If you’ve been accompanying me on this journey, and actually paying attention, you might be thinking that these pieces don’t look like anything I would do. They’re prettier, more polished, possibly more sellable, definitely more accessible. I took a silver clay class this weekend. Really fun. Easy, quick. Knocked off a couple of pretty baubles in no time. Win-win. So why am I torn between easy, pretty, accessible and the distressed, scarred, not-for-the-faint-of-heart pieces that I love to do? I love the dimples and humps and battle scars that fire and pressure and smelly patinas coax out of a piece of metal. No piece is the same. Sometimes the same piece isn’t the same as it was 10 minutes ago. It’s unpredictable and frustrating, and rewarding and worth the trouble. But dimples and humps and smelly gray stuff don’t always evoke the same reaction when we look in the mirror. We flip through magazines and watch TV and still long to be easy, pretty, accessible, sellable. Some not altogether crazy looking guy in the train station told me yesterday that I looked fantastic. I grinned and got all giggly and strutted my dimpled humps back to work.