Doing the donkey work

With freshly-cleared worktops comes a chance to photograph all the ceramics, measure and "catalogue" them, decide which to keep, and pack the survivors away, labelling the containers with the contents.

I also hazily imagine myself spending time drawing them - large! - as a way of moving forward in some direction or other.

It's taking a while. Much "donkey work" needs doing; I'm looking on this drudgery as a chance to think about how some of the pots might be grouped, with a view to displaying them ... somewhere, sometime, somehow. It's this "play" factor that is stretching out the time.

First, a trawl through all the photo folders (organised by month), moving anything ceramic to its own folder ("Ceramics"). That includes the photos of the fabric versions. Then, grouping various categories (by adding a prefix to the photo name; it would have been easier to move them to a sub-folder) and printing sheets of thumbnails.

Into the studio and search for all the stored ceramics, remembering that a few are languishing on top of the bookcase in the other room. Bring those into the studio -

Unpacking, unwrapping continues. and things I've entirely forgotten come to light, such as last year's experiments with paper and twisted cotton thread -

Eventually a number of "chimneys" and pots made by dipping fabric into porcelain slip, some with added metal fabric or threads, are assembled -

After the "group photograph", some latecomers appear - what had looked like a ceramic city now looks more like a flood -

For the measuring (important because I'm thinking of making boxes or bags for some of these, alone or in combination) I've made a time-saving grid for determining the diameter, and raised it from the surface to take the blank space on the ruler into account -

As well as the measuring and photographing, there's some (ongoing) auditioning of pieces for framed groups incorporating some flat pleated pieces -

Another thing that's happening is matching up the fabric "before" with the ceramic "after" -

Sinamay Suite