After about 10 months now, the fact that Paul and I are retired has still not quite sunk in. In January I stopped producing a monthly magazine, my very last graphic design client. But we haven’t quite grasped hold of the fact we can do anything we want. Or to think BIG! Well today maybe we’ve gotten started on that…

My family is getting together in Tucson at the end of April. And then about 2 weeks later I’m to attend the Bring out Your Chinas Convention (BOYCC) near San Diego. Today Paul said, why don’t we make it a biiiig spring road trip and drive to both places?? With all those incredible mountain and desert west’s national parks in between?? We could bring the Boyz and the bikes and camp our way from Arizona to California.

ROAD TRIP!!!!!

I sure hope we can make this work. It would be incredible! Spring is the perfect time to go to those places before it all gets too hot, and before the summer crowds. I would surely dust off my blogging skills and document that big American Adventure!

Before any spring fun begins, I have a lot of work to complete. (Oh, and 2 months of snowboarding left!) I’m back in Boulder this week getting “Roundabout” ready for mold-making. He’s gone as far as I can take him in the clay stage. I’m relieved to report that at least the sculpture does stand on its own. Always a bit hard to verify when you’re sculpting clay in the air on top of a pole. I unscrewed it from the armature today in order to put it on a shorter one for the mold and stood him up briefly to check:

Paul is heading out to New York this week to spend several days with his Dad, and before he left I asked him to make Roundie’s mold box.

Just one of the million reasons why marriage is so wonderful: men love any excuse to use power tools, especially nasty noisy things like the saw…

The photo above shows Roundie on his much shorter post with the dimensions of the mold box drawn on the base. I want to make the box as small as possible because that means less rubber to pour and to cut apart.

The simple wood box will be placed around the sculpture, sealed with caulk, and then I will pour in the liquid urethane rubber to a level about an inch above the ears. It will cure in one day, then I will take the box off with Roundie entombed in a rubber brick. The next step is to cut it apart (probably a 3 piece mold) and then it will be ready to have plastic resin poured in to make a copy of the sculpture. The sculpture is destroyed in this process. It is a fairly crude way to do it but I am familiar with the process now and it’s fast so that’s the way I do it. It’ll take me about a week to clean up, detail out, and finish one resin copy. That will be my sculpture master which will be sent out to have a production mold made. The sell-able resins are cast from that. Better to pay for that expertise! If all goes well I think Roundie could be off to the casting company by the first week of March.

I am also glazing two chinas this week and hoping to cast a china “Optime” from the plaster molds. I will hardly have time to enjoy the fact that the weather will be in the sunny 60s. It feels like spring is almost within reach and how invigorating and inspiring that is. Even if we surely do have at least 2 more months of Colorado winter, this kind of February thaw gets all the creative juices rising!