Happy Halloween

Wet slip again, it never doesn't make me want to either take a bite from it or pour a bucket full of it all over myself. Why is that? Delicious stuff.

Today I spent what felt like hours wrapping and packing pots to be sent away. One big parcel off to the Stirling Smith Art Gallery in Stirling and the other pile of boxes off to the National Museum in Edinburgh, both for their Christmas exhibitions. Hopefully they will be swapped in good time for a nice cheques.

I put a new blade in my stanley knife this afternoon while I was packing up the work, oh my how much easier and more pleasant that makes life. A small thing but oh it makes me happy.

Yesterday Silvana McLean came to decorate her pot for the Twelve Pots of Christmas exhibition. The pots are really coming together now, still quite a few more people to work with but it feels like it's happening finally. I had to turn Andy's dish this morning, a bit nerve wracking after all the time he had put in. I don't go through the bottoms of pots very often these days but somehow the pressure was much stronger when it was just my work that I would be spoiling.

I was just about to put on my pumpkin outfit and take a picture for you for Halloween but have been informed that the outfit has been sent away to be stored until next year. So you'll have to wait for that pleasure, the Cubs were most amused at out Halloween party on wednesday last, I dread to think what the really think about their leader, sometimes the looks they give me are priceless.

Busy Day

It feels like it's been an age since I have decorated any pots, only a week in actual fact but somehow seems much longer. Funny that isn't how time sometimes doesn't fit with how it should feel, like the fact that monday just gone made it four years since Paul and me got together, in some respects it seems like a life time ago, far more than four years and in others it's just like yesterday.

So a couple of newly decorated plates, these two inspired by some little slip pots that I saw when I visited Mary Wondrausch the other week.

I spent this morning in the company of Andy Priestman, a potter and painter friend who I know I've mentioned before. He came to decorate a pot for the twelve pots exhibition. Andy is the only other potter involved and I wanted to work with him because I like his pots and he doesn't decorate as such on his own work so I thought it would make for an interesting combination.

He brought with him a mug for me and a lump of clay now how much better a visitor can you get? A mug AND a lump of clay, how lucky am I? It just shows how easy it is to win me over.

I had a mug of Andy's a while ago which I smashed in a quite disastrous day taking out I think it was two mugs and a teapot all in one foul swoop. Anyhow here's my new one which has been enjoyed many times today already.

And here's my wild clay, it is from Luce Bay, to the far west of here, I've made a little pot this afternoon, a small bowl but I haven't cleaned the clay or anything so we shall see what happens. Exciting day!

I also had some visitors in the form of some returning customers bringing with them a friend of theirs who had just finished a pottery course. It turned out that I already know their friend who is a fellow Scottish Potters Association member Bill Runciman who has just finished at Glasgow School of Art doing the distance learning course. It was great to see them and we had some good potting chat with them too.

GMT

Here we are back to good old GMT time which means that it's starting to get dark at something awful like a quarter to 5 in the afternoon. I'm taking a deep breath as we plunge into the winter darkness. Autumn I love, as I have said before, winter I'm not so sure about and as much as I love it as it is now I know that that means that January and February are approaching ever faster and I hate that time of year. So the moral is of course enjoy crispy blowy autumn and think not on the doom and gloom that gathers on the horizon.
I'm home again from the Great Northern Contemporary Craft Fair in Manchester. What a time. I'm shattered -again and sat here huddled under a quilt with a mug of hot blackcurrant and a sniffly nose and dizzy head trying to recover from the too long spent working sillyly hard up to the show and then the stress of actually being at a show and the fact that though you aren't physically doing huge amounts it's still tiring doing the whole being attentive and interesting thing. I find it exhausting being around so many people for so long because I suppose I am so very unused to being around many people at all. All the talking and chatting and catching up is fantastic but it wears me out. Being back in Manchester was weird, I haven't been there properly in ages and I used to spend so much time there. I met so many people that I haven't seen in a while including a good many tutors from MMU which is always good but makes me a bit nervous at the same time. Alex it's always lovely to see you, sorry I picked the time you were there to escape for 10 minutes to get some fresh air. I met up with people I used to work with, with an good old Scouting friend and his family, with my cousin and her partner, lots of people from uni and of course my good friends who I am in touch with more regularly too.
I didn't sell a huge amount I'll be honest though I met lots of very interested people, a number of whom I think will be back so in that respect it did me no harm what so ever. The quality of exhibitor I thought was incredibly high, the number of visitors was incredibly high, sometimes I couldn't get down the aisles for the numbers of people in the place. The organisation was brilliant and the organisers had endless enthusiasm and patience. I got a mention on a another blog from the show, h is for home, click to have a look at some of the other exhibitors at the show. I apologise for once again failing to take any pictures. I have one of the stand and that's it. Rubbish I know, sorry.
So now I'm into recovery mode but needing to get back into making mode too, I'll be back in the workshop properly tomorrow all being well, fingers crossed etc.

