Start and finish one creative project every month

They just look pink in the photo. That’s the wonder of glazing. It looks like you’ve done something really odd, and then it’s fired, and the real color appears. (Note to self: must remember to download photos of ‘they only look pink’ leaf tiles from camera. And if especially motivated post here….)

In this case the color is blue.

Okay, some might think that blue leaves are not inherently better or worse than pink leaves. But they’re wrong. Pink leaves on a mosaic table top would be weird. Blue leaves will be most excellent. Trust me.

Three hours in the pottery studio with a little tiny paint brush (really really tiny. the kind my old watercolor teacher used to go insane when I pulled it out to do detail work on a door nob or something. Because watercolor should be about gestures and motion, not fine detail. Unless, of course, you are me, trying to get the door nob on your house painting to look like what it is… But I digress)... where was I? Oh yes, tiny little brush, bottle of cobalt oxide, 34 leaf tiles, and me.

Thirty-four mosaic tiles sounds pretty impressive. But some of them are pretty darn small – think baby strawberry leaf. Wicked cool, but itty. All together they might cover one and a half square feet. I’m not sure how big the table top is (I mean, I know how big the table top is, I’m looking at it through the window. I’m just not sure what the top converts to in square foot land.) – I’m just sure it is much larger than what I glazed today.

I’ve got another couple of dozen still to glaze, hopefully Friday. At which point, even with the tiles I’ve already finished and are sitting in a bowl in the den looking quite nice and blue and grey leaf like (if I do say so myself)... I’ll still have a frightening amount of table top in need of covering.

My fear is that after I do all this work making the tiles I’ll some how mess up doing the mosaic work, and it will look like crap. It’s not a huge fear… sometimes I think I distract myself with it in order to keep from focusing on how many hours I’ve spent on this project already.

I am getting faster, much faster, than when I started working with tiles. But I think it’s taking me about 10 minutes to make each tile – not counting driving time. And waiting around wondering when the pieces are actually going to make it in and out of the kiln time.

But for now I will not think of the time, or the worries about the final product. I will just be happy that I got to spend part of my weekend working on creative stuff. Blue creative stuff, most excellent.

The problem with pottery as a way of meeting the goal of one creative project a month is that when you have one pottery class week, it takes longer than a month to get anything finished.

First week: work wiht the wet clay, then it sits under plastic wrap for a week waiting for you to come back and trim the piece. Next week, trim, then put it out to dry. Next week, put it on the bisque firing shelf. If you are lucky, and you almost never are, the next week you glaze your piece, and then, if you are really really lucky (and you almost never are) it’s ready to be picked up the following week.

Five weeks is the fastest you can hope for. And this never happens. So it’s impossible to finish a piece every month.

On the bright side, I did get 60 tiles started last Friday. About half of them might (if I’m really lucky) will be ready to glaze at the end of the week. Of course, the way I work with oxides and a tiny little brush it will take me several classes to work my way through glazing them all. Sigh.

But at least I’m working on something.