infryq

Yesterday I started planning this year’s vegetable garden. Beans, snow
peas, tromboncino, herbs. Might try tomatillos as something new.

Spent the day surly and self-absorbed; the hormones don’t help.

We went to open studio and I trimmed and handled two of the mugs; the third
was still way too wet to hold its shape under pressure. I’m trying out a
slab-based handle technique for these.

We stopped at Lowe’s to see about replacing/repairing the parts of the
laundry tap, and got excellent help from the guy in plumbing and a couple
guys in tools. None of the parts they had were going to work, so they sent
us to a hardware store in Duquesne called Schink’s. He had eeeeeverything,
a real old school place. Shined up the stem to make sure it was okay, dug
out the broken screw with an ice pick, fixed the threads with a tap, and
sent us on our way. Reminds me of Harvey’s. Miss that place.

We went to Target and got granola bars (the almond-butter filled ones from
Kind are good), bunny snacks, and P snacks.

Home, and my pajama pants test fabric had arrived early! I had a late/early
meal and then prepared it for washing. Also started preparing the sateen
shirting I bought for interfacing/underlining. Watched more of the pants
fitting craftsy/bluprint class while I worked. She doesn’t take a rise
measurement, which seems super weird, but we’ll roll with it.

Dinner/snack, crossword, Heart, sleep. My neck was tweaked, so no buttons.

Very involved dreams. Robotic beehive, planeshifting, gravity manipulation
gone wrong, sleeping it off under the stars, glass going selectively dark
for those affected, skyscrapers, three-story apartments, people curious as
cats, cocktails with surprise savory ingredients, Christmas trees with a
single present under them.

Yesterday I sewed one side of the waistband on, then arduously unpicked all
the temporary seams for the underlining and clipped all the folds from the
pleats, graded the now-accessible seam allowances, and started
slip-stitching on the other side. I listened to Record to keep me company.

We went to open studio and I made four small bowls with surprisingly little
fuss. I also inspected the bisque shelves, and found seven mugs and a
medium serving bowl of mine, and two small cups of P’s. Four of the mugs
met standards; the other three had handles too delicate for the job, and
went in the bin. P asked the studio tech about the crazing in the white
liner, and learned that S is working on developing some better glazes. I
will probably wait to glaze until she’s got results.

We went to Target afterwards and got bunny snacks, almond butter, and
cheese crackers; then to geagle for edamame, lentil pasta, and some dairy
for P so he can do masala chai and make coffee cake.

Late lunch, late dinner, crossword, snack, bed. Kept an eye on the snow all
evening; very pretty.

Yesterday we came home!!! We went to the airport around ten in hopes of
getting on an earlier flight and were successful. I knit in the airport and
slept on the plane. Some surprise traffic on 376 but P was a champ. We’re
both exhausted. Travel sucks.

We went through the mail, did laundry, rescued the houseplants, and then I
sat in bed flipping through seed catalogs until dinner. P made a quick
grocery trip and picked up food for him from Babylon. After we ate, P drove
over to Braddock to pick up all our glazed work, and I pruned the pepper
plants. When he got back, we pulled everything out and went over it with a
strong light. Unfortunately tons of crazing casualties; the white liner
appears to be seriously temperamental, and some of my experiments including
the last-minute wipe of the shino from my small bowls didn’t work out.
We’re going to test the liner crazes with food coloring today to see if any
of it is salvageable since almost all P’s mugs were affected. Otherwise
stunning effects for the White Salt over Candace Black: satin metallic
gunmetal in some pieces and a delicate froth of snow over glossy black in
others.

It turns out P’s phone wanted its own pottery studio solo adventure, so
we’ll be going back today to fetch it.

Crossword and sleeps! My bed! My normal toothpaste! My pots! My spoons!
It’s so good to be home.

Yesterday I sewed basting threads and pinned up the gathers on half of the
bottom tier. We went to the bathhouse ornament-making event, and I
eventually figured out how to work the technique I’d had in mind— make an
impression with a rubber stamp, flood the area with underglaze, let it dry,
then scrape off the excess, revealing the image. Some stamps worked better
than others, and I decorated with dots to make everything look a little
more intentional. Pleased though.

Dinner and crossword and listening to Witch while darning P’s hat.