Away Again

Tomorrow morning early I'll be off again, this time down to Manchester where I spent a lot of time, both at uni and for a couple of years working in a gallery there after I graduated. The show, the Great Northern Contemporary Craft Fair is taking place at Spinningfields which I believe is the same area as the old YHA shop that I worked in before it was bulldozed, it was a bit rough when I was there, cracks all over the walls, probably from the amount of times we were ram raided, it needed bulldozing. It's a bit odd in a way being there as I haven't actually been there with my pots since I left though I do have pots in the gallery I worked in, the Royal Exchange.

Lisa Hooper spent the morning with me decorating her pot. It's lovely, she got quite into the sgraffito, as a print maker I think it had many echos for her. This is just a taster, I didn't want to give too much away.

Until the next time, have a good weekend and pop into the show if you are in Manchester and say hello.

Visitors - more!

Phil McMenemy my good friend and great photographer cam over this afternoon. He is also involved in this exhibition coming up The Twelve Pots of Christmas at the McGill Duncan Gallery. Twelve pots by me, eleven being decorated by other artists and craftspeople and one by well - me. So Kay came and did hers last week and Phil came to practise today. His attitude was great, sgraffito is by far the easier of my two techniques to control, especially when you have a limited amount of trial time and only one pot to go with. Phil hated art at school having been shouted at because he was colour blind so he said he was quite nervous about this project. Anyway he jumped in enthusiastically and wants to go with the slip trailing and lettering and the whole hog! Completely out of his comfort zone but good on him I say. It'll be a great fat pot when it's done I have no doubt.

I decorated lots of pots this afternoon, lots of pie dishes and mugs and handled soup bowls, I got into a really good flow, so good that it was half seven before I left work after having had an eight 15 start too. This was my first coat on, helmet on, light off shut the door, oops I can't see where the bike is across the yard night. Many more where that came from. I gets so dark out there, I love it but I rode home slowly, takes a few nights to get my head into the working with a narrow beam of light on the road again.
Tomorrow I'll be meeting Lisa Hooper who is a print maker, she's coming pot decorating too. More news on how that goes tomorrow. I've also to fully get my head around the packing up of boxes (banana box shortage in Castle Douglas trauma!!!!!!) and getting Paul's car packed up and generally being ready to go early on thursday morning. We have visitors tomrrow night too so I need to be ultra organised - phew big list for the morning then. Night night.

Fair Frenzy

It's nearly here, the Great Northern Contemporary Craft Fair and the chaos that always precedes a show is ongoing. You'd have thought that I would start to get slightly better at all this but it always seems to be a rush and a last minute panic. You would have laughed today if you had seen me and my dad struggling to get a table top and two none folding trestle legs into the back of my little Polo car. Who was I kidding thinking I'd be able to get them and all my pots and my into my car. Off to beg Paul to borrow his.
I was pondering today some pots that are on my shelves and realising that they have never been on the blog. It made me realise just how much of what I do doesn't come anywhere near getting posted on here. I'm not sure what the unpublished criteria are for pots or parts of pots reaching the dizzy heights of this blog but for whatever reason it is you only ever see a part of the whole. Aren't you glad I don't bore you with any more of my ramblings!

The daleks are back too, this is the second post in my blogging life that mentions daleks, what does that mean? This one was on our drive when I came home from work and I drove through Rhonehouse and spotted another three lurking there. Is it an invasion?

Saturday Sunshine and a Pretty Puppy

I have a new "thing"! It's not a pot, I know that is unusual but it is instead a glorious bowl of Amanda's. These pictures show you nothing of the subtle colours but I did like the shadows with the light behind the bowl. It was a present for 'helping' her at Origin, shhh don't tell her but I had a great time.

Yesterday the weather was stupendous. It was glorious, sunshine, blue skies, no wind, heavenly. We cycled out the back of Clatteringshaws loch and over to Loch Dee. It's wonderful up there, you are surrounded by hills and not far from Glen Trool. I love it.

We had a picnic lunch up by Loch Dee in the sunshine. There were many patched of grass and heather that were still in the shade of the trees that had a hearty coating of frost still on them and this was at 2 in the afternoon, it had obviously been a rather chill night up there.

I love piles of logs. I think I've probably posted a good many of them on here before but I can't go past a pile of logs like that without stopping for a stroke or a sniff or a photograph.

Clatteringshaws from just by the visitor centre.

My mum and dad have a new dog - Bella, is she not a sweetie.

She's come to be friends with the lovely Jessie.

