"Very good work ... rather messy"

I stumbled across that headline quote yesterday and realized today that it was perfect for today's blog post. The complete quotation is, "Very good work, but book is rather messy." I believe the woman who wrote that was a young teacher I only knew as "Miss Donahue." She was my first grade teacher when I was about six years old. And she was right. And prophetic, as you can see from the display of bisqueware scattered about my studio now, awaiting glazing and firing.
The book is "The New Basic Readers" workbook, full of the little exercises of the "see Spot run" and "which of these four kites is bigger?" variety that primary school kids were given to help us ... what? ... understand the way we would communicate with and comprehend our world in 1953? I guess that must have been it.
Anyway, Miss Donahue would probably now be in her late 70s, if she's still alive. But her judgment about my way of doing things was prescient. I'm a mess.
The studio is loaded with bisque right now, cups piled in bowls, piled in bigger bowls. After I post this, I'll go back out there and begin to dry-stack the kiln and begin to make some order out of everything. I just don't have enough shelves and open spaces to pile a kilnload of biscuitware in preparation for a glaze firing. Or, more to the point, I haven't made myself figure out how to do that.
This firing will include 20-30 bowls for our local Soup Bowls for Hunger project, a lot of mugs, some "tiddler" vases to fill empty spots, some prototype chalices for a Woods Hole church and a number of other odd things. More photos to come, once I've restored order ...