Back in the land of blog

I'm back!

It's been ages since I've posted on here.

Since my last post, Hannah's been to stay, we've fired the kiln, been to stay with Nic for a few days and exhibited and demonstrated at the Contemporary Craft Fair.



Here's Hannah lighting up the kiln. We fired it last Monday - the hottest day of the year. It was scorching, way too hot to be firing that's for sure.



On Tuesday we took the day off and went up to Shebbear to visit my great friend and hero Clive Bowen for lunch. Hannah hadn't been to his place before. It's beautiful there, Clive's wife Rosie is a fantastic gardener - the whole place is inspirational. I used to spend a lot of time at Clive's place, packing and firing his huge two chamber wood kiln, but missed the last two firings, so it was great to be there again after so long. Clive's been a huge influence on what I do, both in terms of what I make and why I want to make it. Behind Hannah is the chimney of his huge bottle kiln.



We unpacked the hot pots on Wednesday. Here they are strewn across the lawn.



Wednesday was also Marky Mark's birthday.



It was an interesting firing, with a range of tones that were more orange than the ambers of the last kiln load, so the two batches of pots mixed well together. I should have taken a picture to demonstrate that, these two large jugs are from the latest firing.




The sgrafitto jug has gone to a new home. It came out really well thankfully. There's always a huge risk firing with a naked flame and this jug took hours to decorate, so I was somewhat relieved to get it out successfully.



Here are some close ups of the naive birds and flowers.








I built this dry stone wall while we were firing and today back-filled it with earth that I dug out of the new kiln shed floor. I'm desperate to get the new sheds finished some time soon so that I can get the workshop into some kind of better order - it's chaos at the moment.

Well that's about it other than to say thank you to the folk who bought my pots at the weekend, thank you to Nic and Sabine for putting me up during the last few days and thank you to Hannah for the great company and for coming down and helping with the firing. Back to making pots tomorrow and who knows, maybe even some more blogging.