Three Days in the Studio

Yesterday I fired the bisque, and threw stuff for the next firing cycle, which is always a hard mental shift for me. I had to push myself to do it, and I am honestly not sure about the resulting pots...they look, right now, like pots I had to push myself to make. But handles and decoration, not to mention glazing and firing, can easily turn around a piece that lacks spark, so we'll see.

I also updated the home page of my website, something I am vowing to do with more regularity. If the homepage never changes, the website appears abandoned, like bajillions of other sites on the web. And why should anyone ever go there, if there's nothing new to see? I blog regularly, of course, which the home page links to; and I update the shopping page, although not as much as I should; but I think to keep things fresh there has to be something new on the landing page. At the very least I need to update the "Next kiln unloading" date. I put that there in the first place to communicate that the site was alive, but the effect is somewhat undermined if the date referenced is six months ago. It's not like it's difficult.


This morning I am enjoying my coffee out of my new Tim Cichocki mug, and making my to-do list. It's a doozie, and it goes like this:

• Bring glazes and glaze tools outside. It's gonna be 81º and partly sunny today, and I want to be out in it.
  
• Walk!! I've made a new commitment to the holy trinity of well-being: sleep. exercise and nutrition. The exercise piece of it is the hardest to keep.
  
• Unload bisque.
• Wax and glaze.
• Create new sales CDs. It's a bit late to be getting started on the summer season of wholesale, but not nearly so late as I was last year, and that worked out okay. Now that I have a car that I can take without maxing out my credit card - I bought a new-old car last week, after the Maine Pottery Tour, woo-hoo - it's time to make sales trips again. I need to have something to leave with the shops I visit.
• Apply for the Winthrop Sidewalk Art Festival. Getting info about this event is like some electronic geo-caching game...links lead to other links, which lead to an email which hopefully results in information. I need to get this ball rolling today. It's a big toe into art fairs again, and while it's not the Smithsonian, I've heard good things about it.

Tomorrow is glazing some more, mixing wadding, and washing shelves. I also need to make sure and do the leatherhard work on the pots I made today; nothing aggravates me more than missing the window and wasting work just because I wasn't being attentive.

Another cup of coffee in my lovely new mug, and hi-ho, it's off to work I go.