Ride 'Em Cowgirl!

Coffee in the New Orleans skyline mug, "Invisible Man" by Joe Jackson on iTunes. It's from the workout playlist--I am anticipating the day. Vacation's over and I'm almost awake enough for it. The glass might come today, it will probably come tomorrow. Dee will be in the studio tomorrow and Friday to help with the prep for the fieldtrip and fieldtrip itself. So will Becky, and I am hoping I can get a friend of Becky's and potential new assistant Todd (a wire-wrap artist) to help. If he can come help, I can add an extra dimension to the work the kids will do, and I'll be free to float from group to group.

I really need to sit down and plot out the flow of the two and a half hours they'll be there. Tour of the different areas of the studio, intro to fusing including examples of the different stages of fusing from tack to full and slumping, brief touch on the physics (COE, viscosity, surface tension, etc), cutting glass, demo of making a morceaux de verre piece ending with opening a kiln and taking out a finished morceaux de verre piece for comparison. Then break into groups and go through the stations: lunch (outside at the picnic table), vitrigraph, cutting, and assembling ornaments for me to fire after they're gone. Sounds about right, except that there's no way I can fit 24 12-13 year olds in the kiln room at the same time and even making it work in the cutting room is going to be tight. We'll work it out. And I need a bunch of tools too from cutters to wheeled nippers, bottles of glue. Yup. Need to do a step-by-step with Becky and Dee.

Talk about being back into the thick of it right away! No easing back in for me. I guess that's what yesterday was for, unfortunately it was also a little girl playdate at our house so my studio time was limited. Life choices. Glad I get to make them.

Becky won't be in till 10:30 today so I am going to head over to the studio now to get today's kiln loads prepped. I hate having to pull from my extra-wide sheets, but I have got to get pieces fired for orders.

A last note: I am physically, mentally, emotionally and every other way incapable of throwing out pieces that didn't turn out. I even have all the pieces that have broken at galleries, in shipping and at shows. But I can no longer have them cluttering up the floor or shelving in the studio. The pieces fall into three groups: finished work that doesn't fit my current commercial series or has a slight flaw in it, pieces that aren't/can't be finished or are broken and the glass is not re-usable, and broken pieces that can be reused in a melt of some kind. Yesterday Becky and I hit upon a genius solution for all of it. The slightly flawed/not my current work I'm going to sell at Jessie's school's holiday fair for bargain (and I mean *bargain*) prices. The unfinished/unusable pieces will be affixed to the fence in the back of the studio with plate hangars and nails or arranged on the ground in the front garden. I've already had one piece stolen from out there, but I don't mind--if someone finds it beautiful enough that they want to keep it, it's better than my throwing it out. The meltable scrap will all be consolidated into storage one bin. I look forward to having a lot more room to store actual production work by the end of the year!

And now back in the saddle...