The Beat Goes On

I am sore, I am tired, and it's only 10:03 am. Today the carpet in the upstairs is coming up and over the next three days it will be replaced by hardwood floors. This is a difficult project as all our bedrooms are up there, but it is somewhat simplified by Mom still living in the office post surgery. This weekend, if all goes well, she'll move back upstairs. J is not down with the new floors even though her room was the most peed in first by the cat (may she rest in peace) and now by the two dogs (who, if they continue their bad habits once the carpet is gone, will also rest in peace... no I wouldn't, but it's awfully tempting!).

The real work of the day for me is to figure out what happened to my manuscript after it left my hands and before it arrived in my editor's. When the copy-editor compiled it, it looks like an entire section was dropped. Now I need to see what else might have changed. I am also going to have to redo some of the projects to get more aesthetically pleasing finished pieces to photograph for the beauty shots. One of the major issues my publisher has is that the glass clay projects look more like clay than like glass--unsurprising as they are made with glass powder and (like pate de verre) will never have the shiny, transparent perfection of, say, cast glass. To make this technique more appealing I need to make it look more glass-like. Maybe the solution is to combine glass clay elements with sheet glass either as windows through the clay or as the support for twining clay pieces. Whatever I do, I need to do it quickly.

It's been a really great spring in the studio with a lot of people interested in the beginning kiln-forming series of classes (kiln-forming 1-2-3). I taught part one last Saturday, and this Saturday I teach part two and next weekend part three. Part one was full, and I only have one spot left in each of two and three. Open studio has also been hopping with students from previous classes coming in and working on their own projects. Everyone is doing something different, and they are all interested in what others are working on and in sharing their own knowledge. This is why I opened my studio in the first place. Now we just need to keep the momentum going.

We're also just about done with our show orders from the Buyer's Market. Once I have them behind me it'll be time to get the new Siyeh Studio website done. That's my big project for this summer in Montana--that and creating glass tiles based on Gaudi's floor tiles and sidewalk tiles from Barcelona. I brought back two different samples of the tile--one in plaster and a larger one in concrete--ten years ago and I am finally in a place where I can start to think about where I want to go with them.

The concrete one has a more subtle, finer detail than the plaster one--for one thing it is not just in two heights of relief as the nautilus shell section undulates in waves--and the motif is also a reverse of the concrete one with the concrete being rendered primarily in the negative. The plaster one has a positive (raised) motif. Both can be found as sidewalks and floor tiles in Barcelona. I love the concrete one, but it is a bit big for glass floor tiles for a bathroom.