Day 2 had serious nap potential.  The class was to spend all day sculpting while I had to do a molding demo.  I had a dream all picked out when I realized Ian wasn't there. Where the heck was Ian?  He was 0/2 on punctuality.  The phone rang an hour into class and there was Ian, except we didn't know where he was and neither did he.  It seems in LA, the bus system is a crapshoot.  You just hop on the nearest one and hope for the best.  Well, Ian did just that and wound up "at a station with trees".  Ok, that narrows it down to about 20 or so.  "Is there anything else that might help me find where you are?" 

"Yeah, there is a guy here with a shopping cart".

Great, after finally getting something more concrete like a street address, I drove the 30 miles to go pick him up.  This put a serious damper in any chance I had of napping.

It was decided we would get Ian to and from class to save everyone's sanity. 

Thankfully, Bear had 3 or 4 sculptures I could choose from to mold, so I did a molding demo on one of them, while the class worked on their sculpts.

The demo went off without a hitch and we were ready to open the mold.  We knew going in we would have some small issues with undercuts that could cause the front half of the mold to get a "little" stuck, but Bear used the bag to keep the clay from sticking to the armature and it would make our job alot easier (right Bear :) ).  5 hours of prying, pulling, pushing, panting later, exhaustion set in.  Dean went into the other room to pass out and happened to land upon a rubber spatula.  After picking it up to throw at Bear he realized this would be just the wonder tool to free the armature from the clay.  A few pokes and prods later, we were looking at our first successful seminar-based mold and Eddie's new catch phrase "It's all about the bag!" (shortly followed by "Dance Monkey, Dance").

We were all beat (except for Quintin, he never gets tired) and ready to call it a day.  We limped off to our respective "places to sleep" with the excitement of tomorrows mold day in our heads.

Day 3 - MOLD DAY!  The 2 words that invoke the most fear of anyone running a seminar.  The idea is to load up 8 people with wet setting stone that will very soon become dry hard stone and have them apply it to their sculpture.  All the while, I had to  make sure no one lost a hand, finger or pinky toe.  To their credit, I was the only one panicking and curled up in the fetal position.  They all molded their sculptures like a pro.  I do believe Tosha may have applied a splash coat to Johnnie and was onto the next coat before he said anything, but we hosed him down before it set too much.  Thankfully, a few people had worked with stone molds before and had no trouble getting theirs done (though Bear's attempt at lifecasting his head in stone when he was 17 doesn't count).

It's also important to note that doing 9 molds requires alot of materials.  Much to Chris and Dean's chagrin, I required them to bring their bag of Ultracal just in case.  It seems Orlando had no Ultracal and was totally dry when I was gathering supplies the night (oops, the week) before.  Who woulda thunk that 10 yards of burlap used for the fiber layers in the mold would be pushing it too.  By the time Quintin was doing his fiber layers, we had to cut up his shirt, pants and underwear to get it done. 

It was finally time to open the molds (and this time Bear used the bag).  All of them opened like a dream which was a good thing because I feared I might have to keep away from Quintin if our lack of extra fiber caused his mold to break.

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