This Blog Has MOVED!

Hello, all!

Thanks to my handsome and talented husband, my blog has been integrated into my newly remodeled website.

You can find my blog by going to my website, http://www.vmwstudios.com and clicking "Blog", or go there directly: http://www.vmwstudios.com/blog

Go on, head on over now!

Gotta do it

I hate casting plaster molds.  It is tedious, and working with plaster is totally different than working with clay.  But I love being able to cast my work multiple times!  There's no way around it.

So today I tackled the plaster again, with decent results, a two-part mold and two one-part molds.  I'm exhausted, though-- some people make plaster look easy, but it's not for me!

Time for a walk with the dogs, who have been looking mournfully at me every time I walk by.

One Year Ago

Progress seems to happen soooo slowly, and I often feel like I haven't improved much at all.  However, I started thinking about where I was last year, and actually a LOT has happened.

Exactly one year ago, I was days away from getting married!  I hadn't touched clay in months, due to other jobs and the whole wedding planning thing.  I wouldn't do any serious clay work for another couple of months after.

In the last year (after the wedding), I did the following:

-Traveled to Japan and Taiwan for the first time 

-Developed and created over a dozen one and two-part plaster molds for my slipcast designs 

-Experimented with and figured out glazes for the designs 

-Had a sculpture juried into a show for the first time! 

-Got juried into and participated in my first art fair, Artsfest 

-Experimented with pit firing 

-Organized and held a two-week gallery show with Callie, our first since graduating from the Hood Ceramics Graduate Certificate program.  We plan to make this an annual show. 

-Set up my Etsy shop 

-Oh yeah--started this blog!

Wow. The amount of work that went into each one of those things... I guess I'm so impatient to improve that I forget how much I'm learning.  Where will I be in another year?

Right now I am on my way to a cabin in the Shenandoah for an anniversary weekend getaway with Ray :]  He's the one who inspired me to pursue my dreams, and who still inspires me every day.  So I guess a better question is "Where will we be in a year?"  I can't wait to find out!

Lots of Love on Valentine's Day

What can be better on Valentine's Day than cozying up with a bottle of wine, heart mini-pies, and a special someone?

Not much, unless it's a kilnload of perfectly glazed artwork....

The Problem With Working At Home

The recent snow days have caused a lot of folks in the DC area to get off work.  Teachers, government workers and more have been happy to get a few snow days, even if they are sick of the snow.  You would think, since I live in the same house as my studio, that this would not affect me and that I would have gotten a lot of work done.

Nope!

If I had been snowed in all by my lonesome, I would have gotten plenty of work done.  However, I was snowed in with my husband and my mother, and while it was nice to spend time with them, the house was never quiet.  My studio has no doors to close, and the laundry room and back entrance are off of it.  I felt like my "space" was invaded, my mental peace constantly buffeted.  I can't get really into something unless I know that I will not be interrupted, and during the snowstorms there were always requests and conversations and minor emergencies to contend with.  When I had time, I retreated into a book or tv show or blog reading.

Finally, today, the snow has been somewhat cleared off the roads and my loved ones are back at their place of employment.  It is peaceful, and I am back to work!

Musings and other results of a snowpocalypse

Whitney Smith's post about making ceramics your job offered some good advice for beginning artists like me.  I am struggling with the decision of whether to make ceramics my job or keep it as my art (art that substantially helps out with the bills but does not make a decent living).  Much as I would love to be able to say I support myself solely on my art, I feel like the more I support myself on it, the less it will be my art and the more it will be my job.  The moment I begin analyzing how salable a piece is, all the joy is sucked out of it.

Her advice to make time for other hobbies and pursuits is easily taken (and to an extreme!)-- I have several other loves besides ceramics, including mosaics, graphic design, cooking, and writing.  Also, a couple part-time contracting jobs unrelated to art.  It's finding the discipline to commit the hours to ceramics that I have trouble with, especially when I view it as a business rather than art.  A part-time business, I'm okay with.  The question is, which part-time job should I focus on in order to make a living?

In other news, here is the aforementioned snow dog.  I told you it wasn't great, but we love looking out our bedroom window and seeing it looking loyally up at us.

And here is the heart pie I made from the recipe I found in the Martha Stewart Living February 2010 issue.  The recipe made 10 of them, and it took me a mere 2.5 hours.  It was just what I was in the mood for: a long evening of cooking, accompanied by a glass of wine, with a delicious reward. My mom and Ray were glad I was snowed in with them!

