In more than one way. First, my portion of the hospital bill for my surgery was significantly less than I was expecting, so Yippee!!!

Second, I took a few minutes this morning to do a quick experiment before work. I had a greenware pendant which I painted with a dark gray slip (weeks ago). I saw a technique on my new Kristen Kieffer DVD about using acrylic matte medium as a surface resist. You paint the design on with the resist, then once it’s dry you take a sponge and wipe away the background, leaving a raised design. Here’s my first attempt:

The piece on the left is pretty much what the other one looked like, with the exception of the started-then-abandoned attempt at sgrafitto.

You can see in this picture that the design is slightly raised. I could have gone further but I was losing a bit of the resist along the edge and didn’t want to take my chances.

The acrylic medium will burn away in the bisque firing, then I can glaze it as usual. I’m very excited about this technique, as the designs I create will be 100% mine and not so easy to copy. I’ll be cutting another zillion pieces out of clay now for more experiments with underglazes and different colored slips.