This is not really my favorite question.
Do I count the time I spent looking at some designs or photographs that stuck with me and have become some part of the inspiration for a piece?
Do I count the time trying designs that didn’t work at all, but that left some legacy that helped me with the next attempt?
Do I count what a writer friend calls “staring at the wall time” (for which, by the way, she charges her clients)?
Assuming I’m talking about torch-fired enameling, for a moment, do I only start counting time when I actually cut out a shape –? (And look at it, and see if it works, and bend it here and there perhaps, and redo or file some flawed piece of it, or throw it away and try it again, or wait until the next day to see if its redeeming qualities are more apparent….)
Can I count the time when I mix the enamel (too thick, too thin?) and test it to see if it is dripping off the stirring fork with just the right intensity, and get it wrong anyway and have to start over?
Can I count the time I am waiting for the enamel to dry, because if it isn’t dry it will literally go up in smoke?
I guess there’s no controversy about counting the time when I’m actually firing the piece – just a few minutes – and carefully watching what it’s doing as I turn it, and then time waiting for the piece to cool because the colors will change, and maybe I then choose to refire it, trying to get rid of an ugly bit and encourage that beautiful streak of yellow….
This beautiful fragment of Anasazi pottery has been sitting in its prong setting for at least three years, waiting for me to understand how to design the pendant.
And then there is time spent looking at it with a colder eye, once it dries and comes home with me, to see if it seems to “work” as determined by some instinct within me that reaches its conclusions in ways that are mostly mysterious with me, and if not….do I throw it away or try to change it somehow? Maybe it was fired with the white “magic enamel” and it would like to be dipped into the black enamel and refired?
And then there’s the purely mechanical challenge of choosing and putting on the findings, maybe filing away a minor bump with an addendum stone, and attaching a tag….which, for beaded jewelry, often means going to websites where I bought stones to be as sure as possible they really are the type of gemstone I think they are.
And can I count the time I spend wearing something to see how it feels, noticing whether anything seems amiss that needs fixing, but also – quite frankly – just enjoying it and taking it in and welcoming it to the world and celebrating its existence?