What? October Is THIS Week?

(NOTICE: I still use two spaces after the end of a sentence.  If you are offended by this, you should have stopped reading already.)

Remember those masks that I started a couple of weeks ago?  Well, here they are getting glazed.  The nose fell of the one on the left.  I decided that I liked it just fine nose-less.  Looks a little like Voldemort, yes?

I realized last Wednesday that the end of September was right here.  Then I remembered that the first of October usually follows the end of September.  Every year this happens.  At that point, the masks that I need to have finished and at the gallery by Oct 3 were not even bisque fired.  Allen is a wonderful man and didn't even give me the lack-of-planning-on-your-part-does-not-constitute-an-emergency-on-my-part lecture.  Instead, he helped me out by getting a bisque loaded and ready for me to fire on Thursday afternoon.  It was cool enough to unload by Friday evening, and I glazed everything that I had over the weekend.  He also encouraged me to leave glaze-encouraging notes for the other potters working in the studio.  When you've got a collection of people who all work at different days and times, you must communicate regularly by sticky note.

Here's some of the other things that I glazed.  Every mug you see here will be blue.  Sometimes I have to stop and marvel that I know what color these will be when they look so different now.  There's a funny story there.  I'll share that another time.  For the record: (left to right) floating blue, variegated base blue, floating blue topped with somekindabaloo (a mixture of left over things), and falls creek blue shino.  That's 22 mugs right there.

I also made things.  Three platters and parts for a vase.  Then I waited and waited and waited for things to dry enough to finish them.  It hasn't rained in so long that I forgot how much it slows the drying time for clay.  All this was made on Thursday and I finally got handles on everything and the vase put together on Sunday.  One of the platters still hasn't let go of the mold.  I'll check it again tomorrow to see if it is ready to come out.

Since nothing was dry enough to finish, I threw three jars on Friday. They were dry enough to finish on Sunday.  Under normal circumstances I would expect pieces to be leather hard by the next day.