Bye for now

I'm off-line for a few days while I take a break with my family. I'll be back in time for Art in Clay at Hatfield House, 6th, 7th, 8th August, where I'll be doing a talk and demo on the Sunday morning. Come along if you can make it, it's a great event.
Bye for now, take care all

Cheers Alex

A bit more height needed, but it's straight! I'm not sure why I'm in this picture, Alex has built the chimney, I just cleaned bricks and mixed the 'compo'.



I'm going to take the roof off soon and replace it with a higher structure wirh bolt-in panels that can be removed during firing. This will make the kiln shed completely weatherproof, the extra height will prevent one cracking one's head when going in and out, and it will tidy up the back of the building which has always looked pretty messy, (particularly when it had the old, wonky chimney).


Superstar!

New chimney, woohoo

Some pictures from the last few days.

I had a little sale at the weekend at the Stockleigh English church fete. I sometimes have a build up of pots that didn't quite make it through the kiln successfully, so it was a chance to sell off some of those pieces at bargain prices.

These people are taking part in a competition to estimate the capacity of the Flower Ladies Harvest Jug that I made for the church a while ago.



Some puzzle jugs




The workshop




The new woodshed, which, like the rest of the workshop, is being cobbled together from scrap.

Alex came down yesterday for a few days. We were supposed to be sharing a firing in the wood kiln tomorrow, but I was anxious to do some long overdue work on the kiln before firing it again, so we've postponed the big burn for a while and concentrated on getting the kiln sorted out. I've wanted to take the chimney down and rebuild it straighter and wider for ages, so we set about doing that today.

Spirit level??!!!!!

Alex is such a star. This should work a lot better when it's finished. Lots of kiln shelves to angle grind tomorrow - nice!

A picture for Peter, our mutual friend Jeff, who called by today and bought this big jug - thanks Jeff!

Old blog

An old blog post I started ages ago and never finished, thought I'd stick it on anyway!

Well the village play's all finished and the stage is packed away until the panto in the spring. I really enjoyed doing the play and have felt a bit empty ever since, now that it's all done. It's been a lot of work, two evenings a week for months, but the cast has been a good group of people to spend time with. We gave a different performance every night as we rambled off-script, but nobody seemed to worry too much and the audiences enjoyed it. It was all a bit odd really, having to perform much of the play on stage in my boxer shorts - not a pretty sight I promise you.


So back into making pots for Art in Clay. I've been making lots of pressed dishes in recent days, inspired by old English Country Pottery pieces. I made a whole load a while back, but they all cracked.


Daisies in a field..................

............that inspired the dotty flowers on here

We haven't had any proper rainfall in weeks and everythings starting to look a pit parched. Here are oats in a field on the way home last night.

More daisies and grass.......

more wet slip

An old dish

Some more old Staffordshire dishes. I particularly like the way the decoration has been cut off on the top dish after it's been placed over the mould.

Patterned dish, the background will fire black with yellow dots and orange swirls, trailed in clay from the stream.

An old dish with a crazy cockerel.

More wet slippy slabs, drying out ready to be slumped over the moulds.

Some dishes drying out ready to bisc fire.

Well that was all ages ago and really disjointed, I've got a bit behind with blogging recently. Got Alex visiting at the moment helping me sort the kiln out, more about that later. Just having a cuppa with Cookie, got to fly, good to be back - more later!