Second Saturday State Of Your Studio - February...

Welcome into my studio…

I am finding myself and my inspiration from all over the place recently.

Above is a Focus!!! Tile that I have been working on seriously.

I have grand delusions of a really funny interactive art project with these tiles…

More to come on that. Think BIG right?

They will all be glazed with this type of finish. Dark. Crusty. Beautiful...

I don't know why I like these pieces so much…

I just can't help myself!

There are a ton of little pieces that will be showing up with this finish…

I just know it!

I need to investigate why these test tiles with wording came out looking like crap.

Nothing like what I had planned.

I think I watered it down too much (you think?!)

So as I was not in my clay studio since last fall (Oct/Nov)…

I decided that I needed to scour my office area and studio in the last month and figure out where the heck I left off before the holidays hit...

I found some old test cones caps for necklaces…

Maybe I'll revisit them sometime.

A slide of some of work I did back in 2000 (check out that date of slide printing - almost 11 years ago exact - weird!) I have the mold for this piece still. Turn it upside down and put a plant in it I say...

The studio has not been this clean & wiped down for a few years!

Ugh, the lingering tower of kitty litter buckets - filled with dry clay scraps.

And bins on shelves above them, filled with:

These are from when I was selling a ton of work through online shops and bead shows.

Not so much anymore…

So what did I do with all those pieces that I paid for already (by this stage, each plastic shoebox full of pieces sanded, sponged & holes drilled - could be $500 to $1000 paid to people helping me out).

They were all dumped into a bucket. This Bucket holds at least 7 shoe boxes full of pieces.

That now look like this:

Do you know how much better I feel about that?

Can I even tell you that there was so much emotion tied up into those shoe boxes full of clay?

Frustration for having paid for work that did not meet up to my standards.

Yes, I'm that much of a control freak. The edges were over sponged and the shapes lost form.

Holes were not centered… Frustrating.

Then there is that lingering feeling of "well, they are paid for, why not try to fix them?".

So I just decided. It has been years. No orders for them. They should be put to better use and recycled into something much more than what they are now.

I feel so much more free right now because of it!

And upon my end of the day clean up…

After finding this cool dried glaze to put in the dry Cone 6 glaze bucket - 

At the point of getting ready to head upstairs - I found this…

Talk about some curse words flying…

A gallon of distilled water I guess had a leak and since I had not been in the clay part of the studio for really 4 months… I had no idea this was going on.

I put on gloves, got the paper towels, garbage bag and antibacterial wipes and went to town. I flipped the wood over and let it dry out (see the heater at the very bottom of the photo).

All better… Pshew.

I have so much more to share with what is going on in my studio.

But that will have to wait until the next Beads-of-Clay Open Studio to be held on March 6, 2011 from 1-4pm EST. I will be having a few giveaways and running a special in my Etsy shop for the weekend.

Until then - Check out some other Clay Bead Makers Blogs sharing (hopefully) the state of their studio over on the Beads-of-Clay Blog.

I hope you will stop back again!