiles six and 5/8 inches instead of just six inches.  I can totally see why handmade tiles are so expensive, though.  They take so much work.  You have to handle them a lot more than something thrown.  And that’s no good either because if you touch them too much, they’ll warp too.