Sunny Saturday

A good friend of mine, Linda Woodfield opened her new workshop studio today in Newton Stewart. We popped in to see her and wish her well with her new venture. It's a great place that she's found, an old butchers shop on the main street in the town which her and her son and husband have spent the last few months sorting and repairing and making it smart.

Linda is a textile artist and we have done quite a few exhibitions together over the last four or five years. I have quite a collection of her work here and I think she has more of my pots than anyone else I know.

We had a quick ride too today, it's been a beautiful day, sunny and blue skied but rather chilly when you were in the shade and a nippy bitey wind too. It did mean that there were loads of frozen puddles along the flat bit of the ride which needed breaking which is great as I love the noise.

The glue of society

In conjunction with The British Museum Radio 4 have been running this series called The History of the World in One Hundred Objects. I've been listening in when I can and it's a cracker. Today's piece was a 7,000 year old pot from the Jomon area of Japan, thought to be where pottery started. It's a great listen for potters. Follow this link if you want to but I'm not sure if you can listen from abroad.
Great project, you can upload your own objects too, things that you think are important historically.
Work wise today I have been mostly throwing black slip all over the workshop and I have packed a bisque for the first time this year. It feels like I haven't managed to get very much done this week though it also feels like I haven't stopped either, frustrating really.

Spring's on it's way

Narcisisisisisisi I think they're called, tiny daffs, anyway whatever they be they are on their way out as are the snowdrops under the big beech tree on the drive. The end of the dark days is nigh and actually so far, fingers crossed, touch wood it's been an ok winter. So it was minus a million for a lot of it but at least that meant it was clear blue skies and glorious sunshine. Give me that rather than wet grey and miserable any day.

Creatures are creeping.

Funny mist the other morning, it was great seeing it lying on the fields in the dents. A bit eery but good.

It's been a right busy week this week, all sorts of things happening. Yesterday I had a visit from a Scottish Potter friend, Lynda who used to be the newsletter editor for the SPA, she came to try to teach me how to be the SPA newsletter editor. So I now have the relevant software which I've never used in my life and a list of things that go in each month and things that are needed and a list of deadlines. Oh how on earth do I get myself into these things? As if I didn't have enough to do already.

Been making pots and getting things delivered to Designs Gallery in Castle Douglas which now have a really good display of my pots for the next six weeks or so. Great cafe downstairs too if you're in the area and thinking of popping in.

Oh and the lovely Philip Leach down in Hartland all those many miles away has started a blog too - finally!

Computer funny business

So much for fixing it the other week, the computer has taken on a mind of it's own as is their want. So I can't get the pictures off my camera at the moment and nor can I compose a new email, I don't think the two are linked but you never know with these beasts do you.
Each day for the last week or so I have had to be restacking bags of clay. As the once neat and tidy stack of bags defrosts it is all getting heaved and shoved about, a bit like a miniature plate-tectonics really (which I love anyway, volcanoes, subduction zones, oh GCSE geology I loved it), and I find a dozen or so bags unceremoniously dumped on the floor each morning. Well it's either that or Alan's having a laugh.
I have been contemplating getting my pug mill cleaned out and fixed back together but never quite get around to it. The defrosted clay though I have discovered is pretty yuck, the bottom of the bag is like slip and the top is like brick. I know I could just wedge it all extra well but there's a ton of it, makes you quake at the knees with the thought. I brought an extension lead into work today as that has been one of the reasons never to get around to starting it up. I cleaned out the white clay that was in it and then plugged it in, realising as I did so that I didn't after all need the extension lead. It worked! So I started pugging the defrosted clay in with my bucket-fulls of reclaim which has been sitting there for what feels like years. I should have stopped about about 8 bags and a bucket and a half of reclaim but I was on a roll. Well I am certainly going to pay for that tomorrow, my muscles are aching already with all the lifting and shoving and pulling down on that handle. Ho hum, at least there is a good stack of clay waiting there and being just lovely.

Jugs and oranges

I slipped the three legged beasts and I like them rather a lot! Two are no more because I seem to have suddenly learnt how to throw really finely and the flipping things collapsed on me, hmmm mustn't try so hard next time.

I have been trying putting different things in the foot rings which is something I used to do at uni and while working with Jason and haven't done for ages but keep feeling that I should.

Brushing slip on as I was the other day is all very well when it's a form without any additions, ie no handles / spouts / random twiddly bits. So I have watered down some of my white slip, usually it's the thickness that when you dip your finger in it only just breaks over your knuckles. This new thinner slip is like single cream and I could see it breaking over the edges of handles as I poured it.

I found the advert for the Shipley exhibition that I mentioned in the last post, just in case you were interested at all.

This amused me this afternoon, three people with oranges of some breed or other for lunch, they made a nice wee family I thought.

