clay: more test tiles of speckled buff for j.b. brown and toshi brown glazes

Two of my colleagues had invited me to happy hour and told me to bring my tarot cards. I told them both to think of a question as we were shuffling and mixing all the cards on the table top and that I turn to tarot not so much for predicting the future but for guiding me on my gut and that draws can read in so many ways within the one card, just like astrology, you can take what you want and leave what you don't. Jasmine was freaked out at how much the card she drew indicated what was happening in her personal orbit. Cybil, not so much as she wanted an answer to her love life, but I've a feeling that she knew what she wanted in an answer. I was sort of a psychoanalyst when she told me the situation with her boyfriend and said I could empathize and only be concerned that there would be resentment if one partner grew too dependent on the other. We read the guidebook to their draws, and I encouraged them to tap into their intuition to make of the card as they wanted. 

I was relieved that Jasmine and Cybil both drew cards from the Minor Arcana--which reflect the day to day activities in our lives. I'm thinking of separating them out from the Major Arcana cards--which reflect key archetypes or spiritual lessons in our lives. I think I'll bring my Mystic Mondays to Kat's house. Meral and I are driving to Tracy, going to the farmers market there, cooking and eating a Jamaican feast, making and drinking cocktails, and just catching up. 

This past week was one of intellectual heavy lifting where I was writing reflections for an expedited evaluation at work. Unlike a full evaluation, I don't have to produce as much evidence, but I'd already been deciding that I want to be a more active librarian after two years of pandemic and to flex more of my teaching muscles. In the meantime, clay took a little bit of a backseat. However, I can never keep my hands completely off mud, and so in the seventy-five minutes I allotted myself on each of the two days of clay this week, I made a planter pot, two test bowls from Speckled Buff, and rolled a few slabs of what I think is Obsidian.

I need to remember when rolling slabs for bowls made on a hump mold to make the slab bigger in circumference to be able to drape completely over the plaster. I think I like these rims. But I'll try some bowls with thinner rims with my pinch marks. I'll be glazing the interior and the rims of these bowls with Coyote glazes, but I've learned my lesson I hope from making bigger pots, not to glaze them unless I can predict how the glaze will look on the clay body.

These little test bowls can be salt and pepper bowls, and I'll start making deeper ones but with the same circumference to use the cork lids I have. I'd like to make a crock that has two cubbies side by side to hold salt and pepper in one bowl. I'll practice pinching that wall from a ball sliced in half and add a coil on the edge to be the higher wall into which the cork lid can fit.