Thousands of ghosts in the daylight
Hestia sniffed my hands all over, but after some proprietary headbutting allowed herself to be petted with insistent slinks of her back and escalating purr. I had met two strange cats this evening at ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
skygiants and genarti's.
We did not actually watch one of the several productions of As You Like It inskygiants' possession, the notional goal of the hangout. We ate a bounty of deli from Mamaleh's—the bagel with chopped liver was successfully foraged despite the ravages of commencement weekend—and got as far as watching a 26-minute stop-motion Twelfth Night with a voice cast to die for, which turned out to be one of the Shakespeare: The Animated Tales (1992–94) adapted by Leon Garfield which I had been recommended last month. Then we were diverted by talking about books mostly of our childhoods and in the process I learned that prior to launching his nowadays much more famous career as a Nesbit-inspired children's fantasist, Edward Eager was a dramatist and lyricist responsible among other musical comedies for the Offenbach-in-English To Hell with Orpheus. It never seems to have made it to Broadway, but was one-shot premiered in 1953 by the irresistibly named St. John Terrell's Music Circus of Lambertville, NJ. I am captivated by this fact. I was also captivated by the strange cats, although Mina jinked out of any room I entered until very near the end of the evening, when she permitted me to stroke her very soft tuxedo-black head for about ten seconds before she headed for the refuge of the bedroom closet. So long as I didn't tower over him, Mr. Dash was more than content for me to attend to the covert white splash of his belly and his plush void back, although he seemed disappointed that leading me through the kitchen with a succession of soulful looks did not produce my feeding him. I had an out-of-season latke. It was an incredibly nice time.
genarti had made me a cup with the Uffington White Horse.
skygiants and genarti's.We did not actually watch one of the several productions of As You Like It in
skygiants' possession, the notional goal of the hangout. We ate a bounty of deli from Mamaleh's—the bagel with chopped liver was successfully foraged despite the ravages of commencement weekend—and got as far as watching a 26-minute stop-motion Twelfth Night with a voice cast to die for, which turned out to be one of the Shakespeare: The Animated Tales (1992–94) adapted by Leon Garfield which I had been recommended last month. Then we were diverted by talking about books mostly of our childhoods and in the process I learned that prior to launching his nowadays much more famous career as a Nesbit-inspired children's fantasist, Edward Eager was a dramatist and lyricist responsible among other musical comedies for the Offenbach-in-English To Hell with Orpheus. It never seems to have made it to Broadway, but was one-shot premiered in 1953 by the irresistibly named St. John Terrell's Music Circus of Lambertville, NJ. I am captivated by this fact. I was also captivated by the strange cats, although Mina jinked out of any room I entered until very near the end of the evening, when she permitted me to stroke her very soft tuxedo-black head for about ten seconds before she headed for the refuge of the bedroom closet. So long as I didn't tower over him, Mr. Dash was more than content for me to attend to the covert white splash of his belly and his plush void back, although he seemed disappointed that leading me through the kitchen with a succession of soulful looks did not produce my feeding him. I had an out-of-season latke. It was an incredibly nice time.genarti had made me a cup with the Uffington White Horse.
no subject
Ha, well, you get an infodump, because secretly (not secretly) I'm very proud of the way the technical choices worked out!
The clay is brown, as you can obviously see on the underside and also through the glaze. So I made it and fired it to bisqueware and then painted on the horse with white underglaze. (Underglaze is a sort of paint made of clay + colorants; you can use it before or after the clay's bisque firing. It is, obviously, meant to go under the glaze. I like to use it on bisqueware because then if you mess up you can wash it off without affecting the pottery beneath, but if you paint on the underglaze and then do a bisque fire you can do more stuff at the glaze stage without worrying about washing off your underglaze decoration, so there are pros and cons. Anyway!)
Then I painted over the horse again with wax, before I dipped it in the glaze. (A slightly translucent green on the outside, and an opaque cream on the inside and at the rim, obviously.) The wax will burn off in the kiln, but meanwhile it resists the glaze, so the horse stays clear of it, and that's what gives the carved look -- the matte underglaze as a sort of batik poking through the layer of glaze. The hardest part is not going outside my own lines with the wax, or at least not so much it looks off, but it's not actually hard, just a bit fiddly. And I do kind of like being fiddly in art now and again, as, uh, just about every hobby I've ever taken up can attest.
And that's it! It's wax that's doing the heavy lifting in terms of the effect; the rest is just a bit of white paint and the fact that the studio has a pleasingly turf-green glaze.
Mina did not absolutely bolt from me! That seemed sociable.
It was! Quite sociable, honestly. But her level of sociability cannot compete with that of M. I-Was-A-Man-Of-The-Streets-Please-Pet-My-Belly Dash.
*hugs*
*hugs!*
no subject
Tragically, I enjoy technical infodumps! I love that you can batik clay. It comes out looking exactly like the scratchboard of a hill figure.
Mr. Dash has acclimated magnificently to the great availability of petting in a settled home.