Snow Dogs

I had no illusions that I would get tons of ceramic work done this weekend as the blizzard hit.  I know myself far too well for that!  Ray is snowed in here and his presence always signals "vacation time!" to me.  My work was limited to reading blogs and shoveling our long driveway.  We found a great site to watch tv shows online (free and awesome! http://tvgorge.com ... I hope they keep it up but have no idea how they make money as there are no ads...UPDATE: they are making "improvements" and currently have no videos to get me through the snowpocalypse!) and have marathoned the last season of Dexter as well as caught up on other favorite shows.

The snow is so deep that it's actually easier to crawl across the top of the snow on hands and knees than it is to try to walk.  If you do walk, the snow swallows you up to your knees every time you take a step.  Ray and I tried both ways today when we decided to make a snow dog, and Bandit helped by modeling for us.

Freckles, who has shorter fur and thus is too cold to lay down in the snow, got in the way as much as possible, climbing into my lap or onto the sculpture.  She was too cute not to cuddle with.  The dogs will only walk where we have broken a path--unless they see something to bark at, in which case they will go wherever they want.

Now I'm bored and rested enough to head into the kitchen for a couple hours of testing a recipe I found in Martha Stewart Living: Pear-raspberry heart mini-pies!

A Snowy Day = Me reaching for a mug

Well the snow canceled my plans for the weekend, but on the plus side it gave me an excuse to keep my favorite mug out all day.  I have a couple favorite mugs, for different purposes and reasons.  It's like shoes: each one has a different purpose and goes with a different mood or outfit, so you can never have too many.

This mug is my favorite mini-mug, as I think of it.  It holds a small cup of liquid and I always refill it a couple times.  But I like refilling beverage containers.  I would rather have three small glasses of wine than a ginormous one.  Thus, today I filled my mini-mug with pure coffee, coffee plus hot chocolate, and finally coffee, hot chocolate, and marshmallows. Mmm!

I got this mug in Kanazawa, Japan last summer.  We found a shop with a ton of mugs, hundreds of them, all different.  Some were cast, some were thrown, some were slab... I went through them all and this little gem caught my eye.  It doesn't look at all "Japanese" to me but it's one of my favorite souvenirs of the trip.

I had some Photoshop fun with it because pseudo-snow is a better background than my messy kitchen counter top.

Death of a Computer

Last week my computer caught a nasty virus and we decided to wipe it and reinstall it.  I got all my files off before wiping it... or so I thought.

I hadn't backed up some of my pictures, in fact all of the portfolio ones of work from December.  This affected my dragon wreaths, my 2 new sharks (the lovely crackle pitfire ones...), one of my favorite struggling birds sculptures... most of those are sold, so the pictures are irreplaceable.

Since the only way we have to remember our work is photos, I felt like I'd lost my friends.  I nursed my grief with my comfort food of choice (spaghetti with lots of cheese) and dove into a book for a few hours.  I finally told myself that I will be making a lot more great work this year, and next year, and the next, etc, so while I may not ever get those photos back, I will have plenty of others coming soon.  Hopefully before I apply to shows.

The biggest annoyance is that I lost photos of work I was planning on posting to Etsy, so I had to go retake those before I could list the items.  And let's not even talk about how I forgot all my music files...

Feedback and Motivation

I had been dragging my feet about an Etsy shop for months.  Even watching my friend Callie start her Etsy shop wasn't enough to spur me to action. I felt that I wasn't ready yet, that my work wasn't good enough, and that I just needed to get a few (dozen) more things in order first.

What finally prompted me to dig in and go for it was Julianna's comment from this post. Knowing I "ought to" do something and having someone (who doesn't know me other than through my art) demand it caused a totally different reaction.  Friends and family can be supportive, but when someone else values my work on its own it means quite a lot, especially to an artist just starting out.  Thanks Julianna!

So if there's someone out there whose work (be it sculpture, writing, or anything!) you admire but you haven't told them (I do it all the time, just looking and watching without making my presence known), drop them a note!  You have no idea how much it means to them.

You can find my brand new Etsy shop at http://www.vmwstudios.etsy.com.   I will be slowly adding to the work there, since I don't have good pictures for everything yet (that's one of the reasons I was procrastinating!), so check back often.