#have art and pottery classes

[curly-cottage-girl]

the twentysomethings are yearning for the retirement home

[hazmatazz]

my pitfall is wanting to be friends with every nerdy cis guy around me

[cabincryptid51]

The Ceaseless Watcher's Special Little Boy deserves to be comfortable<3

(Simply just how I imagine Jon dresses in the safehouse!)

[tinymousepaws]

wips of lil guys

[mydemonsdrivealimo]

need to make bryce more annoying. i think he was in honors or ap art in hs.

[cordelia13]

Friends: how is your healing process going?

Me: I started a new hobby!

[decidentia]

Just a note to say thanks for bearing with me. ♡

[eudaemonyy-blog]

part 1 of my model of dave striders room out of clay <3 next is glaze whenever i finish that LOL

[3gremlins]

ngl it bums me out how fast everyone hopped off masks not just for covid/communicable diseases but just the concept of revisiting personal safety equipment in general.

long post i guess

I've been taking a 5 week pottery workshop on wheel throwing (it's neat!) and we got up to glazing last week. When you glaze pots, the glaze starts as a a thick liquid and then dries really quick into a powdery form (on your clay piece). I was asking my instructor about clean up and she was like "oh you can just rub off the excess carefully, but try not to get dust in the air as it's a little toxic. obviously you're wearing a mask but the rest of us aren't"

(my partner and i wear masks b/c it's inside and that's just what we still do. it sucks but it's better than covid and also now inhaling dust/fumes)

I kinda wanted to respond "maybe we should all be wearing masks??" like if not for covid concerns, at least for the semi-toxic powder we're all just handling/some folks are breathing in O.O

(i didn't b/c tbh i'm still a little on edge with the going out/doing stuff in public thing/esp indoors and people misgender me/mispronounce my name constantly and honestly sometimes you just want to do ceramics and not fight with people. it also just didn't feel winnable)

I feel like there's so many things like that that people just disregard as a risk that don't need to be, but as a society (US at least), we just never wanted to have that conversation (it was at best, begrudging, at the height of government awareness of covid and now it's completely gone by the wayside). At this point people either respond negatively or aggressively to any suggestion of it.

But like we've all had that one art teacher/professor who was a little bit off b/c they'd just been inhaling toxic paint fumes their whole career and it was always written off as just a quirk/part of the job (maybe things are better now? new art students feel free to chime in) and not something that could have been mitigated.

idk, it just makes me sad that we never got to even have the conversation about how so many jobs/hobbies should use more personal safety equipment than they do (either b/c people feel inconvenienced by it or don't know).

(tangent but i remain appalled at how many people i see riding bikes/etc around here that don't wear helmets! it's fucking wild to me, like we had the "wear a helmet or your head will be shattered like an egg" demonstrations as early as elementary school in massachusetts. Like it's just silly not to, and yet so many people in cali are like "a helmet? i don't know her". Also adults will agree that children should, but they shouldnt?!? wear a helmet for biking/skating/etc is the hill i will die on, esp on pavement)

[iloveutoodeath]

omg at work today i led the painting class/activity and it was genuinely soooo fun. we were supposed to paint something abstract and spring themed but i was working with very very young kids so i just let them paint whatever they wanted lmao

[birondragon]

special episodes with grandparents who barely know what their grandchild studies

[rosereign]

I am so indecisive

[sapsolais]

-

[shouts-into-the-void]

Time to spread my art major Jean agenda

hc for jeans next book that jean ends up being like gifted at ceramics and it comes so easily to him and jeremy is mad bc hes TERRIBLE at it

[googoogagahearteyes]

Let me into a ceramics studio I need to create shit with my bare hands and then come close to eating it or smashing it

[pyrrhiccomedy]

I am genuinely so proud of my wife for becoming a crafts person over the last few years.

