melredcap | Happy Birthday To Me!

...Happy Birthday to me, Happy Birthday dear me-eeee, Happy Birthday to me! As of this morning, I'm thirty. (Argharghaaargh... don't remind me...) So far, I have been congratulated by my mother, my boyfriend, various exchange students, two teachers, and my mobile phone. *hehheh* Yes, my mobile phone. One of the cool things about the phone I got is that if you put in your personal details - including your birthday, of course - it will put up cute pictures on appropriate days... darn, I love Japanese technology sometimes!

I was going to update my journal on Friday, talking about Thursday's 'Experiences in Japanese Culture' class and so forth, but there was a drinking and dancing party going on in the common room; it's just a leeeeetle bit difficult to concentrate (and type) when loud music is playing, people are talking at the tops of their voices, and somebody's providing disco lights the low-tech way by flicking the wall switch on and off! Well, it was fun to watch, anyway.

Thursday's class was a continuation of the previous week's one; we went back to Ohi-sensei's studio to carve our bowls thinner. Because they're hand-formed, not turned on a wheel or whatever, they can't be made very thin-walled to begin with; you shape them, let them dry, then carve them out from the inside like hollowing a pumpkin. (You don't do anything to the outside surface, apart from shaping a 'foot' on the bottom and texturing the rest of the surface slightly to make it easier to handle and to make the glaze bond better, because the whole point of this sort of pottery is to keep the marks from your hands.) Of course, you have to learn how to do this without carving your way straight through the side... which is what I did to one of my bowls while I was making the foot. Ooops. Ohi-sensei fixed it for me, and I promptly carved my way straight back through it. Double ooops! I fixed it myself the second time, because I did NOT want to admit that I'd messed it up again... I was in good company, though, because several other people did the same thing. Ohi-sensei was kept busy performing 'transplant operations'; at one point he even made ambulance noises while carrying a 'patient' back to his 'surgery bench'. *heehee* He's a lot of fun! His father, the previous master, arrived in the middle of all this, and declared that some of the students' bowls were very well made. You could see where Ohi-sensei got his sense of humour, too; his father asked us nicely to please deliberately mess our bowls up if it looked like they were going to turn out better than his son's.

Eventually, I did end up with two nicely thin-walled bowls, and also lightly textured my mutant vase. Glazing is next week, and it'll be interesting to see how they turn out!

Happy Birthday to me...