One of our pots has featured in this months edition of the "Knitting" magazine. It appears on a page called "This month's makers' must-haves" .
It's a sheep money box. I suppose it's ideal to save your money in it until you have enough to buy some wool.....
It's the picture at the bottom of the page on the left.
Well ---- It looks it, but we have just had a new window fitted and I have repainted it. The showrrom looks much brighter and fresher now.
A tricky job because we had to move the display shelves around the room as we painted.
The finished room.
Today Gerry and I ran a workshop that should have taken place in April.... In March, the students made some tall vases and some pots ready to raku - which never got done. Only 3 out of the original 9 felt it safe enough to finish their pots but we went ahead anyway. It gave us something to do on a sunny Sunday afternoon.
The tall vases were glazed using wax resist and stoneware glazes, and the student's thrown raku pots were fired successfully. It was a good afternoon.
My dog wall hanging came out of the kiln today and I am really pleased with it. I hope a bird comes and makes it a home.
On Saturday we will be firing my cat as well.
All the pots came out well - the green actually came out green and wasn't red! This is good because the customer is coming tomorrow to pick up his green pots...
It's been a lovely day today with temperatures up to 25C here in Fangfoss, so Gerry and I headed out to Bempton cliffs to see the seabirds. At the moment the place is teaming with gannets....
The RSPB warden said there was a pod of dolphins headed our way so we stayed and watched them. They were really jumping out of the waterand splashing as they landed - spectacular.
This is the view from the top of the cliffs, across Filey Bay with filey in the back ground.
An added bonus was that we picked a bag of blackberries on the way back.....
Zoe sent me these flowers for my birthday - they are quite whacky! I don't know how they've been coloured because there are multi-coloured blooms on the same stem.
I put them in one of our vases - a copper red glaze produced when the kiln is "under reduction" or when it is deprived of oxygen by putting more gas into it decreasing the amount of free oxygen available.
I love making Sushi. Most people think of sushi as raw fish wrapped in rice then seaweed, but apparantly the word sushi means "rice", so you can put anything inside.... I learnt how to make it by going on a Japanase cookery workshop with my friend a few years ago.
To serve up the sushi I made some "sushi platters". I made these by rolling out a slab of clay and placing it on a large flat sponge. I got a block of wood that was smaller than the clay and pushed down hard. What happens is that the areas of clay outside the block of wood are forced upwards forming a side. I made two small ones for the sauces that accompany the sushi.
There is a new shop opened in Flemingate called Art and Soul.
Everything in there is handmade by local craftspeople and they have some amazing things there - anything from jewellery, woodwork, paintings, textiles, dolls, and clothing.
At the moment we have two branches of our pottery there- the "mousie range" and the studio range. It is the mousie range that is selling the best and we have had to take some more stock there today. It has only been open a week.
We are really hoping that Potfest in Scotland - held in marquees in the grounds of Scone Palace, near Perth, will go ahead still.
It is scheduled to open on Friday 25th to Sunday 27th September.
Every year the organisers run a competition and the title this year is "Recycle, Reuse, Repurpose". Gerry got his entry out of the kiln today - entitled "TRASH FOR CASH".
Over the forty plus years of making pots, we have made lots of errors - some of the pots don't even get into the first firing... We mash them down , recycle the clay and re-use it. His entry is a play on that theme - resuing all the types of pots we have made over 40 years and putting them together to make a large vessel.....
When we came back from our few days in the Lake District, we found that our tomatoes seemed to have ripened all at once. These came from the two plants that were part of the village plant swap back in March. What to do with them?
Mark Smith, a potter friend of ours, had put on facebook about drying them in the oven and then bottling them in oil. So I did that, only first infusing the oil with garlic, which I thought would be good on Pizzas! I started with a whole oven tray of tomatoes, but once in the oven for 3 hours they only just filled a jam jar!
Then I had some more ripen today and I read that you could freeze them to make tomato soup with - but you had to skin them first. I don't know whether it was because the tomatoes were fresh, but when I poured boiling water over them, the skins came off much easier than shop tomatoes.
There are plenty more on the plant but they are green and I don't like green tomato chutney. I wonder what else I can do with them........
We were pleased at the results that came out of the last firing. We had a few new ideas in the kiln which were eager to see.
The soap dishes have turned out well - so too have the garlic mashers, but the lemon squeezers still need a bit of work. The squeezer itself works well, but the holes in the base aren't big enough to let the juice and flesh squeeze through. Back to the drawing board on that one. The little jug that is on the bottom to catch the juice is big enough thogh.
This is the garlic masher. You peel the garlic and rub it onto the dish which mashes it up. It works well with ginger too.
This is the lemon squeezer. I like the tenmoku glaze, although it is not popular with customers.
We've packed the big square kiln today to fire tomorrow. Fingers crossed.......
Today we came back from the Lake District after spending 3 days there - primarily to visit Potfest in the Park.
It was great to meet up with many of our colleagues. Some of them we haven't seen for years including Richard Bideau - the son of Joan Bideau, who was a guest potter at Fangfest some years ago. We liked his work then and liked it so much now that we bought a piece:-
Richard loves working with crystals which have formed brilliantly on this pot.
We don't usually like lustre ware, but Gerry fell in love with this piece, so we bought that too.....
We spent all day at Hutton on the Forest. We not only knew many of the potters, but also visitors!!
The gardens and grounds of Hutton on the Forest are lovely too. It is a great day out and is still on tomorrow (Sunday).
These are the finished gnomes that some children made in a workshop a couple of weeks ago. I spent a long time glazing them - as I had nothing else to do. I love them all.....
It's great working with children as they are so imaginativeand never stuck for ideas. I think I will run another one in half term - sometime in October.