Like, I was always a crafts person. I was an arts and crafts kid. My parents sent me to classes or summer camps or after-school clubs pretty much continuously from when I was about 5 years old, and over the years I did metalsmithing, stained glass, polymer clay sculpting, loom weaving, oil painting, charcoal drawing, clothes-making & tailoring, carpentry, woodcarving, macrame, miniatures, beading, jewelry-making, basket weaving, leatherworking, paper-making, bookbinding, papier mache, decoupage, sand sculpting, and probably more that I'm forgetting. There was never a day in my life while I was growing up when my entire bedroom floor wasn't taken up by 2-5 different ongoing art projects. As an adult, it's given me the firm confidence that I can walk up to pretty much any crafting skill, and get the hang of it, and enjoy doing it.

My wife never had that. She wrote, but that was really her only artistic outlet. Art & craftsmanship were just not any of her business. She always expressed admiration for my gumption when it came to making things with my hands, usually with a "bigger idiots than me have done it" attitude, but she was certain she'd be bad at it if she tried it, and that she wouldn't have fun. As evidence, she would offer every time in her life when she had attempted to learn a craft, and didn't have fun, and all the Arts And Crafts kids picked it up a lot faster than her.

Which like - yeah! Learning how to do a new craft is a skill all on its own! Fine motor control is a skill developed over time! So is spatial reasoning, and materials intuition! She wasn't just 'trying to learn wreath-making,' or whatever, she was trying to learn how to learn how to make something with her hands AND wreath-making, at the same time, so of course it would take her longer than the kids who already had the first part, and of course it would be more frustrating for her. I knew she wasn't uniquely bad at crafts: she just didn't know how to approach picking them up, because she was never encouraged to learn.

And then the pandemic hit.

And while we were all trapped inside and going insane in new and exciting ways to all of us, she tentatively decided to pick up embroidery. She probably wouldn't stick with it, she explained: she'd probably be bad at it. It probably wouldn't be fun. But she thought embroidery was pretty, and literally what else did she have going on?

And then she did stick with it. For over a year. And she got pretty good at it! She embellished a baseball hat for her sister with cactuses and wildflowers from where they grew up which came out adorable. She made an embroidered portrait of one of our friends' cat that they still have displayed in their entryway. And she discovered - and remarked on it often, with mild surprise - that she was having fun. She'd say a lot of stuff like "this stitch was so frustrating at first, but now that I get it I really like doing it," or "I kept getting this tangled but I've figured it out now. I just needed to relax."

Then she took up pottery. We did that as a couple for about a year, too. Now she's a knitter.

And it's just been so great, to see her eyes light up when she sees a sweater she likes, and hear her say, "I could make that!" She's slowly let go of the perfectionism that I think holds a lot of people back from doing crafts: that dismay when you make a mistake which leads to discarding a whole project, or starting something over. More and more she's taking on the veteran crafter attitude of "oops lol, whatever I'll just keep going." She's picking things up faster. She's taking pleasure in learning incremental steps. She's started to see crafting as something that relaxes and engages her, instead of as something inherently frustrating. I've gotten to watch her learn to find joy in making something with her hands. I always knew she was creative and artistic and capable of learning how to do anything. It's been so much fun to watch her start to take that on as part of how she sees herself.

We have this running joke about how she will prematurely declare herself to be in an era. Like, she'll go swimming twice and announce that she's now in her "swimming era," and then never go swimming again. Or she'll make one smoothie, buy a bunch of fruit, and declare that we are now in a "smoothie era," and then a week later we have to throw out a bunch of fruit that's gone bad.

The other day (while she was knitting, and I was sitting on the couch next to her doing crochet), she went, "I feel like I've gotten - like, I'm a bit crafty these days, I think. Like, I've done a couple of different crafts, and gotten pretty good at them. I think this is now, kind of, you know...something that I can say that I do."

I supplied that I would even go so far as to say that she was in her "crafting era."

Her eyes widened. "It's an era?"

I pointed out that it was something she'd been doing pretty much continuously for the last three and a half years. That feels like the start of an era to me.

"Yes," she decided. "It's an era. This is my crafts era. I'm a crafts person now."

She's planning to make me a sweater with a duck on it for fall.