Its been kinda busy around here.  As I mentioned, when I cleaned off the kitchen ceiling from our freak storm a good amount of paint flaked off, thus stepping up the time-line on repainting the ceiling.  Last Tuesday, I started stripping the flaking paint from the ceiling.  The plan was to strip the ceiling on Tuesday, clean up on Wednesday, prime on Thursday, paint on Friday.  Yeah right…  as seems to be the way with all DIY tasks, the job turned out to be much bigger than we anticipated.  It seems that the ceiling had been painted without being primed, and most of the paint was in very poor shape.  I brought in the big guns (i.e., Nick) and the two of us continued where I left off the other day.  Not a fun job but painting over flaking cheap paint was not an option.  A few days later, we were finally done. I did managed to fire my bisque kiln (a solid cone 04 top to bottom, hurrah!) last week so things are continuing to tick on in the studio, albeit slowly.

This week, I’m priming and painting the ceiling AND finally mixing up glazes (11 glazes slaking downstairs, to be sieved tomorrow). Guess which project I’m more excited about? In honor of glaze testing 2.0, Nick has further optimized my Glaze Material Management program. It is now getting super duper fancy.  One awesome feature is the ability to mess around with the glaze batch sizes I want to mix up, to fit any stock restrictions I might have (as I’m getting all my glaze materials in flat rate USPS priority mail boxes, my stock levels are not very high).  The program will also tell me how much more materials I need to buy, ready for when I want to mix up additional batches.

glazeforecast

Another feature that I’m very excited about (the potters amongst you will understand) is recipe printouts.  Once I enter how much of a certain glaze I want to mix up I can then get nice organized printouts with the calculated quantity of each ingredient in checklist format. It even calculates the minimum amount of water to be added and can give a recommended water amount too (based on a ratio I can set per glaze as I gain more experience mixing them up). Recipes that originate from the same base glaze print out on the same page, to maximize efficiencies in glaze mixing. Bliss! Thinking back to my scribbled hand-written lists of the past, I marvel at how organized I am getting. And all it took was a promoting Nick (the super organized programming genius) to being my technical director! Result.