Gambles, especially foolish, futile ones, always steal a part of my heart. Even among spiders--the natural mathematicians of the invertebrate world--the golden orbs are something special. Not only are the spiders themselves beautiful, all red-orange, gold, brown and black, but their webs are immaculate geometric visualizations. Theirs are the storybook webs of Halloween. They spin them between posts and trees and walls and rocks...and sometimes cars.
Light and I have been in conversation as far back as I can remember. Most times, I just listen. Sometimes I get to talk back. Rarely--too rarely--we sing. And it's beginning to feel as though we'll sing, soon. When we sing, the light becomes a tangible thing, flowing like water, etching everything in its path, and I finally, blindingly, understand in my bones the definition of "illumination."
"I just love the way you put faeries into all your work. That's what makes it soooo special," she gushed, "I luuuuuuuv faeries." She was looking at "I Dreamt the Jacobean Rose," a sample of tiles I'm pulling together for a prospective client and, frankly, it ain't of a faery. Especially NOT a fashionably flirty flower faery.
Made a comment on Facebook that has resulted in "so you want to explain the "no underpants and 28 pairs of socks bit?" from a couple of folks, so... (Susan, you already know this one, you were there, so don't bother to read this...;-) ) A few years ago my friend Susan invited me to barge down the Canal du Midi. That's barge as in "large, RV-like boat with all the comforts of home and toilets that fill with canal water when flushing" (I didn't ask where they flushed, but had a sneaking suspicion that the highly perfumed canal water was brown for a reason).
The reward for patiently, carefully weighing and mixing and packing frit into little plaster cells, then documenting the result? You get to play with blocks. Those of you who've been to the studio know my obsession with color tests. I once tried to build a full catalog of readily available tints but got discouraged at how long it was taking. So I sat down and figured out how many combinations I should test:
This is Tarzan. He's coming up on his 22nd birthday. Tarzan's been a fixture at my neighborhood petshop since kittenhood, greeting customers, doing a little product testing and keeping the owners company when business is slow.
Yesterday didn't go at all well, so today I'm bright and early hard at work, whittling down my giant to-do list. Just now, though, I'm at Sawtooth Bakery, enjoying an inexpensive breakfast, buying bread and having fun peoplewatching.
The girl with angel wings cried, silent, fat tears that slipped down her cheeks and splashed on her pretty pink dress. She trudged just past me, plopped down on a bench and sighed.
It makes sense, but I'm having trouble believing it: My kiln failed because I left the garage door open. As you might have read, Skooby-my-Skutt bathtub kiln died right at the start of an important pate de verre firing last Saturday. Since I'd bought him a brand new controller not four months ago, I was pretty unhappy about it, and left a flurry of HELP messages with Skutt. "Hmmmm," said Perry-the-Skutt-kilngod when he called this first thing this morning, "I read your message(s) and I've been thinking about what might have gone wrong. Do you have a voltmeter?"
Well, that's the last of the blueberries. Last Wednesday night I stripped all but the last few dozen berries off the bushes in back; I left those for the birds. It was kinda sad, even though I got two months of fresh-for-the-pickin' blueberries and shouldn't really complain. But blueberry picking became a welcome routine this summer: I'd work hard all day then, when shadows got long and the light went golden-warm, I'd pick up my little brown colander and head for the blueberry bushes out back. I'd spend a half hour or so tickling blueberries, gently stroking the fruit so that only the ripest and sweetest dropped into the colander.
