Sunday, April 15th

Mermaids!

A friend of mine asked me months ago if I could make her some mermaids. We had a flurry of back-and-forth emails and then I set to stalking eBay for ceramic molds, waiting for exactly the mold of the specific mermaid she wanted. It took a few months, but one did come up, and here she is!

I’m not completely happy with these; the eyes did not come out as I wanted and there was a bit of smearing (I was in a hurry and didn’t give the last coat of black enough time to dry completely before glazing). That’s what happens when I hurry. Patience, sadly, is so not my strong point.

Even though I have an extensive list of things to do today (including firing the kiln and dyeing 20 skeins of yarn) I’m feeling a lot easier about things than I was two weeks ago. Greg and Caitlin loaning me their backup electric skein winder really helped. Not only do I no longer feel tense about the time it’s going to take me to wind 100+ skeins of Star Wars yarn, but I’m not throwing my back out doing it. The other day I wound 20 skeins on the machine in the time it took me to do less than ten by hand. THREE CHEERS FOR GREG AND CAITLIN!!!11!!1!

Also taking a load off my mind are the three new colorways I was releasing all at the same time — Cranberries, Lavender Lemon, and Seaworthy. Next time I decide I want to release three different colorways at the same time I’m doing a big project like the Star Wars yarn? Remind me that I’m a fucking nutjob.

In addition I completed six different custom jobs for ceramics with Friday’s kiln firing, and getting those done made me feel better. And remember the dish set I was doing for someone? And the one plate would never stop exploding? She’s been busy and it turns out I’ve been using the wrong venue to contact her, so I finally tried a couple of different ways and she came over last week and picked up the last of her dishes. So now I feel done with that (it was hard to feel finished when they were piled in the corner of my office; I was afraid a cat would knock into them or there’d be another glaze explosion or something).

I guess what I’m saying is that this week is stretching before me in almost a carefree manner. Knock on wood.