That's all for today I think.

Slippy day in another way!

Guess the inspiration of the staring owl / bird of prey Amanda!

I've been brushing slip on my pots today, I think I've said this before, it's not something I do often but keep meaning to have a play with and as now is my playing time of year, that is exactly what I am doing - and liking it. Though whether I will like it finished as much as I like it now is another matter but only time will tell.

I put necks on these fat jugs too, handles tomorrow hopefully.

Trying to be a bit freer this year, can you tell? I like these leaves above but the bird below got a bit stiff in comparison to it's border I think, shame but tis all trials and seeing what things look like I suppose.

Once upon a time about four and a bit years ago I took a trip (oh heck now I come to think of it is was an epic trip!) with my friend Linda, we drove to Dumfries, missed the direct train to Newcastle, waited for the next which meant a change at Carlisle, got to Carlisle, while writing a postcard (don't ask) we missed the connection (I know insane) it was raining and then the line we wanted was flooded so we got a train replacement bus service half way then got on the train again, and finally got to Newcastle a good few too many hours after we should have. The reason for this epic journey was I suppose two fold, one to visit an exhibition at Shipley art gallery which try as I might I can't remember the name of but was a folk art quilting show. Secondly though maybe the exhibition was just a means to an end, was to meet again a certain man who I had met in a car park (a lovely carpark, in a forest, out cycling you know, not just a random supermarket or anything like that) a couple of months previously. I took Linda, a quilter and textile artist, for moral support and just in case he turned out to be an axe murderer (can you believe he did actually have two ice axes in the boot of his car when we met him!) So Linda claims I paid not the slightest bit of attention to the exhibition but four and a bit years later I can prove her wrong as the "love apples" as they were called on the quilt I liked best (tomatoes to the rest of us) appear in the oval dish in the photo below. So there you go Linda, it was worth long and the long and torturous trip after all. Oh and just in case you wondered the man we met was worth the trip too ( he's looking at me suspiciously as I write this because I'm chuckling and smiling to myself at the thought).

Some ovalled dishes made last week. They will have the outsides slipped tomorrow hopefully, these have brushed on slip too, it's harder to see than the white so I really have no idea what these will look like.

This slab is another to be made into a dish. The trees were some that I found going through old sketch books last week, they are I think if I remember rightly at Parkgate on the way back to Dumfries from Moffat just in case you needed to know that.

Back again!

Lots of pictures to make up for the fact that I have been away for a week. No computer so no email, no blogging, no pictures, but lots of time to do my knitting and read books, amazing what you get done without the distractions, oh and Paul was a way for three days too.

We had some more snow in the week, most of the previous fall had gone, well not gone specifically but had been turned into hellish ice on top of the already pretty scary ice that we already had. More patterns were made though it was getting more difficult as this snow is on top of ice so I had to be even more wary than usual of my distinctly dodgy sense of balance in order to not cawp over.

A sight you don't see very often, my sketchbooks and this is a one off believe me they won't be making a regular appearance here. I'm always slightly ashamed of them, they never were amazing items at uni and yet I always felt they were supposed to be something extraordinary. They make more sense now that I'm out of college as now I can see why I need them, for me, for what I do but I just didn't 'get' why I needed them at college and I'm pretty sure my tutors could tell and I'm pretty sure they knew that nine times out of ten I made something and then drew stuff. I've never felt I have a style of drawing really and pencils just put me in minor panic mode, a slip trailer however now that's completely different. Some of these books go back a bit, the bottom right one is from when I was a Jason's, the pattern there is on a bowl I have here but I'd forgotten how much I liked it. I've been looking back through old things these last few weeks, there's stuff in them there books that I feel I can still use. Now that's why I need sketch books!

Kick - step - kick - step, reminded me of a dance from my pantomime chorus girl days.

I can't get enough of the patterns in the snow. It's been ace seeing them all, so many sweet wee feet and then scuffle marks and wing patterns and sheep and deer and what looked like a blooming big dog!

I made a tree the other morning in the farm yard, again a solid sheet of perfectly polished ice under that snow, gently gently.

I've been a busy girls, making and thinking and things have been happening though a little slower than usual but probably that's because I'm thinking. I have things I still want to play with but without having a deadline on the horizon I'm finding it hard to really get the hang of trying new things. I'm getting there I think. These funny fat jugs remind me of something I saw in the Netherlands the other year and I have been putting feet on them and a couple of dishes this week, maybe because I've been thinking so hard about staying on my feet and because I've been walking to and from work and not cycling. Who knows why they have appeared, maybe it's just madness.

A brushed and trailed slipped slab, made into a dish today.

How beautiful is this! Looks like the twig fell and bounced in the snow leaving it's imprint before resting next to it, my photography does it no justice but it was gorgeous.

