Save That Cardboard

I think as artists we find many uses for every day things. Take for example, cardboard boxes that things come in. After being cut up into flat pieces, they make great "trays" to carry my paper clay slabs from my studio to dry outside in my patio.

A few weeks ago we had a few days of rain following a week of very hot weather. I was in the middle of making a rather large vessel and did not want to wait for it to dry on its own time so I made a "drying box" out of the sheets of cut-up cardboard. All the pieces are held up by their own weight pressing against each other. I did not use any tape. A small bathroom heater (running for about an hour at maximum power) provided the heat to firm up my work sufficiently enough for me to continue working through those couple of rainy days. I put my work-in-progress vessel into my make shift "drying box" as needed, each time rebuilding the box. The Sun came out after two days of rain.

It makes me appreciate how much "free power" we get from our Sun on a typical Southern California day. When it comes to paper clay, the Sun is our friend! I did a search on Google and found out that on a sunny day, we get on average 100W of solar energy per square foot.