Been working all day today, packed a glaze kiln and threw lots of mugs and generally started to reorganise in my head what is still to do before the C word which is 10 weeks away but means that in 7 weeks all my exhibitions will be well under way and the shows will all be over. Hmmm put it like that and what am I doing here blogging?

Happy Hannah's Harvest Jugs

Guess who's a happy Hannah! I am very pleased with these and tonight, just to celebrate we are off to a harvest supper in Corsock.

Moneybox Mayhem

Money box mayhem this morning, they got more and more detailed as I went on, hmmm that helped me get as much as I could done today - not! Makes for more exciting pots though.

The next show for me is the Great Northern Contemporary Craft Fair at Spinning fields in Manchester. Come and visit if you are around. The variety of exhibitors is vast, in many different materials and techniques. I'm looking forward to seeing the rest of the show if I get chance.

For those of you who don't live near Manchester you can now buy some of my mugs along with mugs by lots of other potters from this new website. Littlebrownmug

The box above and the plate below inspired by my trip to visit Mary Wondrausch last week.

I don't know a great deal about Grayson Perry who won the Turner Prize a couple of years back but he was speaking on Radio 4 this afternoon at the Frieze Art Fair in London, it's at about 26minutes past on the listen again thingy-ma-bob.

Tuesday

This morning my "to do" list was so scarily long that I resorted to the age old technique of procrastination, I went out to tidy up the plant pots for the winter. Not that I have any idea how or what to tidy for this particular time of year but it made me feel better and it looks better now too. While I was at it I tried my hand at a bit of ceramic restoration on this big plant pot, I think no one would ever guess that the original pot that the tree was in was the blown over by the gales last week and that I had the very next day swapped the pot for another that I had at home - this one - which as I walked back into the workshop job completed promptly blew over and broke!
Today I have had the pleasure of Kay Ribbens hat maker extraordinaire's company at work as she has been decorating a small jug of mine for an upcoming exhibition. More on that nearer the time but I won't show you the jug until all the 12 pots have been decorated.

Lovely lettering that was on the street where we were staying in London.

Some willow sculptures cascading over the pavilion at Origin this week.

Things I learnt in London:

- It takes two grown women a ridiculous length of time and much hysterical giggling to work out the complications of the complex light switches in the hotel room.

- The moon seemed much larger than here so we must have been closer to it.

- At the Elephant and Castle I could see no sign of either. Five times I went past slowly in the traffic jams while on the bus and still no sign at all. I felt cheated.

- The gherkin building feels like it's at the end of every street.

- The bus maps aren't half as confusing as I had first thought.

Many more to come

This morning on my ride to work the grass was white with frost, the sky was clear and blue, my eyes were stinging with the cold and by the time I got to work my fingers were numb even through my gloves. The air just cut straight through my clothing and here we are in mid October there are months to go yet and it'll get worse before it gets better but this morning was fabulous! Crisp, bright, fresh and zingy, my head was clear as a bell by the time I arrived. I love autumn, the leaves are turning and the drive is strewn with freshly dropped shiny velvety conkers begging for me to collect them up. I think I may have been a squirrel in a former life as throughout autumn my pockets are always full of tree fruits, conkers and acorns mainly but beech nuts and spinning jennys too when I can find them.

The exhibition Pots and Baskets is now open at The Barn Gallery at The Bield at Blackruthven near Perth - ours not yours Ang! This is the joint exhibition between the Scottish Potters Association and the Scottish Basket Makers Circle which has been in the planning for months now. I hear it looks great though I wasn't able to get to the opening due to only just being home from London. I'll let you see some pictures as soon as I get them. These are some of mine and Lizzie's pieces.

The clay was bitter cold this morning and the glaze bucket, brrrr you can imagine. I'm finishing pots this week for the upcoming Great Northern Contemporary Craft Fair which will be in Manchester in a couple of weeks time. I'm looking forward to this show, it's the second time it has been held but the first time I have participated. I supply a gallery in Manchester but I have never exhibited at a show there since I moved away which is just eight years ago now. I came to Galloway for twelve months and I'm still here.

A couple more London pictures for you. I have yet to take a trip on the London Eye but I do plan too, maybe next time.

The entrance to Somerset House where the Origin show is held, the fuzzy lime green bit is the entrance to the pavilion.

Away and back again - again.

I admit I got rather excited as we drove over Tower Bridge last sunday morning. It had been a long drive from Galloway down to London with Amanda who was exhibiting at Origin. I haven't ever been over that bridge, I probably caused Amanda mortal embarrassment by taking a picture as we were driving along. It is an impressive beast of a bridge though you have to admit.

