Anniversary dinner

We celebrated our 52nd anniversary yesterday, with a lovely, elegant dinner at the Eseola lodge in Linville. It's a beautiful drive up to Linville and the lodges' gardens are always a visual delight.

The dead Dell laptop was packed up first thing this morning and Jim will drop it off for me after breakfast. The repairman was here the other day and did his best, but they forgot to include all the parts needed to repair it.

I still have to do more trimming and marking on the test tiles I threw the other day - an average of around 60 tiles for each of the 3 clay bodies. I cut them yesterday and got the holes in, but they were still too wet to mark the bases, so I used the little studio time I had to throw a few small test pots for the cone 6 firing, using the Little Loafers Glory clay which throws pretty much the same as the cone 10 version. The fresh clay was hard. I guess they make it that way because it has very little vertical strength if it isn't, and if it's softer, you have to throw practically dry. It's definitely not my choice of a claybody I'd want to work with all the time. My feeling is that you might as well work with straight porcelain; but unfortunately, they've been out of their cone 6 porcelain for weeks. In the meantime I'll work with what I have until I can get back to Asheville early next week.