Teaching!

No coffee yet, no music either. The rest of the household is sleeping in this morning and the only sounds are the hum of the air conditioner, the buzzing of a fly trapped in the office with me and the tapping of my keys.

After I posted yesterday I took Jessie to school and was reminded that this is Art Week at Phoenix Summer Camp and I volunteered to teach the project... Whoopsie Daisy. So yesterday there were no firings. I spent the afternoon racking my brain for a fun, NEW project suitable for 19 4-6 years olds.

We're going to make coasters! I cut 48 4" clear squares and ground down all the edges and corners so nothing is sharp. I packed up jars and jars of opal frit (with over 30 jars of opal frit picked, I decided to skip transparent frit and all powders this time) and Dave went to the grocery store last night and bought Elmer's glue all and dixie cups. Today they will put the frit on the glass with glue--two pieces for two layers, one coaster each--and I will flat fuse each piece.

Then tomorrow I will stack and fuse the layers (using a digital picture I will take of each child's set to tell me whose is whose, what the orientation is, and which one goes on top). Thursday they are going on a field trip to the High Museum of Art--I will not be able to accompany them, though I think I might have already volunteered. Friday I will take the finished coasters back to school and the children will put the little rubber feet on their coasters and sign their names in black sharpie on the bottom. Sharpie pen fires out so putting their names on in advance would do nothing.

The afternoon was taken up with a tutorial on the "tool" my web design/hosting company expects me to use to maintain my website. I thought tools were supposed to be useful. It has got to be the least flexible, most cumbersome interface I have ever used. There is no proportional resize of any elements--including jpegs. There is no drag and drop. All sizing is done by typing in the height and width in pixels in for each block on the page, and if you accidentally get one too big, it breaks the look of the page. The sizes are not displayed for the elements so you can't easily tell where it's broken. All this means I am going to have to spend a lot more time and attention to update my pages--and create the ones which are still not done. At least I got the slide show working and know what was wrong with it. Maybe I'll even have it on the real home page by the end of the week.

So this morning I teach, this afternoon I break down the show I had at Creative Spirit last week, and I fuse the children's coaster tiles. I hope I also get a chance to do the combed sconce project scheduled for today. The anxiety attacks are just going to have to wait--I have no time for them today.