Ceramics

The thing about drawing and painting is that it gives me a lot of time to think and reflect. I'm in the middle of a big ceramic painting project, which I can't really explain now, but I will post before and after pictures once I'm finished. Actually, I'll post the pictures in November after we leave Brazil, and it will make sense then.
When I was a teenager, our young women group at church would often paint ceramics. There was a lady in our ward whose great passion in life was painting ceramics, so every year or so we would have a ceramics activity. I didn't look forward to it. The painting was fun enough, but when ceramics scrape together, the sound of it makes me want to crawl up a wall. And then when you're done painting, you're left with this little ceramic knickknack, and I had enough knickknacks to start my own knickknack shop. I always dreaded ceramics activities.
One time, I decided I didn't want to have another little ceramic box for my shelf, so I skipped our activity that week. This was pretty rash for me, since I went to young women's activities every week practically without fail. But I skipped it that time and spent the rest of the week happy that I had spared myself another dust catcher. On Sunday when we had our young women class, people asked about my absence on Wednesday, and then my teacher pulled out a little ceramic box from her things. "Here, we made one for everyone who didn't make it." Gaaah!
Despite my reluctance to paint little ceramic knickknacks as a teenager, I did learn how to do it, and I remember our teacher emphasizing the dry-brush technique as we made little rosy cheeks on our bunny rabbit ornaments or whatever. And now that I'm working on my mega-awesome ceramics project (stay tuned), I am grateful for the practice and techniques I learned in my youth-- even if it did mean a shelf full of knickknacks to dust.