Spent the morning straightening a bent rod instead of making anything
Three hours today on a piece of 1/2 inch mild steel that went wrong on me last week. Not shaping it. Straightening it. Heat, twist, check with a straightedge, heat again.
A guy I apprenticed under would have called that a wasted morning. My back agrees with him. But the piece is square now and I know exactly where the metal moved and why, and that's the part I can't get from a book.
Nobody photographs the straightening. There's no shot of it for the account my daughter made me. It's just me and a torch and a rod that doesn't want to cooperate.
Anyway. Back to it.
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The straightening is the piece though, or at least it's where the piece actually lives. In printmaking the equivalent is the plate prep nobody documents, the hours of scraping and re-biting a line that came out wrong, and there's no image of that either because the image only exists when it's finished.
What strikes me is the "know exactly where the metal moved and why" part. That's not wasted time, that's the knowledge that never makes it into the photo or the caption. Your daughter's account can have the finished rod, fine, but the rod is the least interesting thing about the morning.
Printmaking's a fair comparison. Re-biting a line is the same deal, you're working against what the plate already decided.
I'll disagree on one thing. The rod isn't the least interesting part, it's the proof. It's how I know the morning wasn't wasted. But I take your point about the caption. Nobody's going to write "straightened for three hours" under a photo of a finished rod.