The Adventures of Maddie: The Disgruntled Apprentice

This is a cross-post from my personal Facebook page, so don't think I've written up anything special for you blog-followers. I don't have the time for that, so at least enjoy your scraps.

ANYWAY.

THE ADVENTURES OF MADDIE!

Today's adventure: The Disgruntled Apprentice!

I've been donating my time after my sculpture class to add glaze to abandoned ceramics pieces, so they can be sold in November to buy new glazes for the next semester. I ended up glazing all of the scrap box, so I asked the ceramics teacher if she had any more pieces. She said I could glaze her own personal demonstration pieces, and put them in the scrap box for me.

Cut to after class, when my "charity" glazing time begins. I grab this nice little serving dish, decide to glaze it up with earth tones. I finish in about an hour, go to put it the kiln room, and I notice THE BOX IS EMPTY AND THE PIECES ARE GLAZED ON THE SHELF. And they look like they were glazed by a 5 year old throwing a tantrum.

So I go outside the kiln room and ask one of my buddies if he saw anyone glazing. He says he saw the ceramics teacher's apprentice hanging about in the kiln room, and it all makes sense.

This girl, this apprentice, is a little full of herself from what I've seen. Back when I was taking Ceramics class she hovered over my shoulder and grabbed a plate I was making, and took a tool and said "YOU MUST USE FINESSE!" and she literally starts smoothing my piece while repeating the word "finesse" over and over, and I'm just sitting there like "wtf is happening" until she hands it back to me and is like "SEE?" and leaves. 

Anyway, she must have either recognized her "master's" pieces or overheard our conversation earlier in the day (she's always lingering about somewhere in the studio) and was jealous as all hell, so she grabbed the remaining pieces and glazed them as fast as she could so I couldn't get to them.

At first I was like "wtf" but then it was just funny because here's this chick who is supposed to be an artist's apprentice, and here she's intimidated that I'm glazing her master's scrap pieces... And in the meantime she makes them look like shit. 

I also think that this plate might have had something to with it.

See this plate? I glazed that. It's not the most amazing thing on the planet, but it was a scrap piece and I decided I'd freehand a pattern onto it while testing out some fun colors. Well, today when I walked into the Ceramics studio, I had the entire group of older ladies and even an older gentleman crowding around me asking me which glazes I had used. This silly plate was the hottest thing to come out of the kiln, and I think that might have sparked some animosity in the apprentice.

Too bad, so sad.

Gonna keep on glazing, AND sharing all of my glaze secrets, because I'm cool like that.

Productivity Week - Day 5

Time to write up Friday's little accomplishments and whatnot.

Friday morning we left the house at around 8:30am to drop my sister off at school, and then drove to pick up Jon. Needless to say, I was absolutely thrilled to be able to see him. Even though we're apart for only 4 days, it sometimes feels like an eternity.
When we got home I showed him my new work and began the glazing process. Unfortunately my glaze is starting to get excessively thick, so I thought adding some water would remedy it. Well, it turns out that things don't work like that, and though it did make the glaze thinner, it dulled the shininess of the glaze.
I had to glaze it all over again to make the glazed surface uniform in sheen, but all three are finished and ready to photograph/upload.

I didn't really do anything else the whole day... I could go on and on and talk about how we watched The Biggest Loser with my family, how hilarious it is to watch Jon play Mortal Kombat, and the horrible customer service both eBay and Etsy have, but I'm much too lazy and those subjects would probably be much too boring.

Until next time...

Productivity Week - Day 1

Well, it's REALLY been getting to me that I basically do nothing all day. Obviously complaining about it isn't going to do me any good, so I've decided to push myself to be productive this week. In a way I'm testing the waters by trying different things, and in a way I'm just trying to prevent myself from feeling any more useless.

So! Today was the first day of my Productivity Week.
I didn't do too much today, but at least I got something done.
My day started out with having to drop Jon back off at UNH, so by the time we made it home, it was about 11am.
I only got about 6 hours of sleep last night because my crazy and restless mind wouldn't stop its nonstop train of thoughts, keeping me from falling asleep for a while. As a result, I was dead tired when I got home. I tried to stay awake as long as possible, but ended up passing out until 2:30pm.
When I woke up I immediately set up my laptop to play music, and got to work on something I've been putting off for a while... glazing my latest batch of clay goodness.

Glazing seems simple, but it's really a pain in the rear.
You paint the glaze on one side of the clay piece, put it down, wait for it to dry, flip it over, glaze the other side, wait some more... and usually you have to put a second coat on, or fill in parts that you might have missed.
In other words, it's time consuming, and best to do when you have a lot of things to glaze. That way you glaze a bit of one piece, move to the next, and just continually rotate through all of them until they're finished being coated.
Unfortunately I was a bit impatient, and got myself in a few... sticky situations. (Pun totally intended.)
I flipped over pieces that weren't completely dry, had to glaze over a few fingerprints from touching wet glaze, and basically had glaze-coated thumbs by the end of it all.

Overall, everything came out okay except for my snowcone earrings.
I tried glazing the tops of the earrings and dipping them in salt for realism, but it seems that the salt and glaze had some weird chemical reaction rather than dry together.
The glaze is now cracking off and has become greasy. Definitely not good.
Unless I can get some glaze on top of the layer of glaze/salt mix and get it to dry, they're most likely not going in the shop.

At 8pm I was finally done. (I had spent some time talking to my boyfriend as well, so I really wasn't working for 6 hours straight... that would be brainmelting.)

So that's about it for today.
Some other things on my list for this week...

Things I NEED to do:

- Look at Craigslist to find some possible jobs
- Photograph new clay items and Jon's LOST DVD sets
- Post LOST DVD sets on Ebay
- Post clay items on Etsy
- Try drawing on paper again
- Hook up tablet and try drawing on the computer again

Things I WANT to do:
- Go through old notebooks to find drawings to edit on the computer
- Try to make sprites for a plant for Creatures 3
- Try making larger clay pieces
- Make something for next month's April's Army charity sale
- Post my daily progress on this blog! DERP!

That's all for now. Sleepy time for Maddie...