Now what made this mark? Well in case you can't guess it was a Hannah carrying two bags of clay and ee-by-gum it blooming hurt! Usually falling on a bag of clay as opposed to the floor may lead to a slightly softer landing, that is unless the bags are frozen into big red twelve and a half kilogram ice-cuboids. That was the first of two falls yesterday, it's incredible how fast it happens, a split second and schlumph there you are flat on your back and wondering how on earth you got there and thinking oh no I didn't put my hands out to stop me did I? I'm fine, slightly battered, a little bruised (though not such impressive bruising as I'd hoped for given the weight of the fall and the aches and pains I have now, a little disappointing really on that front) and a bit achy but nothing more than that thankfully.

You can see our house from here.

Another trip up Screel today, it has been yet another glorious day, clear skies, low sunshine and blooming cold.

From the summit here you can see our house, unfortunately you can't see it in the picture as Paul is stood in front of it. The views are tremendous but I'm sure I said that the last time I posted about this hill too.

The white peaks sticking up behind the Solway Firth there are the Lake District mountains, Paul was drooling, think he would have liked to have been up there though with the ice and snow like it has been they would be a bit serious for me at the moment.

This wee Robin appeared to follow us all the way up and then all the way down, I know it could be that there were a few of them but I like to think he was making friends with us. He sat on the toe of my boot while we were stopped nibbling some chocolate on the way back down. Friendly soul. Friendly or did he have other ideas? Was he and his couple of dozen friends just trying to lull us into a false sense of security with how sweet he looked and then they would lead us of the back of the hill to a chasm where they would gang together and push us over before stealing the remaining chocolate? Who knows what goes on in their heads.

Anyway on a slightly less surreal note I will be without a computer for the next week, so no email, no blog reading, no scrabble! What will I do? The stories being told once the computer returns may be even more surreal as a result of Hannah being left completely to her own devices for a few days. Wait and see.

Still in the 17th C vein

Continuing in the 17th Century theme and borrowing nae plagiarising heavily from the glorious Stoke on Trent Museum book I decorated the mugs today. It was a slow process not least because I discovered there were ice crystals in my slip trailers - extreme potting, and because I had to get up and do some dancing around every twenty minutes or so as I'd frozen into the chair. It has been bitter, took till about 3pm for the workshop to start feeling warm and that was having had the anti frost thing on the heater all night and then it was on full as soon as I arrived this morning. There was ice on the inside of the windows which I've never had at work before. I suppose it did read -11 degrees C when I left the house this morning and that was with the sun out and shining on the thermometer!

So I did the wee squat mugs first and tried to do them all different to each other.

If you have seen the Stoke book you'll know where I'm coming from with these.

White tops, black bottoms. The ones in the book are thrown in a very buff clay, quite unlike what I'm working with here.

White on white, not something I do other than as a fill in occasionally.

Again in the olde worlde theme I had a bath by candlelight being as the light switch in the bathroom is playing silly beggars and then we had venison for dinner. Maybe next week I'll be dressed like this to keep in the theme...

Or even this. . .

Though the weather would have to be considerably warmer before I would even consider baring so much flesh.

Blue and white

The view when you look left out of my workshop door, too good to be true almost isn't it.

Bunny prints.

Eeek many bunny prints!

Some slip trailing started happening this afternoon, I kept putting it off but eventually got into the swing again though the black trailing slip is freshly mixed and a little runny which I like in some ways as I have to be faster with it and not faff around so much but then it made my bird get very fat feet, maybe it has water retention.

Them there baluster jugs that I threw before Christmas. It feels good to have pots on the shelves and there are some at every stage I think at the moment. Some mugs to slip tomorrow, hopefully some more throwing and still some more wide rimmed plates to slip.

It all feels a bit odd at the moment, I have a half dozen or so pots to send to a show next week but then I have nothing booked for a long time so although it's good to have a bit of play time I also like to have a couple of things on the horizon, makes me panic otherwise. I do know though that things turn up as the year starts to get under way and I'll probably end up like last year panicking that I don't have enough time again, fingers crossed! A nice balance, that would be good don't you think?

The longest journey to work

I was shocked to find it snowing heavily this morning when I got up but I do so love snow, it's that big blank freshly slipped white pot likeness that's ready to decorate that seems to excite the child in me.

So I did the only thing I could do and decorated the entire mile and a half of the road between here and there. Didn't meet a single person (not at all unusual, in fact more unusual to actually meet anyone) didn't pass a single vehicle either so my drawings were fresh and there for the world to see...

Until as I got to the drive down to work I met a tractor coming out of the farm next door with it's big shovely scoopy attachment lowered and ready to charge - back up the whole road that I'd just travelled down. So only me and the farm lad knew it was there and heaven knows how much madder he thinks I am now compared to how mad he thought I was yesterday. Oh well.