A Dog a Day

Today went to morn tea at a sculptor's place. I brought timtams & absorbed information. I learned that you can use a rice cooker to melt your wax & pour it into one of those silicon cake tins to make wax sheets. I'd bought one of those cake tins just this week, hoping it would work to make wax sheets in & here we are - it apparently works an absolute treat. I'm so over dealing with a heavy plaster batt... you have to soak it, keep it cool, do it outdoors squatting in the yard, make new one when it wears out, store the bastard, find that rain got to it & wore ruddy bastard grooves across it, etc. With a silicon mould you can leave out the running water mess & even work inside the studio when u make wax. Brilliant. And the rice cooker trick melts the wax without drama, no setting it on fire or blowing it up all over the ceiling, & then keeps it at a low temp afterwards as long as u want. Bloody brilliant. Damn! And everybody's got a rice cooker they never use, even us.

She does beautiful work & the photos i'd seen did not do em justice at all. Really uses bronze like it should be used. You just wanna hold them. They're all abstract. Just beaut.

She told me about Depot Beach where you can snorkel and find rocks like the little ones u find at Mystery Bay, with lines thru em, except they are the size of your hand. I must go snorkel there sometime.

Thence to studio. I poured the daschund mould, i had took it off the clay the other day & cleaned it up & soaped it. Today dampened it good, resoaped it & poured lovely fresh white plaster in & then a backing of fibreglass with a pair of honkin big wire hangers imbedded. Suspect the doggie looks a lot more like a jack russell than a daschund but u get that. I had destroyed the clay relief getting the mould off it so i used a knife & a bloody big wooden mallet to persuade the clay back into a nice flat slab for the next relief. Another mate come over later & moaned long n bitterly about people who are hard to work with & drank some beer. Sadly i can't help much but can supply beer.

He told me about Washerwoman's Beach which is where tiles wash up from a shipwreck & the tiles had been aimed for St Mary's Cathederal. So if u snorkel there u can find some nice buggered up careworn tiles swishing back n forth in the surf. I will have to go have a snorkel there when its not bloody freezing cold, gale force winds & hail, like lately.

While he was there i started on a jokey quick dog on the slab & it started to work out. Hey i could do a dog a day at this rate. Anyway i soaked it in water a bit too much & it got hard to work with, more got stuck on my fingers & tools than i left on the slab, so i called it a day. Tomorrow it'll be just right.