The morning after the set up and before the opening (which helpers weren't allowed into we discovered when we got there - eeek alone in London with no immediate plans!) we had a late start and a big fat breakfast to set us up for the rest of the day. After that all we needed was sleep.

I don't have any pictures of Amanda's stand but you can see it on her blog. There were a few visitors to the stand that seemed to recognise me but were obviously confused by seeing me with a stand full of glass. I quite enjoyed myself, it's far easier to sing the praises of someone elses work than it is of your own and Amanda's work is so fabulous that I couldn't stop myself.

No surprises that I went back to the V & A museum again. The world ceramics part was closed, what is it with me and visiting places that are closed when I get there? The show in Contemporary Applied Arts was shut too though they were huge Felicity Ayliffe pots that I could see reasonably well from the entrance.

Linda Bloomfield was also exhibiting at Origin and she invited me back for dinner one night. Thanks Linda, I had a lovely time. It was great to see Linda's neat and tidy studio tucked away in her back garden, you'd never know it was there and that there was all that activity going on inside it. Hope you had a good Origin.

Linda had a quince tree in her garden, in fact we ate some in a crumble for dinner. I've never seen quinces before, I don't know what I was expecting, I think I was expecting more of a fig type thing, not a furry hard pear.

Speaking of quince, the following day I had the pleasure of meeting a certain Mary Queen of Slipware Wondrausch. When I met her at Oxford last year she had invited me to come and visit her at home, so as I was in London for a while and she is but a short train ride south I thought I would take her up on the offer. Honestly what a treat! Maybe so much alcohol at such an early time in the day isn't quite my usual habit and then being urged to pick up some very old and very special pots, phew quite intensely nerve wracking. If you have seen the Brickfields book which is about her house you will have a feel of what to expect but it is all that and more when you really see it. Mary met me at the station covered in clay as she had been throwing and unpacking a kiln that morning. I hope I can still be potting at that age, I think she's 86 at the moment. Full of stories and information and tales about pots and potters I have no idea what she thought about me, heaven knows but it was fabulous to spend some time with her as so much of what I do comes in a round about way from her. Jason who I worked my apprenticeship for trained with Mary about 30 or so years ago so it's a bit of a family tree. There was a beautiful little ink and wash sketch on the table in the conservatory where we had lunch, such a simple but lovely drawing. I really must start to spend some more time on drawing and looking I don't do it nearly enough at the moment but I should.

I was too much in awe and too scared to even think of asking to take any photographs but I did spend the journey back to London trying to remember and draw the pots that I had looked at and loved.

Back to this today, a relief from the hectic city life I have been living recently. I have 'to do' lists that have been reproducing while I have been away and a slight panic when I looked at just what I have top make in the next couple of weeks so I was in and making today on a gorgeous autumn day with the sun low in the sky casting fabulous shadows in the workshop.

Friday Feeling

Sunflower! The first one has flowered. It says "Giant" on the packet, this one is at least three foot tall. Hmmm.

Nearly there, come on now little flower, you can do it.

Big list to be tackled this morning and I didn't do too bad really, a few more things to finish tomorrow morning before I'm away but I was quite pleased with the progress really. A couple of things still under plastic but not too many.

Third harvest jug been sgraffitoed this afternoon. It was a lovely way to spend a drizzly friday afternoon. This morning was the first wet ride to work in about 4 weeks! No doubt there's more to come over the next few months, I suppose I should start to get myself acclimatised to it.

The Autumn exhibition opens tomorrow at the Parkfields Gallery in Ross on Wye. A very lovely part of the country, spent a good few weeks there enjoying Venture Scout camps in years gone by. Those were the days when summer holidays were sunny and hot and never ended, we'd canoe down the rivers being chased by swans on the way, build camp fires and talk all night,tie our Venture leader to the back of a transit van and drive him across the field, learn to drink cider, think I'll stop there. Good place to be though, many happy memories from those camps.

Here are two bowls that Blogger Margaret gave to me when I met her in London. She does do such exquisite decorating, these two have some of her enamels on the wings of the beasties. They're beautiful. Thanks Margaret.

So tomorrow off down south to the big city again. At this rate I will be picking up quite a cockney accent in no time at all. I'll be able to visit the Victoria and Albert Museum again but where else should I go if I have time? Tell me your "must see" things to do in London and I'll see what I can see.

Nope the picture above is not photoshopped, it is indeed a green KitKat. How crazy is that! It was from some of the Japanese teachers and kids that come and stay near here. I have to say from past experience I should have known that the sweets from Japan are not as we would expect them to be here in the UK. Everything has a quite different slant on it.
I will try to blog from London if I get chance, no doubt though we will both be quite worn out by the time we get back to the place we are staying at at the end of the days. I can't wait to see Amanda's new work, I'm really excited! Visit Origin if you have the chance.