A Moment Captured..: Mostly Typical Saturday...

I'm back home after another Saturday in the studio. There was a kids' class in there this morning, so P and I spent our time doing other things, waiting for them to leave. I FINALLY dropped my cat cross-stitch at the framer's - it's very handy, there's now a framer in the art supplies store that also houses the studio. I usually frame them myself, and I was a bit shocked at the price. Holy smokes! It was $123, after the pay ahead discount! Methinks it may be time to buy another matcutter! Of course, the speed at which I cross stitch means that I won't have to pay often... We'll see how it turns out - it should be ready for pick-up on September 1. Anywho, picking the perfect mat color - twice, since it's double matted, and the perfect frame took me a considerable amount of time so the kidlets were gone by the time I'd paid, keeled over from sticker shock and recovered.

Last Friday (when I should have been driving...), I trimmed some things. I got a couple of them underglazed and ready for the bisque fire today.

In a fit of optimism, I made a wine glass (cup, mug, call it what you will) for Friday nights at the studio. Last Friday, I trimmed it and added grapes. Today, I got it back from the bisque fire and glazed it. (One nice thing about these kids' classes - they're doing bisque and glaze firings every week.)

I also trimmed these last week, and put them into the bisque firing. As usual, I ran out of time before I ran out of things to do, so these are not ready for the glaze fire yet. Today, I dipped them in black. My plan right now is to make them the same dark blue as some of my other bowls. P took a squeezy bottle today and made some really cool dippy-splatter things on something of hers - I may copy that on these somehow. We'll see. At any rate, these are at the bisque stage. My hope is that the dark color will help hide how very lopsided they are.

I also finished the painting on my birdies. This is them as of last week, before I did the black outlining. I think they're going to be really cute, but I'm still trying to figure out what color to paint the little vase itself. Decisions, decisions!

This is the way my fuschia vase turned out. I'm a bit disappointed with the clear glaze - the butterfly darkened until it's practically invisible and there's a glob of glaze on the left of the flowers. I'm going to try to sand that off - wish me luck.

This is my first mug ever. I'd forgotten, until P reminded me, how much this poor thing has been through. First, I scratched scribbles around the middle, and under glazed it in a couple of colors, decided I didn't like it, used a dark blue underglaze to cover the first colors, fired it, dipped it in clear glaze, fired it, didn't like it, re-dipped in a light blue shino and fired it again. Now, I'm happy with it. It's kind of hard to see in the pictures, but it looks kinda like denim - light over darker blue.