happy new year!

 I was excited to greet the morning and 2013.  Excited to start thinking and acting creatively.  Coffee made, we built a gingerbread house (why not? we missed the annual party and had the kit in the kitchen).

My favorite annual sketchbook is back-ordered and won't arrive for some weeks, so I razored out the unused pages from this year's book to begin my daily drawings.  This green ladyslipper orchid was my first subject.  I want to be less rigid this year (in my drawings and in my life), which is difficult for me.  I'm a rule follower and I like for things to be predictable.  If 2012 taught me one thing, it was that my preferences don't always work out for me so well.  So I'll try to go with the flow a little more.

The holiday season was one of my best for sales.  It was difficult personally because of so much loss.  I scaled back and made things more quiet than usual.  I set a firm deadline for stopping work and stuck by it.  Didn't bake a single holiday treat (until I made baguette the day after Christmas) but that worked this year.  Less pressure, fewer events.  More sitting and knitting and resting.

Now I'm ready (I think) to begin again.  One of my favorite gifts was a huge 11x13 600 page sketchbook from Gary.  It is enormous.  A little intimidating.  Today it is at the kitchen table, but it will probably live in the studio.  I'd love to make it my daily sketchbook, but it's not so portable, and I like to have the daily sketches all in one single volume.  I decided, after reading a pottery magazine one night, that I wanted to really explore pitchers this year.  I've always loved them- for pouring, serving, pressing into use as vases, just admiring their heft.  My plan is to sketch out an idea, throw and alter or hand-build a pitcher and really work with the form each week.  One pitcher for each week of the year, sketches for form and surface design, an unfired vessel each week, and then four finished glazed pieces each month, resulting in a body of 52 pitchers, large and small.  Knowing some will be things I want to keep forever, some I'll hate, some will crack and break.  I want this to be process-oriented, less product oriented (but you know I want good product, too!).

Happy New Year's, friends. Thanks for reading along with me.