Sketching and Cleaning

Over the last few weeks I've made some time to sketch. Last year I think I remember sketching in boring meetings but this year I haven't attended meetings with much downtime. I think that's probably a good thing.

This year--more accurately, this month--I've sketched a few times while listening to music with my daughter or playing a game. Her games often require me to be in the room but I'm not allowed to do anything because I usually do the wrong thing. As long as my sketching can be interrupted when she wants me to move the ponies into a new position or watch her performance, I am allowed to bring a sketchbook to her room.

I'm not sure a gear handle would be particularly comfortable

Sketching is an important part of the process, but it always makes me itchy to start working. I'd like to make a couple mugs with embedded gears before June Art Fest, but there's a bit of work to do before I have enough room in my studio to work. I don't actually think that the work will get done before June 14, so the mugs will probably have to wait.

I was using two colors because someone else required the purple pen part of the time

Today was a busy day and we spent a lot of time outside playing and enjoying the weather. When we came home for dinner, I started boiling water and began emptying the dishwasher, much to my daughter's chagrin. She demanded to know why I wasn't cooking, since she was hungry. I explained that I needed to clear a space on the counter by moving the dirty dishes from lunch into the dishwasher. My studio is more or less the same as my kitchen countertops, except that it's not dirty dishes from lunch that are blocking my way, it's empty boxes from April and bike parts from January and glaze bottles from November.

thinking more about balance this year--to avoid top-heavy sculptures

The upshot at dinner was that my daughter helped me fill the dishwasher so I could focus on cooking. Her assistance doesn't translate quite as easily to the studio chaos. She helped me dust a bit in the semi-exterior kiln/storage room this afternoon, but was frightened off by a spider before much actual dust was removed. Meanwhile, I was putting together a new shelf and fashioning a cat-guard to keep the cats from crawling under the door and peeing in the corner (of the semi-exterior room, not the studio).

really, greasy, parts. there's probably a better way to clean them

Now that the shelf is up, I can start moving some bike parts out of the main studio for storage. I hadn't moved them out beforehand because I wanted to avoid the problem of cat pee soaked cardboard boxes filled with greasy bike parts and spiders. I think I've addressed the cardboard and the cat pee. I spent some time this week cleaning the dirtiest, greasiest bike parts, but there's quite a bit of work still do to. I don't have a plan for preventing the spiders from taking up residence, but spiders are easier to manage without the cat pee and grease, I think.

semi-clean small round bike parts (we sort by shape and size here at chez-I-don't-know-the-names-of-these-parts)