Thursday

What a mad week it's been, late to bed every night. Luke finished assembling his sketchbook at about midnight last night - it looks great, loads of photos, drawings and research.

Hil's inspection went really well today so she's taking it a bit easier this evening. They were only told that they were going to be inspected on Monday, so it's thrown upon them without much warning. Fortunately she's very good at keeping her paperwork in order, so the last few nights she's been checking through everything just to make sure nothing had been overlooked. All was good. It's stressful though, I can't see why anybody would want to teach.



Guess who? This is Luke's other GCSE coursework that he submitted today along with his model. He did this a few weeks ago, when I was bearded. He's worked really hard at his painting techniques. This one's acrylic on canvas, he did some great watercolour landscape work too.

He'll be sixteen on Sunday - no wonder there's so much white hair in my beard.



I've not got much made today as I had admin stuff to do this morning before walking to the workshop - just a couple of harvest jugs. The walk gave me time to think about how I was going to decorate the big jugs I made earlier in the week. There are three more that had their first coat of slip today, they'll get a second coat in the morning.

These three are finishhed and drying on the shelf. This one has a white slip, which is mottled green with copper carbonate, which is sprinkled on while the slip is wet.



The applied decoration on this one....



will break through the surface of the slip on its high points.



I've done this decoration before, but have yet to get one through the kiln the way that I want it - maybe this time.



Jessica came up this evening and unpacked her kiln load of pots. We put them in the electric kiln because they hadn't been dry enough to make it into the last woodfiring and it's still a few weeks until the next wood kiln burn up. She had some fantastic results, I think she was really happy, I certainly was, I'm proud of what she's achieving. It's so satisfying seeing how her skills are coming along, particularly the way that she's mastered the concept when decorating, of taking some very basic elements and using them in a simple but clever way. There was a lot of good stuff to learn from that batch of pots, so I expect she'll be back next week with lots of ideas about where to take it next. Very pleasing - I guess that's what makes people want to teach - ah, I get it!

Happy Friday all