Hopefully "Worth the Wait"!

I've had this gal finished for a little while now, but I needed to get a second set of pictures of her. I always get the angle wrong when I am trying to shoot photos of this mold, probably because model horses almost always need to be shot from a slightly upward angle. "Worth the Wait" is the exception in that she ends up looking off-balance unless she is shot slightly downward.

It was interesting to revisit this particular mold at this point in my career. I was reminded that the last "Worth the Wait" done in my own studio was actually the first horse I ever glazed here at home. (I had done several before while visiting Joan at the Pour Horse factory.) I didn't own a kiln, so the horse was sent to one of those infamous ceramic stores that charge you by the inch to fire things in their kilns. You know - the kind of stores populated by a bunch of older women and a handful of cats.

Not only did I not own a kiln, I hadn't actually applied the final glaze to my own pieces before. At Pour Horse I was invariably doing the detailing up until the last minute, so Joan had always applied the gloss and then shipped the finished piece to me. It would be the first of many skills that Joan would teach me over the phone. (Thank goodness for unlimited calling plans!)

Looking back, I can only marvel at my own insanity. I had promised the horse for a NAMHSA auction, even though I didn't actually have the facilities to make the horse, or the precise knowledge of how to finish her. And ceramic production being what it was, I wouldn't even know if I did it all right until the end. Yet I handed her over to the nice women at Creative Crafts and left for a family vacation. I would return the day before the event and then drive on to the show that day to deliver her. The whole vacation I worried that someone's ceramic Christmas tree might end up permanently welded to my horse's barrel. Or that she might end up in some forgotten corner of the shop (there seemed to be lot of those). Or get knocked over by a cat. Now I realize that the real risk was that I hadn't the foggiest idea what I was doing, but then I was blissfully ignorant about that part.

I had pretty much forgotten all that, at least until I began working on this one. It was a good reminder that sometimes the best thing is to take a few crazy chances and do something you aren't quite sure you know how to do.