Yesterday we went to open studio and I threw seven mugs. No flubs!
Progress. We came straight home afterwards, lunch, and then I finished
plying the blue and green Romney and washed it to set the twist. FabricMart
had a deep sale on wools, so I bought a bunch for making warmer skirts for
the transitional season. Also got some cotton voile for either linings or
petticoats, haven’t decided. I cleaned the bearings and flyer shaft on my
spinning wheel, then started carding and spinning the Tunis X Icelandic for
that cardigan I planned back in early spring. Maybe NaSpiSweMo?

Dinner, a really wretched crossword (see Rex for commentary, his experience
mirrored ours, just bad), and sleep.

Yesterday we went to open studio and I trimmed the rest of the small bowls.
The pug mill was broken unfortunately so there wasn’t much clay to be had.
After pottery we went to Target and got more Katie-snacks, determined they
didn’t carry “moon cheese” yet (that’s just at the monroeville one and
online), and found a wee trash bin that will fit in the cubes on P’s side
of the bed so he can stop dropping his headphones in the trash.

Lunch, crossword, then I spun for a bit and watched Queer Eye. Dinner, then
I watched A Wrinkle In Time. It was... rushed. I’m not sure it would have
made any sense at all if you hadn’t read the book. If you’re going to leave
something out, leave it out, don’t name-drop it and hope.

Yesterday we went to open studio and I threw six one-pound bowls and
flubbed two more. The pitchers I handled last week are setting up nicely,
but I’m still letting them dry slowly under plastic. I also started a pinch
pot, on inspiration from studio proctor M.

We were home by 1pm, very early for us, so lunch was actually near
lunchtime. We did the crossword (difficult), and P had a nap. Dinner was a
little late but still done well before eight. Pleased with food.

Yesterday I had lunch with S and C, which was good. S has moved offices to
escape a bad situation with her office mate. Long overdue. I spent the rest
of the day on package installs for the upgraded machines.

After work we went to open studio. I pulled a few pitcher handles before
deciding the clay was just too wet and switched to trimming. The jasper
stones P got off eBay are easier to hold and do a great job of burnishing
the surface, so success there.

Yesterday I met with S about further middleware problems, which turned out
to be mysterious enough that she took the source code with her to
investigate offline. Achievement unlocked? Spent the rest of the day on
sequence diagrams and modeling colon+list constructions as appositives.

P had a late meeting with a student, so I hung out in the booths on WeH1
and had pre-clay snack there. Open studio was good; thinning out the shino
glaze made it stick much better to the outside of the copper red and I have
high hopes it will work out. The glaze firing was ready, and all my pots
turned out beautifully — orange haystack over temoku develops a lovely
sheen, and over yellow salt breaks into complex smears of coppers, blues,
and umbers. A+ will do that again. P had some lovely pots in this batch
too, including a voluptuous little wee cup for hot chocolate, a really
pretty tip jar done with barium blue, and some nice small vases. One
mystery failure of tomato red, which crawled all over the place. S’s
hypothesis was failure to damp-wipe the piece before glazing, contributing
to both too thick a glaze application (dry bisque eats water) and a bad
bond with the pot (dust). We paid a ridiculously low price for our stuff,
and I spent the rest of the night trimming.

Yesterday I repeated the morning/afternoon nlg/Android pattern. In the
morning I got the imperative/passive-perfect switch to work satisfactorily
by adding a new type that will uniformly apply the different grammar
transformations, and transparently handle effectors which haven’t been
updated yet. In the afternoon I got sucked into a morass of gradle issues,
eventually calling in an expert. Even with her help it took us over an hour
to get things running. Gradle error messages are almost completely useless.
On top of that, one of the more useful signals it could provide (what build
phase has the error) is completely ephemeral— it literally deletes it from
the screen before printing out the error messages. Just bad. Really bad.

After work P and I dodged raindrops to go to open studio. I trimmed my
candy dish, but the bowl I threw a week ago was still too wet. Probably
wrapped too tightly. I attempted to throw something new off the hump, but
the clay was stiff, and I didn’t wedge it enough, so it was mostly a
disaster. I wound up with a larger candy dish from the remnants. I also
glazed the beehive vase. Should be exciting.